New Delhi: Seeking to cater to the film connoisseurs here, a day-long film festival paying tributes to Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore was organised here.
Organised by the Government of West Bengal the festival "Tagore Talkies" showcased three critically acclaimed films based on the author's writings at the Mukthtadhara auditorium here recently.
The 154th birth anniversary of the poet was celebrated earlier in the month, on May 7.
"The main objective is to pay homage to Rabindranath Tagore in a different manner. It gives us immense satisfaction that our effort has succeeded," Prasenjit Das, Deputy Resident Commissioner and Deputy Director of Information, Government of West Bengal said.
One of the lesser seen documentaries on Tagore by veteran film maker Satyajit Ray opened the festival.
Ray had directed this film in 1961 to celebrate the poet's birth centenary.
Although Tagore is better known as a poet than he is as an author, it is evident in the film that Ray has consciously refrained from using any of his poetry.
It is said that Ray, who was not content with the translations of Tagore's verses, believed that "it would not make the right impression if recited" and that Tagore's stature as a poet will be reduced.
While Ray is said to have carefully avoided the documentation of several controversial aspects of Tagore's life in this documentary, the director has been reported to have said in his biography,
"Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye" by W. Andrew Robinson, "Ten or twelve minutes of it(documentary) are among the most moving and powerful things that I have produced."
The other films included a Hindi rendition of Kumar Shahni's "Char Adhyay" (1997) based on Tagore's novella of the same name and Ray's "Ghare Baire".
Set in the politically turbulent Bengali Renaissance of 1930s-40s, "Char Adhyay" offers a different perspective on the issues of nationalism and idealism.
"Ghare Baire" (The Home and the World), is another of the both Ray's and Tagore's masterpieces.
A skillful adaptation of Tagore's original work, the film deals with the complexities of swadeshi movement and the emancipation of women and what it does to the men who love them- a subject recurrent in Ray's works.
The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984.
This was the second film festival organised by West Bengal government in Delhi, after a two-day retrospective, "Best of Indian Cinema ? Bengal Film Festival", which was held in September last year.
