Actress Smita Patil, a huge star in India, passed away prematurely in 1986. Three years earlier, she had played her own role in Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika, portraying an actress with meteoric and tragic fate. She was in Nantes in 1980: “In commercial cinema, it’s always the same thing. You’re asked to do a dance scene, a love scene, a crying scene, a song. No point in tiring yourself out. Someone else sings for you. You just have stay in the box they put you in and not move. […] For an actress, it’s very frustrating. It’s only in the young cinema that you can really give your all, put all your heart into it.”
(Smita Patil’s comments collected by Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinéma no.320, February 1981, Festival des 3 Continents “Panorama of Southern India Cinema”)
