Movie Murmur

Niraj Sah and Hemant Mahaur in 'Haal e Kangaal' (The Bankrupts) It was started off when friend Shrikant Prabhu goaded me to send a dvd copy of the film to Vidyarthi Chatterjee, a no-nonsense film critic from Kolkata. When I sent it to him, it was Durga pooja time.  After a couple of days when he did not receive my calls, I was worried. The meaning making machine that my mind is, thought that maybe the senior critic has not liked the film.  And then the next day came the call, that lasted all of forty seven minutes. He had not heard the phone ring as the Durga Pooja celebrations around his house was at its peak. After cursing the noise levels, he spoke about my film, Haal e Kangaal (The Bankrupts), the one that I had sent it to him.  During the course of the conversation he said among other things, "The film is unusual, perky, interesting, experimental and smartly made in a positive sense. There are a few films like this, and you should continue to...

The Bankrupts (Haal-e-Kangaal) V N Lakshminarayana, Critic, Mysore It was a fruitful experience to watch 'The Bankrupts' at Mysuru and again In Bengaluru. 'The Bankrupts' is a high profile movie packed with the dialectics of form and content, image and sound, verbal and the nonverbal expression, truth and falsehood, bluff and imagination, gender and human relationships, capital and cinematic art- and finally the ideology in the era of postmodernism that is embedded in the very fabric of social life of the people at large. An undercurrent of sadness born out of systemic deprivation of existential opportunities to realize one's talents adds to the absurdity of the entangled life situation the two artiste friends are placed in, gives the movie a tint of comedy too. The minimalistic approach adopted in creating the entire movie is not only novel but also path breaking in the production of Indian films. Rajiv Kumar, Film maker, Delhi 'Th...