Victor Banerjee Movies

Two young men find themselves dealing with the ins and outs of Bengali culture on different sides of the globe in this comedy-drama from Indian filmmaker Anjan Dutt. Apu (Parambrata Chatterjee) is a successful computer technician who is looking for greater career opportunities, and decides to leave his home to move to Texas. Apu's family is nonplussed, and his girlfriend Sheela (Raima Sen) makes his clear she has no interest in joining him, so he flies to America to start a new life on his own. Apu has trouble adapting to life on and off the job in Houston, his new romance with Rita (Peeya Rai Chowdhary), the daughter of a wealthy expatriate family, runs into more than a few rough patches, and Hasan (Shauvik Kundagrami), Apu's new best friend, seems to be having even more trouble adjusting to American life than he is. Meanwhile, Andy (Shayan Munshi), a musician of Indian descent who was born and raised in New York City, comes to India for the first time to visit his grandfather. While Andy imagined he knew what India would be like, his assumptions go out the window once he arrives, and his downtown sense of cool begins to fail him when he falls for a beautiful woman he meets in Kolkata -- Sheela. The Bong Connection was screened in competition at the 2006 Dubai Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

My Brother...Nikhil isn't the first Hindi film to deal with AIDS, but unlike, say, Phir Milenge, which was essentially a Bollywood remake of Philadelphia with a heterosexual woman in the Tom Hanks role, My Brother...Nikhil is about a closeted gay man who contracts HIV, shattering his seemingly perfect life. Nikhil (Sanjay Suri, who also produced the film) is a champion swimmer and local hero in Goa in the early '90s, where the film takes place. He has a loving relationship with his fiercely independent sister, Anamika (Juhi Chawla), and his doting mother (Lillete Dubey of Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair). His connection to his hard-driving father (Victor Banerjee) is more problematic. His father pushes Nikhil too hard at his swimming, becoming angry when the young man loses a race, and he also disapproves of Nikhil's friends, among whom is Nigel (Purab Kohli). When Nikhil is told that he has HIV, news spreads quickly throughout the region. His teammates on the swim team and most of his friends abandon him. His parents are publicly humiliated, and even they spurn him. Only Anamika, her husband, Sam (Gautam Kapoor), and Nigel stand by him. He needs all their help when he's arrested (contracting HIV or being openly gay were essentially criminal acts in India at the time) and held prisoner in an abandoned sanitarium. Those closest to Nikhil band together, hire a lawyer, and fight for his release. The story is told by Nikhil's loved ones, who address the camera directly, in the style of a documentary. The film is based on a true story. My Brother...Nikhil, written, directed, and edited by Onir, features music by Viveck Philip and lyrics by Amitabh Varma. It was shown at the 2005 New York Asian Film Festival, presented by Subway Cinema. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

When the Calcutta family in this drama discovers the body of their grandmother, who has hanged herself, they are understandably upset. In their efforts to understand the event, old family secrets are uncovered and fresh fuel is added to old fires, creating new rifts and alliances. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This two-part TV movie, produced in Australia, was based on the tragically true story of an Australian teenager (John Polson) condemned to death for dealing in drugs in Malaysia. Part One set up the circumstances which landed Polson and his friend Hugo Weaving on Malaysia's death row. In Part Two, Polson's mother, played by Julie Christie, races desperately against time to save her son from the gallows. She enlists the support of the Queen of England, the Pope, and a large international organization of concerned citizens--but the Malaysian government remains unmoved. Evocatively filmed in Macao, Dadah Is Death had the bad luck to premiere on American TV opposite the highly rated miniseries Favorite Son. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A Passage to India, director David Lean's final film (for which he also received editing credit), breaks no new ground cinematically, but remains an exquisitely assembled harkback to such earlier Lean epics as Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter. Based on the novel by E. M. Forster, the film is set in colonial India in 1924. Adela Quested (Judy Davis), a sheltered, well-educated British woman, arrives in the town of Chandrapore, where she hopes to experience "the real India". Here she meets and befriends Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), who, despite longstanding racial and social taboos, moves with relative ease and freedom amongst highborn British circles. Feeling comfortable with Adela, Aziz invites her to accompany him on a visit to the Marabar caves. Adela has previously exhibited bizarre, almost mystical behavior during other ventures into the Indian wilderness: this time, she emerges from the caves showing signs of injury and ill usage. To Aziz' horror, he is accused by Adela of raping her. Typically, the British ruling class rallies to Adela's defense, virtually convicting Aziz before the trial ever begins. Though he is eventually acquitted due to lack of evidence (in fact, director Lean never shows us what really happened), Aziz is ruined in the eyes of both the British and his own people-as is Adela. Woven into these proceedings is a subplot involving Adela's elderly travelling companion Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), who through a series of plot twists too complex to describe here becomes a heroine of the Indian Independence movement. A Passage to India was nominated for several Academy Awards, scoring wins in the categories of Best Supporting Actress (Peggy Ashcroft) and Best Original Score (Maurice Jarre). A theatrical version of A Passage to India, written by Santha Rama Rau, was previously adapted for television by the BBC in the mid-1970s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When a ship's purser returns home from a voyage, his wife has committed suicide and he discovers that she was pregnant, the result of an affair with her boss when she was his secretary. Intent on avenging the death of his wife, the sailor seeks employment with her old boss, who has no problem in hiring him. The boss is still a philanderer, and being of no great moral stripe, he even sets his own wife up with the sailor. What began as a vague plan of revenge backfires when the wife and purser fall in love -- leaving him in a dilemma that has no emotionally easy solution. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Based on a story by Munshi Premchand, and much influenced by Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1925 film Chess Fever, this satirical film by noted Indian director Satyajit Ray is set in colonial India in 1856. The British Resident of the East India Company (Richard Attenborough) has observed that the monarch of Lucknow, which is in his trading region, seems to be completely uninterested in government. He tries to arrange things so that he can annex the province. Embroiled in a long-running chess rivalry, two local noblemen (played by Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey) cannot be bothered with such minor issues as who is governing whom. Meanwhile, conditions in the kingdom go from bad to worse. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide