Suman Ghosh’s Aparna Sen Docu is a Complete Film With Beautiful Background Score

There is working footage from The Japanese Wife with bytes from Rahul Bose who confesses that they had horrid fights and “everyone thought it was the end” but it was not. The film later makes references to Sen’s parents, the reputed intellectual, journalist, author, and father of the film society movement, the late Chidananda Dasgupta and his wife with lots of still photographs drawn from the well-kept family archives which invests the film with a personal and intimate dimension. The editing, cutting, slicing, mixing, and moving backward and forwards in time and place throughout the footage is enriched by the use of clips of the films she acted in, and directed over time, the physical journey to the places where she shot many of her films, still family photographs with her daughters, herself and her parents at different stages of her growth, and bytes from people who know her closely and have worked with her. All this has made Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen, a complete film with a beautiful background score that never dominates the visuals but adds a lyrical rhythm that gives the film a beautiful texture. My only lament is that no one cared to mention a single word about the book – Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen, an auteur, in-depth critique of the first five feature films directed by Sen which won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2002.