Mrinal Sen

Mrinal Sen made films that argued with their own audience and then made one that turned the argument on himself. He was born in Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh, came to Calcutta to study physics, and drifted into cinema through the Communist Party's cultural wing and a job as a sound technician. Bhuvan Shome in 1969, a small comic film about a stiff bureaucrat undone by a village girl, was an unexpected success and is usually credited with starting the Indian New Wave and the government funding that sustained it. The Calcutta trilogy of the early 1970s - Interview, Calcutta 71, Padatik - is angry, formally restless political cinema made while the city was in near insurrection. Then he changed: Ek Din Pratidin, about a family waiting all night for a working daughter who does not come home, and Akaler Sandhane, in which a film crew shooting a famine drama in a village discovers the village remembers the real famine, turn the accusation towards the filmmaker. Kharij won at Cannes. He was more experimental than Ray and less consistent, and said so himself. He made films in Hindi, Telugu and Oriya as well as Bengali, and Mrigayaa in 1976 introduced Mithun Chakraborty. He served in the Indian upper house as a nominated member and was president of the film federation. He and Satyajit Ray conducted a public argument in the Calcutta press in the mid-1960s about political cinema, which both later described as friendly and which readers at the time did not. He received awards at Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Moscow. Ek Din Achanak and Antareen came late in his career and are quieter. He kept working into his eighties and died in Kolkata at ninety-five.

• Lived: 1923 CE – 2018 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: artist