Three generations of one family disconnect in a forgotten masterpiece of the 1980s Indian parallel cinema. Russian premiere as part of the retrospective programme of the Festival of Films Regained.
The Mirage
- Date:
- 25 Sep 2025,
19:30–21:45
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Maya Мiriga
1984, Nirad Mohapatra
India
120 minutes, Odia with Russian subtitles
Starring: Bansidhar Satpathy, Sampad Mahapatra, Manaswini Mangaraj, Kishori Devi
T
The large family of schoolmaster Raja Babu live under one roof: his elderly mother, himself and his wife, and their four children. By local standards, it’s a successful life, and one of Raja’s sons is about to enter the civil service. But things rarely work out as planned, and even the strongest family ties tend to break.
Shot form The Mirage, 1984
With the revival of this seminal film, Odia cinema promises to draw much needed attention from the rest of the country as well as the world.
— Srikanth Srinivasan, The Seventh Art
In the mid-1980s, the wise drama by Nirad Mohapatra proclaimed to the world the existence of cinema—and a brilliant one at that—from the Indian state of Odisha. It seemed that the director had a great future ahead—but he never made another feature film. The Mirage itself was rescued from oblivion in the 2020s: the original negative was found in a warehouse almost perished, and it took three years to restore it.
