A Northumbria University academic curated a major retrospective of one of India's most influential filmmakers at the BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank and Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna this June.
The month-long season was the centrepiece of a landmark year of international curatorial, restoration and filmmaking work by Northumbria’s Dr Sanghita Sen, marking the centenary of Bengali screenwriter, playwright, thinker, educator, and film director, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak.
Dr Sen, Assistant Professor in Visual Communication and Digital Cultures at the School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries, has curated the historic programme - Revolutionary Cinema: The Passion of Ritwik Ghatak - which ran at BFI Southbank from 2 to 30 June and Soil of Bengal, Water of Bengal: The Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak at Il Cinema Ritrovato XL edition, 2026 at Bologna.
The programme at the BFI brought together new restorations of every one of Ghatak's feature films, alongside three unfinished films, two films he wrote, one in which he acted, and 13 of his fiction and documentary shorts - believed to be the most comprehensive presentation of his work ever staged in the world. Ghatak, who died in 1976, is widely regarded as one of the giants of world cinema. His films were shaped by the trauma of the 1947 Partition of Bengal and a fierce political conviction that placed him in dialogue with two other pillars of Indian cinema - Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. The retrospective fell within the year-long centenary celebrations marking 100 years since Ghatak’s birth in November 1925 in undivided India.
The BFI Southbank season is one of several international milestones for Dr Sen this summer. She was also invited by Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna - one of the world's most prestigious film heritage festivals, organised annually by Cineteca di Bologna - to co-curate a Ghatak strand alongside the celebrated Indian filmmaker and archivist, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. The programme at Bologna presented new restorations of all eight of Ghatak’s features to great success with all shows sold out. Dr Sen introduced a few films to the audiences. This led to a renewed interest in Ghatak’s cinema from curators and this programme may travel to different countries across the world. Dr Sen is in conversations with a few stake holders about potential international re-release of Ghatak’s films.
In a further milestone, Dr Sen's own feature documentary on Ghatak's cinema and the Partition of Bengal - a Screen Scotland-funded and Bofa Productions, Scotland produced project she has been developing for more than a decade - received work-in-progress screenings at both festivals, presented by her in person. The work-in-progress presentation of the film at Il Cinema Ritrovato occurred on 23 June and at BFI Southbank on 30 June.
Dr Sen is also collaborating with India's National Film Development Corporation and National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI) on their major project to locate and restore Ghatak's films in 4K, producing the English subtitles for all eight of his completed features. She has received on-screen subtitling credit on each.
Dr Sen said: “Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema is strikingly ahead of his time that compassionately yet critically addresses Partition and human displacement, trauma and fragmentation, memory, myth and cultural identity, ecological fragility and environmental loss. His films have been a constant point of return for me as someone who also comes from a Partition refugee family of Bengal. It is an encounter with history that feels intimate, immediate, unsettled, yet deeply human. His films taught me how cinema can hold both rupture and resilience at once.
“To bring his work to the UK audiences in his centenary year through the BFI season feels like a fitting culmination of research done over a decade which is also a much overdue tribute to a great filmmaker, who unfortunately remains highly underexplored. I hope, it will create a space not only to rediscover a major figure in world cinema, but to engage with histories of political conflict, displacement, belonging and ecological crisis that dominate our time and world now. Presenting my own decade-long documentary on Ghatak and Partition alongside this retrospective is also both a personal tribute and an intellectual milestone - an opportunity to place my work in dialogue with his legacy, and to extend the conversation his films began.”
The retrospective deepens an already significant partnership between Northumbria University and the BFI, which was renewed for a further three years in 2025. The collaboration has previously seen Northumbria become the first university to have student work featured on BFI Player, through introductions to classic films created by BA (Hons) Film and Television Production students for the BFI's New Perspectives project.
Dr Sen joined Northumbria in 2023 from the University of St Andrews, where she completed her doctorate on the 1970s Bengali cinema of Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray. Her research on transnational Third Cinema and political filmmaking continues to inform her practice as both an academic and documentary filmmaker. Her work sits within Cultural and Creative Industries - one of Northumbria's recognised research Peaks of Excellence, exploring how the sector shapes skills, wellbeing, the environment and civic identity.
