Aparna Sen, movie star, ace filmmaker, successful magazine editor and active civil society leader, has had an incredibly eventful and diverse career. A documentary chronicling her life and times was long overdue. But that certainly isn’t the only reason why Suman Ghosh’s Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen, should be essential viewing.
Straddling a wide gamut – from the personal and professional to the political and public – and employing a wide range of interviews and reminiscences of notable contemporaries, Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen throws light on an accomplished filmmaker, her significant body of work and the complexities of the times that she lives and works in.
Suman Ghosh, who cast Aparna Sen alongside Soumitra Chatterjee in Basu Poribar (2018), has produced a deft 81-minute cinematic document that encapsulates the varied facets of one of India’s foremost filmmakers. The female gaze and the primacy of films that put women at their centre are inevitably mentioned, but Ghosh, taking a cue from the subject’s stand on the matter, does not unduly foreground Sen’s gender.
It isn’t just women who bring the female gaze to cinema, several male filmmakers do it too, Aparna Sen suggests. Late in the film, she says she considers her feminism as part of her humanism. Ghosh captures the core of Sen’s worldview in his illuminating portrait of a woman and a film director who thrives on engaging with the world around her on her own terms.
Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024 as part of the Cinema Regained strand along with one of Sen’s most celebrated films, Parama (1985), a feminist drama that was way, way ahead of its time.
Ghosh, who is currently particularly busy having crafted two feature films (The Scavenger of Dreams …read more
Disclaimer : This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by FilmyFriday. Source:: NDTV.com
