Top 5 Bengali Movies & TV Shows Of 2021

Bengali film expanded its horizons this year. By the middle of 2021, we had the indomitable Mosharraf Karim in a one-man show in Mahanagar, a one-night-at-the-police-station storey, also on Hoichoi, and by the end of 2020, we had the slow-burning, impressively made Taqdeer on Hoichoi, starring Chanchal Chowdhury as a freezer van driver stuck with an unknown dead body. More shows followed, including Boli, which debuted in December.

This conversation between the film industries of Kolkata and Dhaka is instructive: the largest Bengali streaming platform, which is struggling to produce quality content, could use some help from the other side of the river, while Bangladesh's emerging film scene – which is having its own moment, capped by a premiere at Cannes earlier this year with Rehana Maryam Noor – could use some amplification. Everyone, including the audience, benefits.

It's not just Hoichoi; viewers can also access Chorki, a Bangladeshi site, if Zee5 is broadcasting Mostofa Sarwar Farooki's Ladies and Gentlemen (listed in the list) (with an international debit card). If blurring the lines between the two Bengals is the key Bengali film trend of 2021, it's only natural that it'll be represented in this best-of list, which is arranged in chronological order of release dates:

Binisutoy

Binisutoy, directed by Atanu Ghosh, is the oddest film about a no-strings-attached relationship. The stars (Ritwick Chakraborty and Jaya Ahsan) aren't even romantically involved and spend the majority of the movie apart, occupied with their own lives. The core concept – two guys who create false identities in order to find...something – is absurd, but Ghosh's screenplay's puzzle-box structure and arthouse treatment elevate it to a meditation on companionship in the age of social networking. It's rare to see a major Bengali film that, rather than infantilizing the audience, asks them to do the work and come to their own conclusions.

Unoloukik

While the rest of the world was looking elsewhere, Bangladesh created this: a self-produced anthology series of mind-bending short films that combine satire, dystopia, and creepy fantasy. Consider it a Black Mirror episode covering topics as diverse and timely as mental health, insomnia, domestic abuse, and post-truth. One of them is about a man with bipolar disease who winds up in a luxury dining experience meant for the suicidal Bangladeshi elite, featuring puffer fish – which is dangerous unless handled with skill – It's insane. It's unlike anything else that's been made in Bengali recently.

Once Upon a Time in Calcutta

In Aditya Vikram Sengupta's Once Upon a Time in Calcutta, there is no Victoria Memorial or Howrah Bridge; instead, flyover collapses intersect with the fates of fictional characters. While Tagore remixes blare from street speakers, a Tollywood ex-diva (Sreelekha Mitra) plays the daughter of a late, real-life cabaret queen. Sengupta's film uses clever casting (Anirban Chakrabarti wears a wig as the unscrupulous owner of a chit fund company! ), location, and an international technical team led by Gokhan Tiryaki to bring the multiple realities of Kolkata to life (longtime DP of Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan). As a result, we have a fantastic large city film that also happens to be the first Bengali film to compete in Venice in the last two decades.

Munshigiri 

Munshigiri starts out as a normal detective noir with a puzzle of a case - a man is discovered dead on railway lines, his hands lifted aloft like a 'umpire signalling a six' – but nothing prepares you for the literary crime thriller it becomes. In a film that in many ways echoes the director's earlier, superior Aynabaaji (with Chanchal Chowdhury playing the lead in both), the film's ingenious forgery at the centre more than makes up for its sluggish middle section before revealing its trump card, once again reaffirming the links between contemporary Bangladeshi cinema and its literature.

Birohi

In this five-episode online series, Pradipta Bhattacharyya continues to mine the constantly strange local oddities of rural Bengal, in which our hesitant tragicomichero (Sayan Ghosh) takes a teaching position in a secluded village. But, unlike, say, Panchayat, the Amazon Prime series that loosely follows the same premise, this isn't so much a study of the'real India' as it is a window into the director's head, and whatever it is, it gets you high. This Hero's Journey has a villain, as well as small, socially conscious subversions. A lovely love storey — between characters named Krishno and Radha – only adds to the geography's links. It's not even among Bhattacharya's top three works, but you're not sure when Birohi throws that bombshell in the climax — a hallmark manoeuvre by the filmmaker.