New Delhi, Aug 8: Late Rituparno Ghosh's last film, an impressionistic documentary on the life of Rabindranath Tagore, will have its television premiere tomorrow.
"Jeevan Smriti: Selected Memories", produced by the Ministry of Culture, will be screened on Doordarshan national network, coinciding with Tagore's death anniversary.
The film is divided into chapters arranged chronologically but not as a continuous flow. It focuses on some key journeys in Tagore's life that evolved and enriched his quest to re-imagine a new India, which would rise above narrow patriotic concerns prevailing in the country of the time.
"This is not a truncated biography; nor an attempt to deal with the complexities and contradictions of Tagore. But a humble endeavour to capture the essence of an ever restless creative spirit through glimpses into his life and work through the prism of time," says the film's creative producer Sanjoy Nag, who also plays the role of adult Tagore along with Samadarshi Dutta.
Saswata Chatterjee and Rishi Mukherjee enact the role of young Tagore. The film also has Raima Sen playing the role of Tagore's sister-in-law Kadambari Devi.
"The Tagore in our film, emerges a man who is far ahead of his time, and possibly the first international Indian.
"The chapters, apparently might seem disjointed in terms of a seamless narrative flow. But they are to be actually interwoven with incidents in history, where India constantly provides a backdrop and occasionally seeps the narrative via letters, the poet's musing and sometime more direct cinematic techniques of flashbacks and flash-forwards," says Nag.
According to Nag, the idea is not to stick to the expected austerity of the standard documentary film, but to bring Tagore alive as a person whom the average Indian can relate with as a man of all seasons, of all times.
Two earlier films of Ghosh, who died on May 30, have been based on novels by Tagore -- "Chokher Bali" and "Noukadubi".
