A River Called Titas

"Gokannaghat is a small fishing village on the banks of the River Titash. Nobody knows much about the people residing here. And, perhaps, nobody even cares to know about them. This movie is dedicated to the myriad of toilers of ever-lasting Bengal." --Opening titles to A River Called Titash This 1973 classic of world cinema, which a British Film Institute Poll recently named the best film ever made in Bangladesh, captures a way of life little known in the West. Set in the Bangladeshi fishing villages along the river Titash, the film focuses on the lives of the area's working poor, showing the joys and misfortunes of their lives while also capturing the gradual effects of progress, particularly as new generations move away in search of better lives. The film is adapted from a semi-autobiographical Bengali novel by Advaita Malla Burman, published five years after the author's death. Like the work of Robert Altman, the film is an early example of what writer Alissa Quart calls hyperlink cinema, movies that play with time, place and style while following multiple plot lines. A River Called Titash moves from character to character, with characters who have or will star in their own stories also providing background to others' tales. Two young men vie for the attentions of a local girl, one of them marries a woman he has saved from sacrifice in another village only to have her kidnapped by pirates, the first girl's husband dies in the river, and throughout the river's slow drying up points to catastrophic changes for the entire village. As the film moves from story to story, director Ritwik Ghatak varies his style, shooting some scenes with a stationary camera that creates a documentary feel and others with pans and sudden cuts reminiscent of popular Indian melodramas. This reflects his commitment to the theories of German playwright Bertholt Brecht, which he had studied as a young man. Like Brecht, he hoped to bring together political commentary with the most popular dramatic forms. Ghatak is one of the most political of all Indian film directors, which some historians believe accounts for the scant distribution his films were given outside of India. In addition, he suffered from alcoholism and mental problems for which he was occasionally institutionalized. All of that seriously hampered his career; in 25 years of making movies, he only directed eight features. But even with that limited output, he created an almost autobiographical study of his own feelings of alienation from a society that had pushed his homeland, the Bengali district now known as Bangladesh, into poverty and political disenfranchisement. One of his most frequent themes, the effect of colonization and the later partitioning of India, runs through A River Called Titash as the area's residents suffer from the poverty of being confined to one of the world's poorest countries. Beyond that, the constant separations in their lives -- wives from husbands, children from parents, workers from their livelihoods -- mirror the forced separation of Bengal as it was originally divided between Pakistan and India. Stylistically, his work has been compared to that of the Italian Neorealists because of its focus on the details of everyday life, which then become part of an overall political message. The poor people living along the Titash are in constant conflict with the corrupt landowners who control their lives and fortunes. But their fortunes are also linked to the rise and fall of the seasons, which are captured throughout in Baby Islam's pristine camera work. Ghatak shot the film in East Bengali, where he grew up, shortly after Bangladesh won its independence from India. He mixed professional actors like Rosy Samad, Prabir Mitra and Roushan Jamil with non-professionals to help capture the sense of what the life there is truly like. Conditions were not the best, and the director's tuberculosis was aggravated by the hostile climate. Between that and government opposition to his work, he would only complete one more feature, Reason, Debate and a Story (1974), before his death at the age of 50 in 1976. More recently, the film was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation (WCF), whose goal is to bring together rarely seen works, many from the Third World, in restored prints so that they will not be lost to future generations. To restore A River Called Titash, the WCF worked with original negatives held by the National Film Archive of India and a rare print held by the BundesarchivFilmarchiv in Berlin to create a digital restoration completed in May 2010. As a result, Ghatak's film is beginning to reach an appreciative audience that was never even aware of his work during his lifetime, not to mention new generations of cineastes born since his death. Not only does the film's preservation make available Ghatak's unique cinematic viewpoint, but it also maintains a sense of the worker's culture along the Titash, a way of life gradually being lost to time. Producer: Habibur Rahman Khan Director: Ritwik Ghatak Screenplay: Ghatak Based on the novel by Advaita Malla Burman Cinematography: Baby Islam Score: Ustad Bahadur Khan Cast: Rosy Samad (Basanti), Golam Mustafa (Ramprasad/Kader Milan), Kabari Choudhury (Rajar Jhi), Prabir Mitra (Kishore), Roushan Jamil (Basanti's Mother), Rani Sarkar (Munglee), Ritwik Ghatak (Tilakchand) By Frank Miller