Anup Singh's The Name of a River to be screened in Mumbai on 28 January

The Alliance Française de Bombay is to present director’s Anup Singh’s love essay titled Ekti Nadir Naam / The Name of a RiverThe Name of a River is an ambitious evocative docu-fictional essay exploring the life and work of Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976). In The Name of a River, the director uses a love story of a man and a woman crossing the river between Bangladesh and India playing the roles of refugees, divine beings and literary and cinematic characters to understand the mysteries of the events that led to the massacre of half a million people and forced ten million people to migrate across the newly established borders. The 90 minute film presents the audience with a dreamlike odyssey through a history, a life and a work that we, the viewers, encounter in the shape of stunning landscapes and music, lovers and gods, myths and memories, literature and cinema. Ghatak’s reputation as India’s most important filmmaker has been steadily growing since the first major retrospective of his films was organised internationally in the 1980s. Although largely ignored in his lifetime and usually overshadowed by the illustrious Ray, Ghatak was a legend to a whole generation of Indian art-house directors and was seen by many as the father of the Indian New Wave. Here it may be interesting to note that Satyajit Ray has described Ghatak as ‘one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced’. The Name of a River has been screened at numerous international film festivals and has won the Aravindan Award, India, for best debut filmmaker in 2001 and the Silver Dhow Award for best feature at the Zanzibar International Film Festival in 2002.