Partho Sen-Gupta

Partho Sen-Gupta (also spelled Partho Sen Gupta or Partho Sengupta pronounced Partho Shen-Goopto) is an independent film director and screenwriter of Indian origin.

Sen-Gupta was born in Mumbai (Bombay), on 2 September 1965. He has been working in cinema since the age of seventeen, starting his career as an apprentice in the art department, in the studios of "Bollywood" in Mumbai. He worked with an Indian art director Bijon Dasgupta on the sets of big budget commercial Hindi films like Saagar and Mr. India among others.

After having spent a few years and finishing his apprenticeship, he became assistant art director. In 1988, he worked on his first film as art director or production designer in an Indian art movie called Main Zinda Hoon (I am Alive) directed by Sudhir Mishra. He then set up his design studio working on numerous advertising films and art movies, designing sets and specializing in real-time SFX. He won the Best Art Director Award in 1989. He also worked as production designer on the French film Nocturne Indien directed by Alain Corneau and shot in Mumbai.

In 1993, he was selected to do a two-month summer workshop at FEMIS, the French film institute in Paris. During the workshop, he directed his first short film "La Derniere..." based on Samuel Beckett's radio play Krapp's Last Tape. He was then awarded a three and a half year full scholarship to study film direction at the same school.

During his film school years, he made four short fiction films "Le Cochon", "La Partition", "Trajet Discontinu", and "La Petite Souris" which took him to different European film festivals and won awards.

After graduation in 1996/97, he decided to live between the two cities, Paris and Mumbai, and started writing his first feature film screenplay based in India called Hava Aney Dey (Let the Wind Blow) which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004. It was selected in many international film festivals and won awards. The film was part of the Global Lens 2008 series of the Global Film Initiative and premiered at the MoMA NYC, in January 2008.

He was invited by the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 as a part of a group of promising young film-makers by the Cinéfondation. In 2005, he made a documentary film The Way of Beauty on the Indo-fusion group Shakti which was released on the DVD in May 2006.

He is currently working on his second feature film project Fallen Hero (produced by Independent Movies LTD). The film will be shot in Rajasthan, India and it received the Hubert Bals Fund at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Arunoday - The Sunrise, a new film project by Partho Sen-Gupta was selected among the 30 projects at the 11th Pusan promotion Plan (3 to 6 October 2008) at the Pusan International Film Festival and is due to commence production shortly. The Sunrise is the only Indian project in the selection.