Victor Banerjee is an Indian actor who appears in English, Hindi, Bengali and Assamese language films. He has worked with directors such as Roman Polanski, James Ivory, Sir David Lean, Jerry London, Ronald Neame, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, and Montazur Rahman Akbar. He won the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for the film Ghare Baire. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian award, in 2022 for his huge contribution to cinema by the Indian Government in the field of art.
Charulata is a 1964 Indian drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray. Based upon the novel Nastanirh by Rabindranath Tagore, it stars Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee and Sailen Mukherjee. The film is considered one of the finest works of Ray and is often featured in the lists of the greatest films ever made.
Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a Bengali writer, painter and entrepreneur. One of the books he wrote is Chotoder Shera Bigyan Rochona Shongkolon. He was the son-in-law of reformer Dwarkanath Ganguly. He was also an entrepreneur. He was the first person who introduced color printing in Bengal. He started the first colour children's magazine Sandesh in 1913.
Mahanagar is a 1963 Indian Bengali-language drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray. Starring Madhabi Mukherjee in the leading role and based on the short story Abataranika by Narendranath Mitra, it tells the story of a housewife who disconcerts her traditionalist family by getting the job of a saleswoman. The film marked the first screen appearance of Jaya Bhaduri, one of Hindi cinema's leading actresses.
Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku is a fictional scientist and inventor created by Satyajit Ray in a series of Bengali science fiction books of the same name published from 1965 on. He is the central protagonist of the series. Professor Shonku resides in Giridih. His house contains a laboratory, and he lives with his pet cat, Newton, named after Sir Isaac Newton and his man-servant, Prahlad. He was born in the year of 1912 but his year of death is unknown.
Pratidwandi is a 1970 Indian Bengali drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. It is the first part of the Calcutta trilogy. Pratidwandi tells the story of Siddharta, an educated middle-class man caught up in the turmoil of social unrest. Corruption and unemployment are rampant, and Siddhartha cannot align himself with either his revolutionary activist brother or his career-oriented sister. The film is known for experimenting with techniques such as photo-negative flashbacks.
Sikkim is a 1971 Indian documentary about the nation of Sikkim, directed by Satyajit Ray. The documentary was commissioned by the Chogyal (King) of Sikkim at a time when he felt the sovereignty of Sikkim was under threat from both China and India. Ray's documentary is about the sovereignty of Sikkim. The film was banned by the government of India, when Sikkim merged with India in 1975. The ban was finally lifted in September 2010. In November 2010 the director of the Kolkata film festival stated that upon screening the documentary for the first time, he received an injunction from the court of Sikkim again banning the film.
Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), a Bengali film director from India, is well known for his contributions to Bengali literature. He created two of the most famous characters in Feluda the sleuth and Professor Shanku the scientist. He wrote several short novels and stories in addition to those based on these two characters. His fiction was targeted mainly at younger readers, though it became popular among children and adults alike.
Subrata Mitra was an Indian cinematographer. Acclaimed for his work in The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), Mitra often is considered one of the greatest Indian cinematographers.
Rabindranath Tagore is a 1961 Indian documentary film written and directed by Satyajit Ray about the life and works of noted Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore. Ray started working on the documentary in early 1958. Shot in black-and-white, the finished film was released during the birth centenary year of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born on 7 May 1861. Ray avoided the controversial aspects of Tagore's life in order to make it as an official portrait of the poet. Though Tagore was known as a poet, Ray did not use any of Tagore's poetry as he was not happy with the English translation and believed that "it would not make the right impression if recited" and people would not consider Tagore "a very great poet," based on those translations. Satyajit Ray has been reported to have said about the documentary Rabindranath Tagore in his biography Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by W. Andrew Robinson that, "Ten or twelve minutes of it are among the most moving and powerful things that I have produced."
Bansi Chandragupta (1924–1981) was an Indian art director and production designer, regarded among the greatest of art directors of Indian film industry. He won Filmfare Best Art Direction Award thrice, for Seema in 1972, for Do Jhoot in 1976 and for Chakra in 1982. He was awarded Evening Standard British Film Award posthumously for "best technical/artistic achievement" in 1983. He was born in 1924 in Sialkot, Punjab, British India and died on 27 June 1981 in Brookhaven, New York, United States.
Sandip Ray is an Indian film director and music director who mainly works in Bengali cinema. He is the only child of the famous Indian director Satyajit Ray and Bijoya Ray.
Chidananda Das Gupta —family name sometimes spelled 'Dashgupta' and 'Dasgupta'—was an Indian filmmaker, film critic, a film historian and one of the founders of Calcutta Film Society with Satyajit Ray in 1947. He lived and worked in Calcutta and Santiniketan.
Karuna Banerjee was a Bengali actress best known for her role in Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) as the long suffering mother, Sarbajaya. She was nominated for Best Actress at the 1959 BAFTA Awards for her performance in Aparajito (1956), the second part of The Apu Trilogy. She appeared in a number of other films after that, including Ray's Devi (1960) and Kanchenjungha (1962).
Calcutta Film Society was India’s second film society in the city of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It was founded in 1947, just after independence, by Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta, Sunil Janah, RP Gupta, Bansi Chandragupta, Harisadhan Dasgupta and others. The 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin was the first film screened at the film society, which over the years developed the reputation of having the "most cine-literate audiences in the country". It was revived in 1956 with the efforts of stalwarts like Dasgupta, Vijaya Mulay, Diptendu Pramanick and Satyajit Ray.
Bijoya Ray was the wife of the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Their son Sandip Ray is also a film director. Bijoya and Satyajit were first cousins. Bijoya's father was the eldest half brother of Satyajit Ray's mother. After a long courtship, they were married in 1949. Bijoya Ray acted and sang playback song in a Bengali feature film called Shesh Raksha in 1944 and also acted in the documentary Gaach by Catherine Berge in 1998. She died in Kolkata on 2 June 2015, aged 97, after suffering from acute pneumonia.
Satyajit Ray was an Indian director, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker, author, essayist, lyricist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher, and composer. Ray is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors in the history of cinema. He is celebrated for works including The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), The Music Room (1958), The Big City (1963), Charulata (1964), and the Goopy–Bagha trilogy (1969–1992).[a]
Cinema of West Bengal, also known as Tollywood or Bengali cinema, is the segment of Indian cinema, dedicated to the production of motion pictures in the Bengali language widely spoken in the state of West Bengal. It is based in the Tollygunge region of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. The origins of the nickname Tollywood, a portmanteau of the words Tollygunge and Hollywood, dates back to 1932. It was a historically important film industry, at one time the centre of Indian film production. The Bengali film industry is known for producing many of Indian cinema's most critically acclaimed global Parallel Cinema and art films, with several of its filmmakers gaining prominence at the Indian National Film Awards as well as international acclaim.
David McCutchion was an English-born academic, and a pioneer in a number of original strands of scholarship in Indian studies before his early death at age 41. Popularly known as "Davidbabu", in his short life, he made a major contribution to the study of Hindu terracotta and brick temples of Bengal and was also one of the first scholars to write a study of the emerging field of Indian writing in English.
Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI) is the umbrella body of film-screening societies in India. FFSI is currently a member of the International Federation of Film Society that has its Central Office in Paris. The international organisation is an associate member of UNESCO.
