Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye Toh
Date: 11th July 2025
Time: 11:00 AM onwards
Venue: KCC, 4th Floor
Marking 100 years of one of Indian cinema’s most poetic visionaries, this day-long celebration at KCC honours the legacy of Guru Dutt—filmmaker, dreamer, and storyteller. Through screenings, talks, and conversations, we reflect on a body of work that blended beauty with melancholy, and artistry with deep emotional truth. More than a retrospective, this is an invitation to engage with a cinematic language that still speaks to our hearts and times.
The programme highlights include:
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM: A keynote address by Prof. Ira Bhaskar will manage to anchor the symposium in questions of emotion, authorship, and ideology—drawing from Prof. Bhaskar’s pioneering work on gender and Indian popular cinema. This will be followed by an interactive Q&A session with the audience.
12:00 – 1:00 PM: Screening of In Search of Guru Dutt (85 mins) by Nasreen Munni Kabir. With a special online introduction by the filmmaker herself, this landmark documentary remains essential for it revisits Dutt’s creative partnerships, the melancholia of his visual world, and the evolution of a cinematic legend.
6:00 – 6:45 PM: A Talk by Prof. Madhuja Mukherjee, filmmaker and Professor at Jadavpur University followed by a close reading of Pyaasa as a layered cultural text—unpacking its poetic frames, socio-political resonances, and emotional depth.
7:00 – 8:00 PM: Screening of Pyaasa (1957). Introduced by Prof. Madhuja Mukherjee and presented in collaboration with NFAI–NFDC, this restored classic will close the day with its haunting meditation on love, loss, and artistic longing.
