Is Bengali cinema losing its rootedness?

A still from Ashish Avikunthak’s A Glossary of Non Human Love (2021) | Photo Credit: Ashish Avikunthak A mountain of refuse rises along Kolkata’s eastern edge. Plastic sheets tremble in the wind as men and women navigate its shifting slopes, picking through waste with the practised attentiveness of people who know the terrain by heart. Children weave between the mounds. The Bengali spoken here carries the cadences of different homes, migrations and lives shaped by labour and survival.This is Dhapa, Kolkata’s largest landfill. For months, filmmaker Ishaan Ghose, whose films include Jhilli (2019) Morichika (2025), wandered through the dumpyards without a script, a camera or even a clear idea of the film he might make. “It was a strange irony. Just a few kilometres away from Bengal’s cultural hub was this completely invisible world, and hardly anyone knew it existed,” he says. The irony extends beyond Dhapa. What happens when a culture becomes so accustomed to looking at itself through a handful of familiar images that it begins to mistake them for the entirety of Bengal? Published - October 31, 2026 02:57 pm IST