Smoke from coal ovens is a recurrent visual motif of class struggle in Sen’s excellent take on the material poverty of Calcutta’s poor, sprinkled with bouts of indelible dreamlike scenes. 

Sen at his thought-provoking best, this highly-layered meta-filmic behind-the-scenes drama sees a film crew enter a poor village to make a movie about the 1943 Bengal famine, only to find it increasingly difficult to engage with the people, traditions, history and filmmaking itself.