Basu Chatterjee (10 January 1927 – 4 June 2020) was an Indian film director and screenwriter in Hindi Cinema.Through the 1970s and 1980s, he became associated with what came to be known as middle cinema or middle-of-the-road cinema filmmakers, such as Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Bhattacharya, whom he assisted on Teesri Kasam (1966). Like their films, his films dealt with light-hearted stories of middle-class families often in urban settings, focusing on marital and love relationships.
Chatterjee directed the Bengali film Hothath Brishti (1998), which featured actors from both Bangladesh and India. The film featured Ferdous Ahmed from Bangladesh, and Priyanka Trivedi and Sreelekha Mitra from West Bengal. Chatterjee continued to cast Ahmed in subsequent Indian-Bengali films, including Chupi Chupi (2001), Tak Jhal Mishti (2002) and Hotath Shedin (2012), another joint production of Bangladesh and India. He wrote the script for the Bangladeshi film Ek Cup Cha, directed by Noyeem Imtiaz Neamul.
Early life
Basu Chatterjee was born in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India, in a Bengali family. His middle class upbringing reflected in his movies that explored areas which were far removed from the glitz and glamour of the blockbusters of the time.[3]
A book on the work of Basu Chatterji, titled Basu Chatterji: And Middle of the road cinema, written by author and music historian Anirudha Bhattacharjee, has been published by Penguin Random House in 2023.
