This soul-shattering classic of Indian cinema combines searing imagery, joltingly expressionistic sound design, and an extraordinary central performance from Supriya Choudhury as a relentlessly self-sacrificing daughter supporting her ungrateful family.

Ghatak’s complex, self-referential drama—about tensions between an experimental theater director and his former collaborators—explores the emotions, spaces, and sounds that serve to “partition” human beings politically, geographically, and aesthetically.

Ghatak fashions a tender, if at times chilling, story in his second feature, about a taxi driver who struggles to fit into the modern, industrialized world.

Ghatak’s extraordinary epitaph, completed in 1974 but not released until after his death, stars the director as a thinly veiled version of himself: Nilkantha, an alcoholic intellectual who, after his beloved wife’s death, takes off for the Bengali countryside and encounters a wide variety of characters there.

One of the first Bangladeshi films, the epic A River Called Titas oscillates between high-pitched melodrama and an almost documentary-like recreation of a riverside culture that has mostly disappeared—the boats, the customs, the rituals—in short, a lost way of life.

Ghatak drew upon details from one of his own youthful adventures for this lighthearted celebration of Kanchan, a kind of Bengali Huckleberry Finn who escapes the oppression of his disciplinarian father for the promise and excitement of Kolkata.

Private lives blend seamlessly into national history in the third part of Ghatak’s “Partition Trilogy,” about two siblings scraping by in a refugee camp who take the son of an Untouchable woman into their lives, with tragic results.

A symposium on the work of Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak will be held at Columbia University. This symposium includes such speakers as the Kenyan activist intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Swedish investigative journalist and cultural theorist Stefan Jonsson, and film theorists such as Nora Alter and Dudley Andrew.