KIFF pays tribute to Mrinal Sen on his birth centenary year

CHENNAI: The landline telephone used by auteur Mrinal Sen, his favourite chair, and the fountain pen he used to jot down scripts and film posters are prominently displayed at the exhibition ‘Mrinal Sen: The Maverick’ at the 29th Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) on his birth centenary year. The exhibition has sections like ‘Mirroring the Middle Class’, Rebel Roots, filmography of Sen traces his journey as a film-maker from the 1955 film ‘Raat bhore’ (The Dawn), Neel Akasher Niche (Under the Blue Sky) till the last one ‘Amar Bhuban’ (This My Land).

The shooting stills and information during the days of making of Sen’s cult Ek Din Pratidin in 1979 (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn), Akaler Shandhaney (In Search of Famine), Chalchitra (The Kaleidoscope), Kharij (The Case is Closed), Khandahar (The Ruins) of the internationally known director among others figure prominently in the exhibition which was inaugurated by Sen’s favourite actor-director Anjan Dutt, his favourite actress Mamata Shankar and Bengali film superstar Prosenjit Chatterjee on the second day of the festival on Wednesday.

The exhibition features the 1984 London Film Festival poster of Khandahar, the poster of Chalchitra, the poster of Ek Din Achanak and Antareen (The Confined - made in 1993) among others.