Vober Vita (2025)

Synopsis

Honoring 100 years of Ritwik Kumar Ghatak — the auteur who captured the soul of Bengal on film.

On 4 November 1925, in the heart of Dhaka, twins Bhaba and Bhobi were born — two lives that history would later divide. The Partition of 1947 draws a border not only across Bengal but through their own existence. Bhaba, known to the world as Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, migrates westward with his family; Bhobi (Pratiti Devi Ghatak) remains in the land that would become Bangladesh. Ghatak’s life, and later his cinema, remain haunted by that wound — an exile that would define his creative and spiritual journey.

“Bhabar Bhita” (The Home of Bhaba) begins where Ghatak’s quest ends. The film traces the filmmaker’s search for a home — not as geography, but as memory, myth and collective consciousness. Through the eyes of his twin sister, Pratiti Devi, and the gaze of contemporary filmmaker Molla Sagar, the film journeys across old Dhaka’s fragmented spaces, exploring the ruins of belonging and the persistence of cultural memory.

Carrying a camera and a photograph of Ghatak with his child — a relic offered by Pratiti Devi, Sagar’s journey captures the fading lanes of Old Dhaka and the new, alienating cityscapes, he seeks the intangible homeland that Ghatak searched for in his films.

In the search for Bhaba’s “home,” the film reflects on Ghatak’s own philosophy: that cinema is not merely a narrative, but a medium that evocates the emotional and historical consciousness. His frames are built on loss, shock, and separation, yet a feeling of regeneration lingers at the edge. Sagar’s film continues that legacy. The camera is unable to reconstruct Ghatak’s past but finds a way to commune with it. Every image, every ruin, and every recollected gesture becomes an invocation of the “timeless land” that Ghatak once sought to portray — a land where everything changes, yet nothing truly ends.