“Kolkata feels like home,” said legendary filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, addressing a packed audience at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) during a conversation with director Anup Singh on the legacy of Ritwik Ghatak.
“Even before I started making films, I kept coming here. The people are warm, intelligent — and every average Bengali, I say, has good taste," the veteran filmmaker added.
The octogenarian Malayalam filmmaker, known for his deeply humanistic cinema, drew parallels between Bengal and Kerala, calling both “rice- and fish-eating, progressive people,” but credited Bengal for nurturing India’s cultural sensibility. “We Malayalis have a lot to learn from Bengal. Our literature grew because we translated every important Bengali work,” he said.
Gopalakrishnan’s admiration for Ghatak threaded through the discussion. Recalling Meghe Dhaka Tara, he described one of its climactic moments — the protagonist’s desperate cry, ‘Brother, I want to live!’ — as “one of the greatest sequences in Indian cinema,” one that “echoes across the land and makes the audience cry with her.”
Anup Singh, known for Qissa and The Song of Scorpions, shared that Ghatak’s films continue to haunt and transform him. “Even after watching them a hundred times, they remain a mystery,” he said. “I go back to them like I would go back to the sea, or to a mother.”
But the conversation also turned critical. Gopalakrishnan voiced concern that today’s cinema, driven by technology and market demands, has lost its intimacy. “My films were handmade — I touched everything,” he said. “Now it’s all in a box. There is no mystery, no palpability.”
He warned that the decline of theatres, especially in Bengal, could further alienate audiences from the cinematic experience. “You have hardly a hundred theatres left here. When cinema loses its audience, it deteriorates,” he said, urging filmmakers to stay truthful to life. “Popularity is not a measure of good art. We should never lie to the audience.”
Even as he admitted to a decade-long gap in filmmaking, Gopalakrishnan hinted at a return. “If I have nothing to say, I won’t make a film. But I haven’t given up,” he said, smiling as the audience broke into applause.
Singh closed the session with a nod to Ghatak’s spirit that continues to hover over Kolkata’s cinephile culture. “The magic of cinema endures,” he said. “Even when we aren’t making films, it keeps working within us — it haunts us, and that’s how another dream begins.”