Production: D.K. Films/
Direction and screenplay: Mrinal Sen/
Story: Amalendu Chakravarty/
Camera: K.K. Mahajan/
Music: Salil Chowdhury/
Art Direction: Bansi Chandragupta/
Editing: Gangadhar Naskar
Cast: Dhritiman Chaterji, Smita Patil, Sreela Majumdar, Gita Sen, Dipankar De, Rajen Tarafdar, Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Devika Mukherjee, Jochhan Dastidar, Sajal Roy Chowdhury, Reba Roy Chowdhury, Umanath Bhattacharya
In 1980, a progressive young film director, with faith in his medium as a weapon for social change, comes to a Bengal village with his crew to recreate on film the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. They stay in a dilapidated old mansion which has seen better days, where one corner of the great house still shelters one of the seventeen owners of the property, an impoverished and paralysed old man and his wife. The shooting begins, but is stalled by unseasonal clouds. On a rainy day the unit sit indoors and play a game, identifying from photographs of famine-stricken people the time they belonged to; a difficult game, for the picture of hunger remains the same through history.
The old man dies. The supporting actress, Devika, leaves in a huff after a quarrel. Durga, a local girl working for the unit, recognizes her daily anguish watching the heroine Smita enact a sequence where she is humiliated by her husband who suspects her of selling her body for a handful of grain. Meanwhile, the sumptuous meals served to the unit send the prices of foodstuff soaring in the village. An old peasant accuses them of searching for an old famine and starting a new one in the process. There are other such acts of intrusion. The villagers become hostile when they learn that the director is searching for a local girl to play Devika's role: a woman who takes to prostitution for survival. Disturbed by the reflection of her own life in the film, Durga refuses to work for the unit any more. As the hostility grows, to secure their safety in the village, the unit decide to ask for police protection. But the village schoolmaster, a venerable old man, finally dissuades them and convinces them to go back to the city. Silence descends as the film unit leave the village. The widow of the old man stares desolately out of the window of the empty mansion, while Durga stands looking into her personal darkness. Her child will soon die, her husband will leave her. Only she will remain, a living face of famine in the world of 1980.