Māyā Miriga. 1984. India. Written and directed by Nirad Mohapatra. North American premiere. Courtesy Film Heritage Foundation. In Odia; English subtitles. 110 min.
Nirad Mohapatra’s sole feature film, rescued from near-oblivion, stands as one of the masterpieces of Indian regional cinema. Through its patient, observant lens and haunting score by Bhaskar Chandavarkar, the film chronicles the gradual dissolution of an extended middle-class family in a small Odisha town. With remarkable subtlety, Mohapatra’s nonprofessional cast brings to life the complex dynamics of a household caught between tradition and modernity—the trapped daughters-in-law yearning for freedom, the married sons walking an emotional tightrope, and the slow erosion of familial bonds by individual ambition. We are not far from the world of Satyajit Ray, or from the atmosphere of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.
Though it garnered international acclaim and helped put Odia cinema on the map upon its release, both film and filmmaker mysteriously vanished from India’s cinematic landscape. This meticulous restoration by the Film Heritage Foundation, working from severely damaged negatives found abandoned in a warehouse, returns to the screen a vital work whose intimate portrayal of family life under pressure resonates perhaps even more strongly in today’s India. As critic Maithili Rao noted, the disappearance of Mohapatra after such an “exquisitely elegiac” debut remains one of Indian cinema’s most poignant mysteries.
4K digital restoration by Film Heritage Foundation from the 16mm original camera negative preserved at Film Heritage Foundation and a 35mm print preserved at the NFDC – National Film Archive of India at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, Bologna.