Entertainment News Desk !!! Sen-Gupta was born on 2 September 1965 in Mumbai (Bombay). He has been working in cinema since the age of seventeen, starting his career as an apprentice in the art department of the “Bollywood” studio in Mumbai. He worked with Indian art director Bijon Dasgupta on the sets of big-budget commercial English films such as Saagar and Mr. India.
A few years after completing his apprenticeship, he became an assistant art director. In 1988, he worked on his first film as an art director or production designer, an Indian art film called Main Zinda Hoon directed by Sudhir Mishra. He then set up his own design studio where he worked on several commercials and art films, designing sets and specialising in real-time SFX. He won the Best Art Director award in 1989. He also worked as a production designer on the French film Nocturne Indien, directed by Alain Corneau and shot in Mumbai.
In 1993, he was selected for a two-month summer workshop at the French Film Institute FEMIS in Paris. During the workshop, he directed his first short film, “La Dernière…”, based on Samuel Beckett’s radio play Krepp’s Last Tape. He was then awarded a three-and-a-half-year full scholarship to study film direction at the same school. During his film school years, he made four short fiction films, Le Cochon, La Partition, Trajete Discontinue, and La Petite Souris, which took him to various European film festivals and won awards.
After graduating in 1997, he directed his first feature film Hawa Ane De (Let the Wind Blow), which premiered at the 2004 Berlin International Film Festival. It was selected and won awards at several international film festivals. The film was part of the Global Film Initiative’s Global Lens 2008 series and premiered at MoMA NYC in January 2008. In 2005 he made a documentary film The Way of Beauty on the Indo-fusion group Shakti which was released on DVD in May 2006. In 2008, his new feature film project Sunrise was selected among 30 other international projects for the 11th Busan Promotion Plan (3–6 October 2008) at the Busan International Film Festival. Sunrise was the only Indian project in the selection.
Sunrise was released in full in October 2014 and premiered at the 2014 Busan International Film Festival and numerous international film festivals, receiving awards and international critical acclaim. In 2017, Sen-Gupta wrote and directed his first Australian feature film Slam. It was an official selected project at the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam’s CinemaArt and the 2016 Berlinale Co-production Market. The film, starring Academy Award-nominated Omar Se Adam Bakri and award-winning Australian actress Rachel Blake, was filmed in Sydney, Australia in October and November 2017. Slam was selected in the official selection at the 2018 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and had its world premiere on 27 November 2018. Sen-Gupta lectures for the postgraduate in directing at the Australian Film, Television, Radio School AFTRS from 2021 to 2023.
In December 2023, Sen-Gupta, along with 50 other international filmmakers including Claire Denis, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, etc., signed an open letter published in Liberation calling for a ceasefire during the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip and demanding a halt to the killing of civilians and the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to Gaza for humanitarian aid and the release of hostages.
