IHC Theatre Festival - Mahishasur Marddini
27-09-22 | 06:00 PM | Stein Auditorium

FILM & THEATRE|IHC Theatre Festival. Mahishasur Marddini/ A Night to Remember ( Bengali/118 mins) Dir. Ranjan Ghosh. UNESCO has included Kolkata's Durga Puja in its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It is a religious cultural event signifying the victory of good over evil and worships the female form of God. Mahishasur Marddini is another name for Goddess Durga. A ten-year-old deaf-mute girl is gangraped and murdered a night before Durga Puja is scheduled to begin in Kolkata. She happened to live through her days and nights at the local Hindu crematorium and Muslim graveyard. The story shifts to the house of a landlady and her four college-going tenants busy with last-minute festival preparations. Hearing faint wails from their backyard, they rush out to find a seven-day-old female infant dumped outside in a garbage bin. They rescue the baby and look after her. Through the night, they receive a few guests, some expected, some unexpected. The incidents that unfold thereafter reveal the trials and tribulations faced by women all over. The characters too have their moment of catharsis as they realize that a girl-child or a woman in distress is nothing short of humanity in peril. Mahishasur Marddini is a letter of apology to women for the wrongs done to her through the ages that continue even to this day. Followed by a discussion on 'Cinema and Theatre - Forms and Convergences', in which we will discuss how Mahishasur Marddini successfully combines the elements of both the artforms - the use of the theatre stage (Proscenium? Arena? Thrust? Flexible?), the staging and blocking, the performances, the dialogues, the use of props, etc. vis-a-vis the film form (shots, mise-en-scene, sound and music, etc). Panelists :  Rituparna Sengupta and Ranjan GhoshModerator: Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri.