Amit Dutta

The Man's Woman and Other Stories, a triptych of three separate short-stories received the Jury's Special Mention award of the Orizzonti [New Horizons] section of the 66th Venice Film Festival with the note that the film "opens a window on a new form of film-making on many levels".

Jury-member and film-artist Bady Minck wrote that the director "creates images which are poetic and unsettling at the same time. They oscillate between the fantastic and the concrete, imagination and present-day reality".

Barbara Wurm, writing in the Senses of Cinema magazine states that the director "celebrates neo-expressionist cinematography and demonstrates outstanding skills in merging the tempus and the mode of narration, a very sophisticated plot wandering from reality to possibility and back being the result: Aadmi ki aurat aur anya kahaniya (The Man’s Woman and Other Stories)”

In Sonchidi, two travelers journey in the quest for a flying craft that they believe would help them cross the cycle of births.

The Rotterdam film festival described it as an "intriguing philosophical piece which evokes many memories, challenges various interpretations. Truly cinematic, a connoisseur's piece."

It premiered at the 67th Venice Film Festival, was presented in the 'World Cinema Spotlight' section of the San Francisco Film Festival, was showcased in MoMA, New York and travelled widely to many festivals including Rotterdam, Beijing and Vancouver Film Festivals among others.

The 'Film Comment' magazine had rated ‘Nainsukh’ as one of the top ten films of the 67th Venice film festival.

Nainsukh has received a great deal of appreciation from both film and art critics.

Prof. Dr. Milo C. Beach, the eminent American art historian, director emeritus Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC., author of several authoritative books on Indian paintings wrote:

"The images of NAINSUKH are stunning. The comparisons with the paintings could not be more clear, but what astonishes me most is the ability of Amit Dutta to compose those images, and even more, to light them. The lighting is breathtaking. It tells you why Nainsukh would have taken such care with details, maybe especially with the folds of cloth…I think that this will do more for public interest in Indian painting that all the many scholarly essays.... What an achievement!"

(If I were teaching, I would buy a copy of the film immediately to show in every class... )

Nainsukh has been widely discussed by critics for its unique formal qualities which evade categorisations.

The film is said to be balancing between documentary approach and playful plot, developing its own visual language by interpreting as well as questioning Indian art history and one of its greatest artists.

While deeply rooted in Indian tradition and philosophy, the film is also seen by eminent critic Olaf Moller as a "thought-provoking investigation into the slippery, ever-changing nature of realism, its representation in the arts. A true masterpiece of Indian modernism".

With no considerable dialogue, the almost silent film is considered to create "a hypnotic fusion of imagery and sound that conjures up a lost age".

George Heymont of Huffington Post also observes the lack of dialogue and calls the film "visually stunning and acoustically stimulating that its beauty can often take the viewer’s breath away" The film contains meticulous recreations of Nainsukh's miniatures through compositions set amidst the ruins of the Jasrota palace where the artist was retained.

Galina Stoletneya remarks that "By harmoniously juxtaposing the gorgeous visuals with outstanding sound design, the filmmaker produces a unique work of art—a living painting itself—that stands on its own"

Max Goldberg of San Francisco Film Society observes that the film pays close attention to the finesse of Naisukh's brushwork and his observant images of the patron's more informal moments like smoking and beard-trimming.

He adds that "When the filmmaker reconstructs one of Nainsukh’s more complexly staged scenes—as in the hunting of a tiger clutching its human prey—his cinematic technique of isolating different elements of a single scene evokes the dynamic register of imagination and realism animating the artist’s deceptively flat pictures".

The Ferroni Brigade group of film critics had nominated it as one of the best films of the 67th Venice film festival.

Amit Dutta (born 1977 in Jammu) is an Indian experimental filmmaker and writer.

He is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary practitioners of experimental cinema, known for his distinctive style of filmmaking rooted in Indian aesthetic theories and personal symbolism resulting in images that are visually rich and acoustically stimulating.

His works mostly deal with subjects of art history, ethno-anthropology and cultural inheritance through cinema, many times merging research and documentation with an open imagination.

Amit Dutta graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune in 2004.

He has taught at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad.

Kramasha (To Be Continued), an experimental short film made in 2007, earned considerable acclaim from film scholars and critics and was considered to be a defining achievement in experimental cinema.

After winning many national and international awards, it was included in the list of thousand best films of all times compiled by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum who also described the film as "a dazzling, virtuoso piece of mise en scene in 35-millimeter, full of uncanny imagery about the way the narrator imagines the past of his village and his family."

It was also voted as one of the best films in the Senses of Cinema poll in 2007.

The FIPRESCI Jury while giving it the critic's prize in 2007 at the Oberhausen Film Festival in remarked, "Now that 35-millimeter appears to be a format whose pleasures are being overlooked or forgotten, especially in the realm of short films, the sensual pleasures of Amit Dutta's 22-minute To Be Continued (Kramasha) seem all the more precious…"

Since 2007 he collaborated with the art historian Dr Eberhard Fischer, researching in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh and eventually directed the feature film ‘Nainsukh’ in 2010.

The Jury at the MIFF (Mumbai International Film Festival) while giving it the Golden Conch for the Best Film of the Festival in 2008 wrote about the film: "In the manner music keeps you quietly enthralled with a resonating sense of things without a need to necessarily reduce the experience to a verbalization of meanings, Kramasha offers a world of images and sounds that made us smell and touch the lush of nature amid a mysterious index of hallucinations. Like a dream that we may fail to understand but that reaches deep recesses of our unconscious and touches familiar chords, Amit Dutta's Kramasha weaves a powerful narrative that blends legends, myths and nostalgia into a film that allows us to recall our own early experiences."

Kramasha is considered to explore the relationship between personal mythology, literary text, and the cinematic image.

This exploration is seen continued in his consecutive fiction films The Man's Woman and Other Stories (2009) and the more recent The Golden Bird (2011).

In 2015, he joined Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla as a Tagore fellow.

Amit Dutta began his career making several short experimental films which critics described as "without precedents except probably for a distant echo of Sergey Parajanov's avant-garde play with childhood memories, making the director probably the most singular and idiosyncratic in the world."

His montages are considered as baffling the eye as well as the urge to interpret, being interwoven with a complex labyrinth of allusions from historical reminiscences, fairytales, children's stories, texture etc.

Kaljayi Kambakht, his first novel in Hindi, was published in 2016.

It received positive reviews and the author was awarded the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship for outstanding contribution to Experimental Hindi Literature.

It was among the seven books shortlisted for "The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation" (2023).

The film is based on the biography of an 18th-century master painter of the same name belonging to the region.