Underplayed Gems

Neecha Nagar (1946)

Neecha Nagar poster
Original title
नीचा नगर
Directed by
Chetan Anand
Genre
drama film
Country
British Raj
Runtime
2h 02m
Rating
6.3 of 10 from 10 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

A poor community in a city struggles against a wealthy landlord. The film follows the lives of several residents living in slums as they face injustice and try to survive.

grittysocially consciousbleakslow-burnearnesthumanistrestrained

What happens

Neecha Nagar (lit. 'Lowly City') is a 1946 Indian Hindi-language film, directed by Chetan Anand, written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Hayatullah Ansari, and produced by Rashid Anwar and A. Halim. It was a pioneering effort in social realism in Indian cinema and led to many such parallel cinema films by other directors, many of them also written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. It starred Chetan Anand's wife Uma Anand, with Rafiq Anwar, Kamini Kaushal, Murad, Rafi Peer, Hamid Butt, and Zohra Sehgal. Neecha Nagar was a Hindi film adaptation in an Indian setting of Russian writer Maxim Gorky's 1902 play The Lower Depths. Neecha Nagar became the first Indian film to gain recognition at the Cannes Film Festival, after it shared the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (Best Film) award at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946 with eleven of the eighteen entered feature films. It is the only Indian film to be ever awarded a Palme d'Or. Ironically, the film was never released in India. However the film was telecasted on Doordarshan, (India's national broadcaster) in 1980s. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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