Sen in the World

This article repositions Mrinal Sen as a world cinema figure by examining his participation in the international film festival circuit from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Taking seriously Sen’s repeated polemical rejections of the concept of ‘national cinema’, the article traces the alternative global imaginary his work inhabited and helped construct – one that extended well beyond Western Europe to traverse the socialist bloc, Asia, Africa and Latin America. It argues that the socialist festival circuit functioned as a crucial intermediary space: at once a bridge between ‘the West’ and the Global South, and a locus of the broader internationalist imaginary whose contradictions became increasingly visible across the 1980s. Sen’s reception within this circuit – particularly in the Soviet Union – reveals both the affordances and the ideological constraints of socialist cultural internationalism: His films were celebrated but consistently folded into Soviet critical frameworks in ways that softened their more disruptive edges. The article concludes by reading what it describes as a ‘non-encounter’ between Sen’s 1980s work and late-Soviet audiences as symptomatic of a deeper structural crisis: a revealing misalignment within a global socialist culture already undone by its own contradictions, and a horizon of internationalist imagination that was rapidly closing.