A Bengali film Meghe Dhaka Tara was screened at Abhirang Auditorium, Bharat Bhavan here on Sunday. The film was screened under weekly film screenings organised every week under Chhavi series of classical cinema Bharat Bhavan.
Meghe Dhaka Tara is based on a social novel by Shaktipada Rajguru with the same title. It stars Supriya Choudhury, Anil Chatterjee, Gita Dey, Bijan Bhattacharya, Niranjan Roy, and Gyanesh Mukherjee. Released in the year 1960, it deals with the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal during the Partition of India in 1947 and the refugees coping with it.
This film was directed by a noted Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak in Kolkata. In contrast to many Bollywood films made in Mumbai, India's main film center, Ghatak's films are formally elaborate and somber, and often address issues related to the Partition of India.
It takes place in a refugee camp in the outskirts of Calcutta, and concerns an impoverished genteel Hindu bhadralok family and the problems they face because of Partition. The film revolves around Neeta (played by Supriya Choudhury), a beautiful young girl who lives with her family, refugees from East Pakistan, in the suburbans of Calcutta.
Neeta is a self-sacrificing person who is constantly exploited by everyone around her, even her own family, who take her goodness for granted. Her elder brother does not care for the family as he wants to be a singer, she needs to take the burden. Her life is ridden with personal tragedy: she loses first her fiancé, then her job and finally her health by contracting tuberculosis. Her would-be singer brother is the only person who cares about her at the end. In the end, she screams out her agony, throwing herself into her brother's arms. She utters her last words, “Brother, I want to survive.”
The regional lingual movies also receive a great response at the weekly film screenings so was the response of the Bengali movie. The movie-watchers enjoyed the show a lot.