Distant Thunder (; translit. Ashani Sanket) is a 1973 Bengali film by the Indian director Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay.

Unlike most of Ray's earlier films, Distant Thunder was filmed in colour. It stars Soumitra Chatterjee, who headlined numerous Ray films, and the Bangladeshi actress Bobita in her only prominent international role. Today the film features in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made. It marked the debut of the theatre star Mrityunjay Sil.

Cast

  • Soumitra Chatterjee as Gangacharan Chakravarti
  • Bobita as Angana, Gangacharan's wife
  • Chitra Banerjee as Moti
  • Govinda Chakravarti - Dinabandhu
  • Anil Ganguly as Nibaran
  • Noni Ganguly as Scarface' Jadu
  • Debatosh Ghosh as Adhar
  • Ramesh Mukherjee as Biswas
  • Sheli Pal as Mokshada
  • Suchita Ray Chaudhury as Khenti
  • Sandhya Roy as Chutki
  • Mrityunjay Sil as Ajay (Cameo) Dennis Schwartz gave the film an A− and called it "[a] gentle humanist film that informs the world that over five million died of starvation and epidemics in Bengal." Jay Cocks writing for Time echoes Canby's assessment of it as a "fable", writing: "Distant Thunder has the deliberate, unadorned reality of a folk tale, a fable of encroaching, enlarging catastrophe." He calls the film "superb and achingly simple ... Numbers as huge as ["5 million"] can be dangerous. A tragedy of such magnitude becomes an event abstracted by arithmetic. But Ray's artistry alters the scale. His concentrating on just a few victims of the famine causes such massive loss to become real, immediate. Ray makes numbers count."

Legacy

In 2012, filmmaker Amit Dutta included the film in his personal top ten (for "The Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" poll).

Awards

; Berlin International Film Festival

  • 1973: Golden Bear for Best Film

; 21st National Film Awards

  • National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Bengali - Ashani Sanket
  • National Film Award for Best Music Direction - Satyajit Ray
  • National Film Award for Best Cinematography - Soumendu Roy

References

  • as Asani Sanket at SatyajitRay.org