Padatik

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Movie
Original title Padatik (পদাতিক)
Country of production India
original language Bengali
Publishing year 1973
length 91 minutes
Rod
Director Mrinal Sen
script Mrinal Sen, Ashish Burman
production Mrinal Sen
music Ananda Shankar
camera KK Mahajan
cut Gangadhar Naskar
occupation

Padatik ( Bengali : পদাতিক Padātik ; translated: foot soldier ) is an Indian feature film by Mrinal Sen from 1973. With this film, the director concluded his Kolkata trilogy about the social and political unrest in the city of the early 1970s.

action

The political activist Sumit escapes from police custody. He is hiding in the apartment of his party friend Biman and his sister. But the party leader Nikhil can accommodate him in the upscale apartment of the divorced Sheela Mitra, who works in an advertising agency and sympathizes with the political goals of the activists. Biman remains Sumit's liaison with the outside world.

In the isolation and loneliness of the apartment, Sumit ponders the sense and nonsense of his political activities, which with their radicalism do not reach the center of society. He questions the structures in the party leadership, which prohibits any critical dialogue and demands obedience and subordination to its goals.

A private conversation develops with Sheela, who is no less a social rebel in terms of her self-determined life after a divorce than Sumit in politics. He learns about the quarrel with her divorced husband over their six-year-old son Kunal, who is attending boarding school in Darjeeling . Biman accidentally denounces him to Nikhil for misinterpreting the intimacy of the two as an affection the party does not want.

When Biman Sumit reports about his terminally ill mother, he returns from hiding to his parents' apartment where his mother has just died. The father, with whom he had an argument, encourages Sumit to continue his fight.

background

The film scenes are interrupted by Indian news headlines, documentary footage of the Vietnam War and pictures of starving people. In a sequence of interviews on the position of women on the political and social situation in India, which Sheela Mitra does for her advertising agency, the writer Lila Majumdar and the singer Suchitra Mitra , among others, give their position on progress towards equality between men and women.

Sens clear, albeit naïve, assessment of party politics and political leadership was very controversial at the time because, through the admonition of Sumit's father that the Naxalite movement should learn its lesson from the Indian struggle for freedom, he suggests that the Naxalite uprising against the Indian state also as an extension of the Independence movement could be seen.

Awards

The film won a National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1973.

literature

  • Padatik . In: Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Paul Willemen: Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema 1999, p. 418 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs7ld5zECI
  2. ^ Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, p. 419