(Kaalbela). “The Calcutta of my youth has changed,” observes Animesh, protagonist of this epic love story set within the radical Naxalite movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. Abruptly, with documentary immediacy, black-and-white clips from period cinema propel us into that tumultuous world of strikes and political repression. Young Animesh leaves his family’s modest farm to study literature in Calcutta, but a policeman’s bullet strikes him the first day he sets foot in the city streets. Inside the student movement, his wound makes him an uneasy exhibit of police torture in the service of his own party, a position challenged by young women from his college, especially the incisive and luminous Madhabilata. This is the territory of filmmaker Goutam Ghose’s own youth, and his understanding of it informs his acute adaptation of Bengali writer Samaresh Majumdar’s novel Kalbela. “For (Ghose) it was not just a story of the Naxalite movement but also that of women’s liberation in India,” says Majumdar. When Madhabilata chooses Animesh and bears his child outside of marriage, she knows that the social censure will be savage and that her parents will disown her. In Calcutta My Love, it is the women who consistently understand their circumstances, take concrete actions, and accept responsibility for the consequences. Animesh and his comrades, by contrast, swap abstract slogans to motivate and justify actions that are ever more isolating and violent, leading to imprisonment and even death. This is a richly detailed and human chronicle of a turbulent period that laid the ground for today’s India.

—Kathleen Denny

• Written by Ghose. Photographed by Indranil Mukhopadhyay. With Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Paoli Dam, Santu Mukhopadhyay, Rudranil Ghosh. (165 mins)