Mainak Bhaumik

A student of Economics and Computer Science, Bhaumik graduated with a double major from City University in New York. Then, he enrolled in Columbia University for the M.A. program in Literature.^[2] He did a course on film production from the New York Film Academy and learned about film and video editing from New School University. He took screenwriting workshops with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet, while staying in New York.^[3]

Bhaumik started his career in 1998 by directing a short film His Life - Her Story, which won the Best Short Film award at "Florida Film Festival" (1998).^[4] In 2006 he directed his first Bengali film Aamra His next film Bedroom (2012) is a dark ensemble film that deals with the new generation of young Indians who struggle with depression, failure and identity crisis in a Facebook savvy world that is obsessed with picture perfect lives. In 2013, Bhaumik released the feature film Maach Mishti & More which he refers to as his love-letter to his city of Kolkata. Released in the same year, Ami Aar Amar Girlfriends is a coming-of-age movie about the lives of three Indian girls who cling to their friendship in times of trouble. In 2014, his next film Take One, is about a modern Indian woman, an actress who plays the Hindu mythological character Sita, and is judged harshly by Indian society because of her sexual indiscretions. But unlike Sita, who was forced by society into exile, the actress rejects hypocritical society's unfair judgment of her and withdraws voluntarily into her private exile.^[5]

His documentary films on endangered Indian ethnic folk art forms and culture have been internationally distributed by the Documentary Educational Resources in Boston, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution.^[6] These films have been screened in numerous international film festivals across the globe, and have also been picked up by German Films Italia, Rome, for the Italian TV rights.^[7] He won the Art Award in 2005 for his documentary film Gone to Pat, at the Society for Visual Anthropology, American Anthropological Association. Since then, his feature films have also earned critical acclaim and commercial success.^[8]