The idea of this book stems from the many discussions the author had with Soumitra Chatterjee for over the last few years.
The book holds the author’s many anxieties, questions, hazy perceptions and unresolved miseries. In the discussions, there have been some common themes – separation, return, fear and death. Then painting, poetry, reading.

Soumitra Chatterjee’s debut in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar as the eponymous, gentle hero won him international fame. The decades-long Ray–Chatterjee collaboration, in fact, ranks right up there with the best-known actor–director duos

Satyajit Ray first placed India on the map of world cinema with his 1955-classic Pather Panchali. In a career spanning nearly four decades and including twenty-seven feature films, Ray is undoubtedly the most-known Indian film-maker till date.

Soumitra Chatterjee is a creative genius. Apart from being an actor of international eminence and recognition he is a painter, a theatre actor-cum-director, a playwright, a magazine editor, an elocutionist and also a poet. Writing poetry for over six decades Soumitra had penned several anthologies. Walking through the Mist is however, the first collection of translated poems of Soumitra Chatterjee in English.

Written over the years, 16 Frames is a collection of 16 critical articles on cinema analyzing the different trends and intertextualising cinema with the other art forms. The short and crisp articles are multilayered to raise the curiosity of the reader and are likely to fascinate her with the originality of the subjects dealt with. As award-winning film critic Shoma A Chatterji comments – ‘the book reads on, like a river, sometimes placid, sometimes turbulent, flowing through the reader’s mind, through the films one has certainly watched and films one has never seen and is never likely to see.’