A classic of Odia cinema gets another chance to shine
Maya Miriga (1984), a touchstone of the Parallel Cinema movement, will be presented in a restored version at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bolonga, Italy, in June. Directed by Nirad Mohapatra, Maya Miriga was part of the Critics Week at the Cannes Festival in 1984.
The film has been restored by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, in association with Digital Film Restore and Prasad Corporation in Chennai. A graduate of the 1971 batch of the Film and Television Institute of India, Mohapatra made numerous documentaries, television series, industrial and educational films across his three-decade career, but Maya Miriga remained his sole fiction feature.
“I had conceived the idea [for the film] in one of my intense moments of loneliness and deep depression and it had undergone several changes in various phases.", notes the filmmaker. Shot by Rajgopal Mishra in a warm, sober colour palette, the film demonstrates a great feeling for the interplay of harsh natural light and deep shadows—a sensuous quality that can be appreciated fully in the pristine new version.
Set in the town of Puri, Maya Miriga is the saga of a joint family driven to disintegration by ambition, opportunity, festering resentment and, simply, changing times. A stern but honest headmaster on the brink of retirement, Raj Kishore Babu (Bansidhar Satpathy) lives in a fairly capacious house with his elderly mother, wife and five children: the dull and reliable college lecturer Tuku, the IAS hopeful Tutu, the self-doubting MA graduate Bulu, the rebellious and cricket-obsessed Tulu and the only daughter Tikina.
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