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Mrinal Sen is one of his nation's most politically active, eminent, very sober and refined filmmakers. His life as a filmmaker has been a mix of success and failure. He was the director of 28 feature films and four documentaries made in languages varying from Bengali to Oriya, Hindi and Telugu.

Mrinal Sen, a critically acclaimed filmmaker, was born on May 14, 1923, in Faridpur, now in Bangladesh. After having studied physics at university in Calcutta, Sen worked as a freelance journalist, a salesman of patent medicines and a sound technician in a film studio. The association had links to the Communist Party of India and this heralded the beginning of Sen's involvement with Marxist politics. In the mid-1940s he joined the Indian People's Theatre Association and at that time began to read about and study film. As a staunch Marxist, Mrinal Sen uses film to promote his agenda. In 1956 Sen made his directorial debut with Raat Bhore (1956) and soon he became nationally popular, was followed by 'Neel Akasher Neechay.' He won fame with 'Bhuvan Shome' (1969) and the later 'Calcutta 71,' but it was 'Kharij' that he has won the most prestigious honor in Indian cinema, the Dadasaheb Phalke award, in the year 2003 by the Indian government. He was the recipient of several other national and international awards for filmmaking. His films had won numerous international awards also. Kharij (1982), a scathing look at the hypocritical reaction of a bourgeois Calcutta family to the death of a servant boy, took home the Jury Prize from the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. He was awarded the Padmabhushan by the Government of India in 1980. He became the member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. He also became the member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1982. A member of the National Film Development Corporation, Sen was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1998 to 2003.

To many Indian filmgoers today, Mrinal Sen is a cult hero. In the last five years, he has managed to transform a very commonplace film style into a socially relevant, politically committed cinema. It is Mrinal Sen who has begun discussing the social problems in a nonromantic manner, in a manner that is making Indian audiences sit up and take attention. He has faced different obstacles of difficult producers, reluctant distributors, and of course, a disapproving Censor Board. But he has managed to come out from them and today he is the only Indian director who has been discussing contemporary political situations and analyzing them. Sen's films slowly but pointedly describe the colonial attitudes and norms that still exist in India and which are a major impediment to growth and development. Mr. Sen had achieved his high stature because of his pan-Indian outlook, his world-view, artistic sensibility and sensitivity towards society.