Experiencing Interruptions?

A Bid for Bengal

Best Indian Documentary / Shubhradeep Chakravorty Memorial Award / CIDSFF 2022
Best Editing in Documentary / Kumar Talkies Award / IDSFFK 2021
--
Official selection competition - Film Southasia 2022, Kathmandu, Nepal
Official selection as closing film - Crossings online Film Festival 2022, Goettingen, Germany
Official selection competition - SiGNS Festival 2022, Muvattupuzha, India
Official selection competition - Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival (CIDSFF) 2022, Chennai, India.
Official selection competition - International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) 2021, Thiruvananthapuram, India.
--
A Bid for Bengal / 70 mins / Documentary / India / 2021
A film by Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu
--
How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, '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.

  • Dwaipayan Banerjee
    Director
  • Kasturi Basu
    Director
  • Dwaipayan Banerjee
    Writer
  • Kasturi Basu
    Producer
  • Dwaipayan Basu
    Producer
  • Rituparna Saha
    Edit
  • Kasturi Basu
    Cinematography
  • Kenneth Cyrus
    Cinematography
  • Ritam Sarkar
    Cinematography
  • Saikat Mallick
    Cinematography
  • Sukanta Majumdar
    Sound Design
  • Shamik Chatterjee
    Background Music
  • Samrat Mukherjee
    Background Music
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 10 minutes 30 seconds
  • Country of Origin:
    India
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    Bengali, English, Hindi
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala
    Trivandrum
    India
    December 10, 2021
    Indian Premiere
    Best Editing in Documentary / Kumar Talkies Award
  • Crossings - An online documentary Film Festival
    Goettingen
    Germany
    February 3, 2022
    German Online Premiere
    Closing Film
  • Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival
    Chennai
    India
    February 24, 2022
    Chennai Premiere
    Best Indian Documentary / Shubhradeep Chakravorty Memorial Award
  • Kolkata People's Film Festival
    Kolkata
    India
    April 3, 2022
    Kolkata Premiere
    Official Selection
  • SiGNS Festival
    Muvattupuzha
    India
    April 5, 2022
    Official Selection - Competition
  • Film Southasia
    Kathmandu
    Nepal
    April 21, 2022
    International Premiere
    Official Selection - Competition
Distribution Information
  • Ajantrik Pictures / Kasturi Basu
    Distributor
    Country: India
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Dwaipayan Banerjee, Kasturi Basu

Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer, and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey.
Her debut feature-length documentary ‘S.D. : Saroj Dutta and His Times’ (2018) won the 12th John Abraham award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala, in 2018, and got screened at several prestigious documentary festivals including Film Southasia (Kathmandu), IDSFFK (Kerala) and the Kolkata People's Film Festival (KPFF).
'A Bid for Bengal' (2021), her second feature-length documentary co-directed and co-produced with Dwaipayan Banerjee, won the Kumar Talkies Award for Best Editing in Documentary at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) 2021.
Kasturi is a founder-member of the community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata’.

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, editor and researcher, based in Kolkata. He is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University.
He was associate director, researcher and screenwriter for the award-winning feature-length documentary 'S.D.: Saroj Dutta and His Times' (2018).
He directed (along with Kasturi Basu) the feature-length documentary 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021) which won the Kumar Talkies Award for Best Editing in Documentary at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) 2021. Banerjee also co-produced the two documentaries.

Basu and Banerjee are founder members of several independent cultural and social collectives; namely, the ‘People’s Film Collective’, 'People's Study Circle' and ‘Humans of Patuli’. They are co-organizers of the annual Kolkata People's Film Festival (2014 - present). They have been organizers of the ‘No Vote to BJP’ campaign as co-conveners of the citizens’ platform, 'Bengal Against Fascist RSS-BJP'.

Basu and Banerjee edited the book, ‘Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India’ (2018) published by Three Essays Collective, New Delhi. They also edit 'Pratirodher Cinema (tr. Cinema of Dissent), a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture, since 2014.

‘A Bid for Bengal’ (2021) - a feature-length documentary on the rise of Hindu nationalism in Bengal, is their latest work.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The recent phenomenal growth of Hindu-nationalist politics and communal polarisation in West Bengal - a region that saw a three-decade long rule of the Left Front headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - has intrigued many. Our film ‘A Bid for Bengal’ searches for an answer to this phenomenon.

Through this film we wished to tell the history of Hindu-nationalist politics in West Bengal from the distant past to the immediate present. By juxtaposing archival material with fresh footage from our family history, our film lays bare the old historical fault lines of a broken Bengal that made possible the current gains of the Hindu-nationalist project in a land divided by the 1947 partition. Partition separated West Bengal (India) from East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh since 1971). Bengal was a land shared by nearly as many Hindus as Muslims; but today, seven decades after partition, both sides have increasingly become majoritarian community spaces where minority communities have been made to feel vulnerable. Can we trace this back to fault-lines in our fractured past?

The film visits cow-protection cells, Ram Navami processions, Hindu nationalist radicalization camps, the insides of BJP IT cells, and riot-torn landscapes, to bring to the fore the underbelly of the Hindu-nationalist project in West Bengal; in between covering two consecutive elections trails -- for the National elections of 2019 and the State Assembly elections of 2021. In the end, the film takes the viewer through an anti-fascist citizens’ campaign, to arrive at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not losing sight of hope born out of the quiet resistance of ordinary people against the politics of hate and intimidation.