Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
CWC Global: Deep6
- Monday, November 4, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (143 minutes)
- With Madhuja Mukherjee (filmmaker)
Kolkata, 2011: the Communist-led Left Front has just been voted out after 34 years in power. In its absence, the city’s ghosts appear to haunt those who remain. Deep6 follows Mitul (Tillotama Shome), a journalist who wanders through multiple lives. While living alone in her family’s old house, Mitul is visited by the spirit of her grandmother, intent on watching Mitul’s television and regaling her with stories of her lost homeland, Bangladesh. And when her ex-boyfriend Arka (Cahndan Roy Sanyal) appears below her balcony on a rainy night, he resurfaces a political dream that Mitul had buried long ago.
Shot on a shoestring budget, Deep6 unfolds in images of the evocative urban landscape, featuring meditative long takes and intense sound design. The film generates an immersive experience of Kolkata, at a time when the past refused to be left behind.
Filmmaker Madhuja Mukherjee joined moderator Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Deep6.
Biographies
Filmmaker Madhuja Mukherjee
Madhuja Mukherjee is a practicing artist, filmmaker and author. She is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her first experimental feature, Carnival (2012), premiered at the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012. Deep6, her first narrative feature, premiered at the 26th Busan International Film Festival in 2021. As a screenwriter, Madhuja wrote the Bengali pulp thriller Ekti Tarar Khonje (2012), as well as the internationally-acclaimed Qissa (2013), starring Irrfan Khan. Her multimedia installations, which complicate archival histories and media material, have been featured in solo shows at several renowned venues, including International Film Festival Rotterdam (2012) and Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata (2022). She has also contributed to comic books, adapting and illustrating the graphic novel Kangal Malsat (2013). Her academic publications include the books New Theatres Ltd. (National Film Archive of India, 2009), Aural Films, Oral Cultures (Jadavpur University Press, 2012), and the award-winning volume Voices of the Talking Stars (SAGE, 2017).
Moderator Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies, UCSB)
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media cultures, environmental media, and critical public health studies in English and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her early writings on global media cultures include When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) while her current research on media and risk is published as the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Global
Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.