Tero Nadir Parey (1969)

A quiet and intimate Bengali story set in a travelling circus prey to the pressures of commercialism. A clown (Mukherjee) resists the privileging of crowd-pleasing dancing-girls in the circus programme and resents the arrival of a new dancer (Hazarika). When he suffers a drunken accident the dancer nurses him, but he remains unable to reconcile himself to the change and becomes virtually insane. This is the only feature by Barin Saha (1925-93), a former IPTA activist who studied film-making in France and Italy. The film was not released until 1969 and its commercial failure forced its director to abandon film-making in favour of rural activism. It was shot entirely on location at the Tero Nadi aka the Haldi river in Midnapore, and included scenes of remarkable energy, including the arrival of the dancing-girl in the bazaar (a long subjective shot), the sweeping pans over the river and night shots at the end, evoking Ghatak’s work.