Ritwik Ghatak's 'A River Called Titas' Is Finding a New Audience on Instagram

A black-and-white clip of fishermen wrestling a boat through choppy water has been doing steady numbers on Instagram this week, reshared by film accounts including @cinematicsaji under the handle @themovienama_. The source is Ritwik Ghatak's "A River Called Titas," a Bengali film from 1973 that's more than fifty years old and still finding new audiences one reel at a time.

The Film Behind the Clip

"A River Called Titas" (Titash Ekti Nadir Naam) is Ghatak's adaptation of Adwaita Mallabarman's 1956 novel of the same name, an India-Bangladesh co-production released on July 27, 1973. Ghatak was seriously ill with tuberculosis through much of the shoot, and the film turned out to be his last completed feature.

The story follows the Malo fishing community along the Titas river across a generation, centering on Basanti (Rosy Samad) and Rajar Jhi (Kabori Choudhury) — a woman who, after being separated from her husband and rescued from river bandits, chooses to raise her child alone rather than fold back into what the community expects of her. Ghatak himself appears on screen as the boatman Tilak Chand.

Ahead of Its Time, Then and Now

Structurally, the film tracks several interlocking protagonists rather than a single throughline — critics have since called it one of the earliest examples of "hyperlink cinema," years before Robert Altman's "Nashville" popularized the format in the West. In 2002, the British Film Institute's audience and critics' polls ranked it the greatest Bangladeshi film ever made.

Its current visibility owes something to preservation, not just algorithm luck. Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project restored the film and pushed it back into circulation on home video and streaming — which is most likely why footage clean enough to travel on a 2026 Instagram feed exists at all. The shot of a woman floating face-up in the water, flower petals scattered across her skin, has the kind of high-contrast, almost tactile black-and-white texture that reads as striking regardless of when it was filmed.

It's a small pattern worth noticing: restored Bengali and Bangladeshi classics keep resurfacing on reels feeds not because algorithms favor old film, but because restoration work makes a fifty-year-old frame look sharp enough to stop a scroll. Titas won't be the last Ghatak clip to do it.