Cinema House | The Eve of Elections | A Bid for Bengal

How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu’s ‘A Bid for Bengal’ lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organizations in the Hindu right-wing network responsible for the recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of hope.

About the filmmakers:

Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee are independent documentary filmmakers based in Kolkata. By training, Basu is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers – the State University of New Jersey. She is a founder-member of the community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata’. Banerjee has been a labour history researcher and is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University. Basu and Banerjee are founder members of the People’s Film Collective and co-organizers of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival (2014 – present). They co-edited the volume ‘Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India’ (2018, Three Essays Collective, New Delhi). They also edit ‘Pratirodher Cinema (tr. Cinema of Dissent), a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture, since 2014.

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About Cinema House:

G5A presents Cinema House: an opportunity to celebrate the experience of collective film viewing. For one weekend a month, our black box theatre transforms into a single-screen theatre dedicated to independent, regional, and contemporary cinema.

Instructions: 

1. We request you to bring warm clothes as it gets chilly inside the black box as temperatures need to be controlled at optimum levels as per technical requirements.

2. Food, beverages and water are strictly prohibited inside the black box. Please do not carry them in your bags either.

3. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

4. No Late Entries will be allowed. Please plan to arrive at least 15 mins prior to the start time of the program.

5. When attending a program at the G5A warehouse, attendees agree to be photographed/videographed/recorded for promotional use by organizers through both print and electronic media channels.

6. Please note that the information in the schedule is subject to change in case of unforeseen events.