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One of the great Indian filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, as well as a leading figure of the “parallel cinema” movement, Shyam Benegal (1934–2024) is a major artist ripe for discovery by an American audience. He completed 24 feature films across an astonishing four-decade-plus career. His oeuvre spans fiction and documentary, and in both instances he movingly and masterfully held up a critical mirror to a modernizing Indian society, especially training his focus on its patriarchal tendencies, the plight of women, and the persistence of the caste system in an age of escalating capitalist development. His politically tinged, psychologically rich melodramas abound with some of the era’s greatest on-screen performers: Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Shashi Kapoor, and Naseeruddin Shah, to name a few, all turned in some of their most remarkable performances under his watch. Join FLC this August for a can’t-miss retrospective of Benegal’s astounding, galvanizing films, many of which will be presented in new digital restorations.