K.S. Firoz

Religious prejudice and racial dogmatism are the curse of Mohanpur, a backwater village out of touch with progress in the contemporary world. But, as depicted in the film Brihonnola, humanity has the strength to combat and neutralist the poisonous effects of these evils on the lives of the villagers.

Osman returns to his ancestral village on a stormy night, the village he had fled in the dark of the night 27 years ago. He finds shelter in the home of Mannaf Khan, a village elder. Osman seeks to rediscover his childhood and goes about reliving the past in childhood memories. He meets Kunjo Buri who had nursed him as an infant. He also meets his boyhood friend Fazlu. Osman is not after worldly gains, he only wants to spend the rest of his life in the village and the nostalgia of bygone days. That, However, is not to be. He comes face to face with a reality of a markedly different kind.

During the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, in a remote village, a landlord collaborated with the Pakistani army. After the death of his brother, he married his sister-in-law who had a young son. A teacher in the village, with a widowed daughter, taught the young man had a daughter. When the war broke out, the young man joined the Bengali guerrillas, shattering his innocence. In the village, the landlord's action get worse and worse, until he kills the teacher and compels the daughter to marry him. Now the young man must return to his village with new determination.

Based on the timeless literary work by Manik Bandyopadhyay, Padma Nadir Majhi was directed by Gautam Ghosh. The movie illustrates the tumultuous lives of the fishermen and their families, living by the river Padma. Beautiful shots of the river, Ghosh's flair for realism and brilliant display of acting skills by noted actors of Bangladesh and West Bengal, including Utpal Dutt, Robi Ghosh, Abul Khayer, Raisul Islam Asad, Champa, and Rupa Ganguli, fetched the movie local and international honours.