One of history's finest filmmakers, Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali) turns his keen eye and humanist sensibilities to the contemporary landscape of his native Kolkata in a ground-breaking exploration of a woman's economic agency.
Mahanagar (1963), also known as The Big City, follows a housewife who quietly rebels against her family's traditionalist ideals by seeking employment as a saleswoman, a confident stride into the workforce that unsettles frameworks of patriarchy and - more intimately - her marriage.
Madhabi Mukherjee stars in a perfectly pitched drama that uses its small scale to examine some of the largest and most enduring issues in the lives of women, its heroine planting flowers at the border between who a woman is and who she's expected to be.
