GUWAHATI, March 7 - �The bonding of Nabendu Ghosh and Bimal Roy was very unique in nature. In the history of cinema, such successful bonding of writer and director is very rare. The �bonding� had gifted a good number of classic films to the country,� said journalist-turned-filmmaker Ratnottama Sengupta at the Chalachitram National Film Festival here on Saturday.
On the second day of the festival, screening of her directorial venture And They Made Classics (a documentary) took place on the premises of Jyoti Chitraban. It is a documentary on the life of Nabendu Ghosh and his bonding with filmmaker Bimal Roy.
Nabendu Ghosh shared a unique bonding with his �film guru� Bimal Roy. In 1951, when the celluloid master left Kolkata to make Maa for Bombay Talkies, he took the litterateur with him. They created timeless films like Baap Beti, Parineeta, Naukri, Biraj Bahu, Devdas, Yahudi and Sujata.
According to the filmmaker, the documentary depicts how did the writer-director duo work and what made their association work. The film goes behind the scenes through an interview with Nabendu Ghosh that was taken in 2005 when Joy Bimal Roy made Remembering Bimal Roy. It has an additional layer where film industry veterans like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Nutan, Dilip Kumar, Gulzar, Jaya Bachchan, Saeed Mirza and Girish Kasaravalli start talking about the writer�s art and his contribution in moulding the new Indian cinema.
Sengupta is the daughter of Nabendu Ghosh and won national awards for her writings on cinema. She is also a film festival curator and jury member of various film festivals. In Chalachitram, she is also a member of the jury panel.
The documentary was produced by Dr Debasis Sengupta, cinematographed by Christopher Rego, and edited by Dipak Mandal.
Recalling her father, Sengupta added, �He was a man of literature in cinema or a man of cinema in literature. His work was unique from many aspects. He also picked up stories from many languages of the country and turned them into successful films. Like my father, I found another example in Assam in the works of Dr Bhabendra Nath Saikia.�
She asserted that Indian cinema means all the films made in different languages of the country, including Hindi which manages own space in the international platform despite the monopoly of Hollywood.
