20 Aug 2013
The Big City (Mahanagar), set in mid-1950s Calcutta and directed by the great Satyajit Ray, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray gradually builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the contemporary Indian woman.
Disc Features:
New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition.
New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee.
Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview program featuring Ray historian Suranjan Ganguly.
The Coward (1965), a feature film directed by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee.
New English subtitle translation.
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and an interview with Ray from the 1980s by his biographer Andrew Robinson.
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