Screened as part of NZIFF 2021

Once Upon a Time in Calcutta 2021

Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta Diwali Lights

An ensemble cast under direction of filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta pays poetic homage to modern day Kolkata, weaving tales both personal and epic in the triumphant Once Upon a Time in Calcutta.

Nov 07

Penthouse Cinema

Nov 09

Light House Cinema Cuba

Nov 15
Sold Out

Light House Cinema Cuba

India In Bengali with English subtitles
131 minutes DCP

Director, Screenplay, Editor

Cast

Bratya Basu
,
Anirban Chakrabarti
,
Arindam Ghosh
,
Sreelekha Mitra

Cinematography

Gökhan Tiryaki

Music

Minco Eggersman

Festivals

Venice 2021

Elsewhere

“Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Once Upon a Time in Calcutta opens with a death and ends with another. In between, the bustling metropolis... breathes and pulsates through a handful of characters that Sengupta's screenplay assembles on a vivid canvas...

Once Upon a Time in Calcutta is a portrait of a city not as an inanimate composite of its streets, hoods and buildings but as a giant living organism whose lifeblood are its denizens. Sengupta frames urban angst with empathy and an acute sense of reality and history, making [the film] an unsentimental and yet deeply felt ode to a constantly metamorphosing city.

Kolkata – the title opts for Calcutta to suggest continuum – assumes the form of a full-blown character that impacts, and is impacted by, the film's two principal figures. One is a former actress coming off the death of her daughter... and seeking to move on.  The other is a depressive loner who clings desperately to a moribund theatre that he owns but no longer has any use for...

In Once Upon A Time In Calcutta, people seek to cloak their remembrances, regrets and resentments in their pursuit of love, happiness and survival. Faceless and forgotten... these people sum up a metropolis that itself is forever in quest of sustained stability.” — Saibal Chatterjee, NDTV.com