| | 1 | Mrinal Sen (also spelled Mrinal Shen) is a Bengali Indian filmmaker.[1] He was born on 14 May 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh in a Hindu family. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the University of Calcutta. As a student, he got involved with the cultural wing of the Communist Party. Although he never became a member of the party, his association with the socialist Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) brought him close to a number of like-minded culturally associated people.His interest in films started after he stumbled upon a book on film aesthetics. However his interest remained mostly intellectual, and he was forced to take up the job of a medical representative, which took him away from Calcutta. This did not last very long, and he came back to the city and eventually took a job of an audio technician in a Calcutta film studio, which eventually launched his film career.Mrinal Sen made his first feature film, Raat Bhore, in 1955. It had the iconic Uttam Kumar who was not a star then. The movie was a let-down. His next film, Neel Akasher Neechey (Under the Blue Sky), earned him local recognition, while his third film, Baishey Shravan (the day when Rabindranath Tagore died) was his first film that gave him international exposure. |