Indranil Chakravarty

Indranil Chakravarty is a filmmaker and scholar, and has to his credit two short fiction films in Spanish as well as numerous documentaries for television and the corporate sector. He has written periodically on the cinema of Latin America, Europe and India, and has also lectured at film institutes and departments of film studies across the country.

With this grant, Indranil Chakravarty researched towards the screenplay for a feature film spanning four generations, set in Goa, Brazil and Portugal. The screenplay is concerned with questions of identity, displacement and belonging. And this is the first proposal for preparatory research towards a film that has qualified for a grant reward. 

Indranil drew his inspiration for the screenplay from a true account of a family’s history. The story is centered round the family of a Goan businessman who migrated to Portugal in 1950 and is peopled with characters of mixed origins, who trace their roots to different and yet overlapping cultures. His research covered areas like—the economic relations between Goa, Portugal and Brazil; colonial Goa and the rest of India (in the period under consideration 1940-’60); the patterns of emigration from Goa to Portugal and from Portugal to Brazil in the 1950s; social and political history of the relevant periods, as well as aspects of these cultures like music, dance, dress, and architecture.

Indranil intends to direct the proposed film himself and is confident of finding producers from either Europe or Latin America.