The world premiere of the 4K restored version of acclaimed filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s Telugu classic Oka Oorie Katha (1977) is currently underway at Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which is being held from July 3 to 11, 2026. A meticulously restored 4K version of the movie recently had its world premiere at this festival. The restoration was spearheaded by the National Film Development Corporation – National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI) under the National Film Heritage Mission.

His son Kunal Sen said, “It was challenging for him to make a film in a language he did not know, and being a regional language film, it wasn’t widely screened in India. My father would have been very happy to see it being restored by the National Film Archive of India, and being screened in a Film Festival he loved.”

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The spoken language of a film is used majorly by a filmmaker who is familiar with the language he is making the film in. But trust Mrinal Sen to make a complete feature film based on the Hindi litterateur Munshi Premchand’s famous story Kafan (Shroud) not in Hindi, which he knew a bit of, not in Bengali, his mother tongue he was the most comfortable in, but in Telugu of which he did not speak, know or understand a word of.

Looking back, Sen probably shifted the base of the original story of Premchand from a North Indian village to a deeply feudal Telangana landscape. This radically alters the linguistic and cultural nuances of the characters. This also widens the geographical implications of power across India where never mind the time, the space or the language, the basic exploitation of the poor by the thieving rich, of women by the thieving and exploitative poor is timeless and universal. Sen’s choice to make it in Telugu is a pointer to his desire to spread this message right through the map of India – from the Hindi belt through the Bengal belt right upto the Telugu belt where languages, customs and lifestyles differ but the practice of human exploitation by other humans remains the same.

The film focusses on the intertwined lives of four........

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