Manda Meyer Upakkhyan
Director: Buddhadev Dasgupta
Country: India
Year: 2002
Runtime: 90 minutes
Language: Hindi/Bengali with English subtitles
Awards: Bangkok International Film Festival -Best Asian Film
Rajani, a still young and attractive prostitute practicing her trade in rural India, has decided to sell her teen-aged daughter Lati to a fat, rich old man who promises to set up both mother and daughter in a luxurious house with a complete retinue of servants. Lati has other ideas. She is extremely intelligent and, if her schoolmaster is to be believed, the best student ever to come from her village. With the help of a kind-hearted, ingenuous cab driver she flees the sexual servitude her mother has chosen for her, despite her having to spend a short period of time in a rural brothel. Faraway Calcutta and its more enlightened view of women calls Lati to her destiny. A desperately hungry cat, a clever monkey, and a donkey who has all the right answers figure in Lati’s journey, an often humorous journey which is played off, metaphorically, against the first moon landing. A TALE OF A NAUGHTY GIRL is a richly detailed tapestry of women’s roles in modern India, a don’t-miss film based on a short story by Bengali writer Prafulla Roy. Director Buddhadev Dasgupta’s 25th film. NOTA BENE: this is NOT a Bollywood musical. ~ Nick Salerno
Principal Cast: Samata Das, Rituparna Sengupta, Arpan Basar, Ramgopal Bajaj, Pradeep Mukherjee, June Malia
Writer: Buddhadev Dasgupt
Producers: Arya Bhattacharya, Arindam Mukherjee
Cinematographer: Venu (II)
Film Editor: Raviranjan Maitra