What do you call love that gives and gives until there’s nothing left? Ghatak calls it Neeta. She’s someone so full of love, kindness , so gently bright and hopeful and yet she’s slowly devoured by the very people she breaks herself for. Her life keeps getting smaller and sadder. She keeps forfeiting her own dreams for others, and still stays gentle through it all. She is the sacrifice, the exploited soul of womanhood, crushed under the weight of a crumbling, post partition family that feeds off her like parasites.

And I kept getting so fascinated by how much this film mirrors Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Both explore the same kind of suffocating family dynamics and the damage that comes from always…

What creates style? Talking about style is easy (to an extent), but finding the motivating factors behind it is difficult. We'll talk about influence in the most common terms (he influenced him, etc), use the context of a nation, or simply point to a theoretical or philosophical system. I found myself pondering this watching Ghatak's "modernist" (a tenuous word) cinema, made in 1960 at the same time Breathless debuts in Paris, L'Avvenutra in Venice, Cruel Story of Youth in Tokyo, Shadows in the United States, and The Housemaid in South Korea.

But Ghatak's formal system even feels like an outlier to the various New Waves cresting around the world. The almost amateur quality to his filmmaking at first feels like…

In this classic Indian tale of tragedy from a time long before the Spice Girls were promoting Girl Power, Nita watches. She gives. She waits, and then gives some more. A story of diminishing hope as time goes by, Ritwik Ghatak's beautiful imagery feels in many ways like a portrayal of grief. Songs get lost among the trees and riverside landscapes draw the viewer into watery pools of pain alongside a country torn in two.

Times are hard. Life is hard. Hope of a better future is fading.

Melodramatic, creative and sometimes pretty funny, The Cloud-Capped Star certainly wears its many hearts on its sleeve, with almost ritualistic repetition of the ups and downs of life. Surrounded by a family…

Constructed around an excellent performance from Supriya Choudhury as a selfless young woman named Nita, The Cloud-Capped Star is a transporting drama written and directed from the consistently socially conscious Ritwik Ghatak.

Set in the suburbs of Calcutta, the filmmaker demonstrates some experimental techniques such as assembling some disorienting shots as he laments the adversities and hardships of India. As the narrative attends Nita and her family, all refugees from East Pakistan as a consequence of the traumatic impact of the partitioning of India in 1947, it substantiates being a richly thematic tale which adopts themes of internal division, poverty and self-interest.

The decaying corrosion of Nita's middle-class family becomes moulded into a dramatic form by Ghatak that's equally intellectually…

There are some films that don’t just tell a story but quietly peel away the layers of human endurance, and This film is one of them. Watching neet felt like watching the slow erosion of light not an abrupt fall, but a steady dimming of hope under the weight of love, duty, and invisible chains. Her kindness feels almost unbearable, because every time she bends for others, she loses a fragment of herself, yet never learns how to stop giving (& most unreal thing is the same i had to experience whilst watching charulata by ray) maybe these same basic character nuance were essential ingriedents to create such bone wrenching melodramas films back then. What unsettled me most was how…

When we first met, I didn't really see you.
I thought you were quite ordinary.
Now I can see, you're a cloud capped star.
Veiled by circumstance,
Your brilliance dimmed by a cloudy sky.

Exploitation and codependence are terms that contain meanings that are miles apart and yet their differences seem blurred in the refugee camps of post partitioned West Bengal. One of the most important movies in the history of Indian cinema and the most popular from the auteur's career, Ritwik Ghatak's 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' explores the blurred lines of exploitation when everyone around Neeta depends on her little income while she tries to forge a path towards a future she wants. The future she wants sounds so dreamy…

Based on a novel by Shaktipada Rajguru, it tells the story of a kind hearted woman who gets everyone take advantage of her kindness without she being able to do something about it.

While personally the story didn't strike me as other Indian films like, say, the Apu trilogy for example, the premise and its development is interesting enough to draw you in with its subtle yet clearly outlook into a certain region and place in time on India.

Certainly the greatest aspect of the entire picture, though, is definitely its cinematography. The way how the director places the cameras and builds up this beautifully and quite interesting shots is just hard to ignore and draws you in a way…