Sunya Theke Suru (1993)

Experimental, and controversial, debut feature set in the context of the 1960s Naxalite student movement in Calcutta. Resorting to a mix of colour and monochrome scenes to convey the persistence of the past in the present, the story tells of a professor of economics, Bhishmadev Sharma (Chattrejee), peripherally connected with and clearly sympathetic to the student movement, who is arrested, tortured and imprisoned for ten years. He emerges into a changed Calcutta, exemplified by the existential traumas of his now rich former student Samar Gupta, the writer Pragnya and the young activist Udayan, the latter unperturbably continuing to claim that the present is a revolutionary situation. The film’s political passion derives from its refusal to forget a traumatic past, juxtaposing the interaction of temporal dimensions with a sophisticated mise en scene of spatial discontinuities.