In Search Of Famine (Akaler Sandhaney) - A Film By Mrinal Sen

In Search of Femine takes a Felliniesque look at a young film director's effort to portray, with commitment and honesty, the famine that ravaged Bengal in 1943. Forty years after the event and within a village setting, the young filmmaker comes up against a famine that still runs relentlessly on and he is faced with a community of elders which resists both reality and the cinema. The outcome is that his task becomes irretrievably difficult.

Mrinal Sen, one of India's major directors, built his screenplay out of an original story by Amalendu Chakraborty. The script, as it now appears in print, is a reconstruction and translation based on the original working script and a shot-by-shot viewing of the film.

In Search of Famine won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, 1981, and the national awards for the best feature film, best direction, best screenplay, and best editing.