Canceled, and replaced by Crossroads (see note, 2/23). The Return is a fascinating, personal work exploring the dilemma of the traditional artist, at odds with himself and his public in an unnurturing modern environment. Sasaka (Subrata Nandy), the last scion of a noble family and a writer and actor of jatra, Bengali folk theater, lives in artistic and aristocratic solitude within the crumbling walls of his ancestral home. Calls to adapt his art to more commercial tastes are angrily, often drunkenly, received. The arrival of his widowed sister-in-law, Saraju (Aloknanda Dutt), and her young son, Kanu (Aniket Sengupta), interrupts Sasaka's melancholy dialogue with the ghosts of a past happiness. But as with everything in Sasaka's life, they too become moving symbols of the artist's dilemma: with Saraju, he enters into an exploitative, cynical relationship, while with the boy, he forms a bond based on a kind of eternal innocence-a child's intuitive fascination with the magic of art. Dasgupta's style combines calculated understatement with lyric visuals and an atmospheric score; Variety, reviewing The Return at the Berlin Film Festival, praised the film's "way of leaving things half-said," its "poetic (cinematography) that tastes of the past and memory..."