Sopan (1994)

The radical filmmaker Niranjan Chakraborty (Chatterjee) witnesses his friend, police officer Ratanlal, commit a murder. The assassinated man is a noted intellectual and Niranjan’s erstwhile Communist mentor. In a drunken moment Niranjan discloses what he saw to a young journalist, causing a major political scandal. In the end, he denies having seen anything incriminating and rescues the corrupt officer from a prison sentence. The plot is padded by the journalist turning out to be the filmmaker’s illegitimate daughter by an earlier wife (Shankar) who rejected him because of his unprincipled opportunism. The epilogue has the filmmaker win awards, his radical reputation intact. Much of the film depends on local references to actual people and events, e.g. the murder in the film evokes the assassination, during Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s ministry, of noted Naxalite poet and intellectual Saroj Dutta by the police which it is commonly believed was actually witnessed by the star Uttam Kumar. The radical filmmaker character is seen as a caricature of Mrinal Sen and Utpal Dutt.