Neerab Jhada (1984)

Mahapatra’s melancholic rural realism, deployed on an expanded canvas, tells of three peasants confronting a dastardly landlord. One of the friends goes crazy trying to find buried treasure in order to recover his land; another goes to the city where he finds even worse forms of exploitation; the third has a more complicated problem: his daughter falls in love with an employee of the landlord. He too loses his land and has to migrate, but in the process delivers the film’s ‘voice of hope’, suggesting that if sufficient numbers of people feel the way he does, the future might still be bright.