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Meghe Dhaka Tara (Bengali: মেঘে ঢাকা তারা) (The Cloud-Capped Star) is a 1960
film by director Ritwik Ghatak. It starred Supriya Choudhury, Anil
Chatterjee, Gita Ghatak, Bijan Bhattacharya, Niranjan Roy, and Gyanesh
Mukherjee.
This film was directed by alternative filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak in Kolkata
(then Calcutta). In contrast to many Bollywood films made in Mumbai, India's
main film center, Ghatak's films are realistic and somber, and often address
issues related to the Partition of India. Although Partition is never
explicitly mentioned in Meghe Dhaka Tara, it takes place in a refugee camp
in the outskirts of Calcutta, and concerns an impoverished genteel Hindu
bhadralok family and the problems they face because of Partition.
The film is perhaps the most widely viewed film among Ghatak's works; it was
his greatest commercial success at home, and coincided with an international
film movement towards personal stories and innovative techniques (the
so-called 'new wave'). After Ghatak's death, his work (and this film in
particular) began to attract a more sizable global audience, via film
festivals and the subsequent release of DVDs both in India and in Europe.
In a confirmation of the popularity of Meghe Dhaka Tara, a recent survey by
a leading Indian news group reported that the concluding line of the film,
"Dada, ami baachte chai" ("Brother, I want to live") was the most well-known
line of any film[citation needed].
Meghe Dhaka Tara has been termed by many as an extremely manipulative
experiment in cinema, in terms of content and technique. The levels of
suffering heaped upon the protagonist, and the obscurity she endures are
severely melodramatic, and the cinematic technique employed to achieve the
same have been severely criticised. |
