November 2014 inductee - THE NAME OF A RIVER (Ekti Nadir Naam) by Anup Singh

In 2014, the International Rotterdam Film Festival had a film named Qissa as its opening film. The film was by Anup Singh, whose debut film The Name of a River had premiered in Rotterdam in 2001. The gap between the two films had been a 13 year long gap, and anyone who had seen The Name of a River would have been left wondering what might have happened to such a talented filmmaker whose work had never fully reached the international audience it deserved. 

 

The Name of a River is a film that explores the life and work of the great Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Ghatak was quite a prominent filmmaker with a penchant of revealing meticulous social realities in ways that stood entirely outside commercial Indian cinematography. Yet, the structure it follows is that of the story between a man and a woman crossing the river between Bangladesh and India, playing the roles of refudees, divine beings as well as literary and cinematic characters all at once. They are mysterious creatures, as light as the breeze, lost in worlds of fantasies and in the viewer's subconcious but deeply rooted in the dramatic realities on an India in the years of the Partition of 1947 and the famine in 1943 - two tragic events in the history of the country and two events that seem to have left a mark on the cinema of Singh (the theme of partition and re-establishment of dynasty was a heavy backdrop to the remarkably intense Qissa, a film that itself still has to gain proper distribution).