Did you know Rituparno Ghosh had acted in an Oriya film?

Rituparno Ghosh, the master filmmaker, had tried his hands at acting, too. But, not many people know about the film in which he made his acting debut. Well, the director had made his first screen presence in a film titled ‘ Katha Deithilli Ma Ku’, an Oriya film that was released in 2003.
Directed by Himanshu Parija, it was a story about a boxer. Interestingly, Rituparna Sengupta was the female lead opposite Siddhanta Mahapatra in the film. This was also a remake of the 2003 Telugu movie ‘Amma Nanna O Tamila Ammayi’.
Rituparno Ghosh, the young avant-garde director of Bengali cinema in the nineties, literally heralded the current Renaissance of Bengali cinema. He ushered a movement in which filmmakers such as Kaushik Ganguly, Anjan Dutta and Srijit Mukherji among others propelled Bengali cinema back into the elite class of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen movies. With Rituparno, Bengal returned to the map of international film awards. These new-age directors managed to create a niche multiplex audience who after a long time rediscovered the enriched culture of Bengali literature, especially poetry.
Today it seems more and more relevant to acknowledge how he achieved an enviable fusion between high art and commercial success which only a few filmmakers in Bengal enjoyed with such consistency.