In Search of Famine

A polemical feature from India's leading political film-maker, whose strident radicalism constrasts starkly with the liberal humanism of fellow-Bengali Satyajit Ray. In 1980, a film unit arrives in a Bengali village to film a story about the terrible famine of 1943. However, their failure to understand or communicate with the villagers threatens the viability of the project. The film-makers' intention is to recreate the dire poverty of a disabled peasant's household, yet they seem oblivious to the fact that the lot of the villagers has improved very little in the intervening years. Using this film-within-a-film device, Sen calls into question the insensitive assumptions of the privileged film-makers - an afternoon's shopping for the crew, for example, cleans out the village's vegetable market.