Suman Ghosh (director)

Suman Ghosh (born 1972),^[1] is a Bengali film director,^[2] and an associate professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University.^[3]

Education

Suman Ghosh gained his B.Sc in economics from Presidency College, Calcutta and his M.A. in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. He completed his Ph.D in economics at Cornell University in 2002. His particular interest are personal economics and development economics.^[4]

Career

Suman Ghosh is a National Award winning Indian filmmaker who has made 4 feature films and one documentary film. He had his film training at Cornell University in New York. His first feature film “Footsteps”, starring Soumitra Chatterjee and Nandita Das won 2 National Awards in 2008. It was shown at numerous film festivals including Vancouver, Karlovy Vary and IAAC New York. His second feature film “Dwando”, also starring Soumitra Chatterjee, was a part of the Indian Panorama at IFFI Goa in 2009. His next feature film “Nobel Thief”, starring the Indian megastar Mithun Chakraborty was world premiered at the Busan IFF and was an official selection at the BFI, London Film festival. The film received the “Best Indian Film” award at the Bengaluru International Film Festival in 2012. His latest feature film “Shyamal Uncle Turns off the Lights” has had a warm reception from critics and audiences all over the world. It was world premiered at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea and had its North American Premiere at the MoMA, NY. It has been shown at a number of international film festivals including BUSAN IFF, Mumbai FF, Santa Barbara IFF, ReelWorld Film Festival (Toronto), Delhi 010 Digital Film Festival, Freiburger Film Forum (Germany), Indian Film Festival in Stuttgart, Germany and 10th Green Film Festival (Seoul). It won the “Outstanding International Feature Award” at the ReelWorld Film festival in Toronto. The film, based on a true incident, traces the journey of Shyamal Uncle, an eighty-year-old retiree, as he wades through an apathetic system with a seemingly trivial goal – turn off the street lights near his home which are left on even during the day. Colin Burrows is the executive producer and it is being distributed in North America by Global Film Initiative.

Vincent Malausa at Cahiers du Cinema calls it “extraordinary magic …..leads to one of the most beautiful happy endings we have ever seen” and “The impeccable rhythm and the art with which the director deals with new twists….invite the audience to understand that a true epic is told in the small adventure.” Another reviewer notes that “With echoes of Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru,’ the great 1952 Japanese film about a low level bureaucrat who gets a playground for a neighborhood, and solidly in the tradition of the Indian realism of Satyajit Ray—Pather Panchali and the Apu Trilogy, Suman Ghosh, the writer and director, establishes himself as an important filmmaker in the 21st century.”

He is currently completing his new feature film “Kadambari” starring Konkona SenSharma and Parambrata Chatterjee. It is based on the life of Rabindranath Tagore and his controversial relationship with his sister-in-law Kadambari Devi.

Filmography

• Podokkhep (2006)
• Dwando (2009)^[5]
• Nobel Chor
• Shyamal Uncle Turns off the Lights (2013)

References