Bengali-born director, poet, and actor Ritwik Ghatak’s career was one of constant struggle—against a public that, per his contemporary Satyajit Ray, “largely ignored” his films; against a society that had lost its way amid rampant modernization; and against a national cinema whose conventions he broke time and again. He only completed eight fiction feature films during his lifetime, but each represents a landmark achievement in the history of Indian cinema, movingly reflecting the social realities of a nation trying to revise its identity in the aftermath of British colonial rule and the partition of India and Pakistan, and representing the melodrama of everyday life under the country’s newly modernized economy. Join Film at Lincoln Center for a retrospective of Ghatak’s work, including recent digital restorations of his epochal films.

Organized by Dan Sullivan, Richard Peña, Moinak Biswas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Special thanks to the National Film Archive of India.

Acknowledgments:
Columbia University