In Search of Famine

A film crew arrives at a village in the countryside. The time is September of 1980. The film they are to make will be about a famine. The subject is the great Bengal famine of 1943. According to the film that famine caused millions of deaths. The director at the head of the crew is young and idealistic. What he hopes is to show the deprivations still going on in rural India. But the work in the village does not go as he expected. A distance opens between the crew and the villagers. The film becomes a film about the making of a film. The account sets the famine of the past beside the present. Dhritiman Chatterjee and Smita Patil take the leads, with Rajen Tarafdar and Sreela Majumdar also in the cast, in Mrinal Sen’s Bengali film of 1981.