Synopsis In Search of Famine takes a Felliniesque look at a young film director's effort to portray, with commitment and honesty, the famine that ravaged Bengal in 1943. Forty years after the event, and within a village setting, the young filmmaker comes up against a famine that still runs relentlessly on; and he is faced with a community of elders which resists both reality and the cinema. As a result, his task becomes irretrievably difficult. Mrinal Sen built his screenplay out of an original story by Amalendu Chakroborty. The filmscript is a reconstruction and translation based on the original working script and a shot-by-shot viewing of the film. In Search of Famine won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival,1981, and the National Award for the best feature film, best direction, best screenplay and best editing.