A filmmaker inspired by Satyajit Ray

Buddhadeb Dasgupta was a national and internationally- acclaimed filmmaker and poet with a rare sensibility and realistic check in the interwoven combination of thoughts and dreams in Bengali film making.

Dasgupta was born in February 1944 near Purulia. He was the third among his nine siblings .Young Dasgupta was sensitive to the beauty and richness of the life around him, which spoke to him through images. "I always used to think in terms of images which I kept storing in my hard disk through the years, and whenever I want to, I can recall and `translate them into the idiom of cinema."

Dasgupta says "I began in a small way with documentaries. I made a ten-minute documentary in 1968 titled The Continent Of Love. I did several more in the following years, including King Of Drums (1973), which won the Best Documentary Award" he remembered , going on to state that he never honed the skills and the art of film-making at any film school. "I learnt about my craft from watching films, reading about them and listening to people talk about them."

Over the span of thirty years in films, Dasgupta has directed fourteen feature films which are dissimilar in mood and in style and bear the stamp of a changing persona behind the lens. He started his journey of directorial ship with his "humanist" trilogy—Dooratwa (Distance, 1978), Grihayuddha (Crossroads, 1982) and Andhi Gali (Cul-de-Sac, 1984). Fera (The Return, 1988), Bagh Bahadur (Tiger Man, 1989), Charachar (The Shelter of Wings, 1993). His Hindi film, Anwar Ka Ajeeb Kissa, (2013) based on his own story, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui is another milestone in his cinema career. His last film was Urojahaj (Flight).

Dasgupta is known for his constant explorations and experimentation into different forms of breaking the conventional storyline like fragmented narratives, collages, flashbacks and flash forwards, elements of surrealism and postmodernism in his films.

He projected the harsh realities of the world from a very lyrical vantage point. Every film has his signature style statement, an era of greatness. He evolved into an independent filmmaker who worked and lived on his own terms and explored his own way of conceiving and giving birth to films that no longer relied on published literature, another source was Tagore's paintings. "My fondness for films was a natural offspring of my passion for poetry and painting," he recalled.

His involvement with film Society has drawn him into cinema with his expressionism in the form of images. In his long career of five decades artistic and visual images journey, Buddha da has evolved himself experimented continuously with fine refinement of cast and cream produced some gems of Bengali celluloid form.

His films have received awards in some of the most prestigious film festivals in the world including-Venice, Karlovy Vary, Locarno, Bangkok and nomination for Golden Bear a Berlin Film Festival etc. Dasgupta, inspired by Satyajit Ray like many other contemporaries of his, passed away on June 10.