Cholochitro Diary

What Cholochitro Diary is

Cholochitro Diary is a home for Bengali film lovers. Write down what you watched, rate it out of ten, save the ones you want to see, and tell your friends what stayed with you. The films run from the silent era to whatever opened last month, and you can search in Bengali as well as English.

A log needs only the day you watched. A rating or a review can come then or later, and a review is yours: what the film did to you, in your own words.

Around that sit a watchlist, lists, follows, notes on the films, profiles of the people who made them, articles, and, where it is known, the place a film is streaming in India.

What the catalogue covers

Bengali-language cinema, from the silent era to whatever opened last month. Every title is checked as Bengali-language before it is added, and each film carries its Bengali title alongside the English one: নায়ক rather than “The Hero”, which is both the correct name and the one people actually search for.

Independent, small-budget and self-distributed work belongs here on the same terms as anything else. This is the part most film databases handle badly. A film that played three festivals and never got a theatrical release, a debut shot for the price of a week’s advertising on a mainstream title, a documentary that circulated on hard drives before it reached a platform. These are frequently missing from international databases altogether, or present as a title with no poster, no cast and no synopsis.

That gap is not an accident of coverage; it tracks budget and distribution, and it means the independent half of an industry can vanish from the record while the commercial half is documented in detail. Where a film is missing or thin, it can be added and completed by hand, artwork and credits and context included, rather than left to whatever an automated import happened to return.

How the writing is done

The notes on a film page, the profiles and the articles are written by a person, from sources that can be named. Nothing is generated to fill a gap.

A blank field is better than an invented one. Most films do not have a note yet, and where the sources disagree about a fact, the page says so rather than picking one.

Free today, and what is coming

Today Cholochitro Diary is free for everyone. There are no ads, no paywall, and nothing is locked behind an account you have to pay for.

One thing is planned, and it does not exist yet.

Give a hand

Cholochitro Diary is still small, and there are real ways to help it grow.

• Use it, and tell people. Keep a diary, write about a film that stayed with you, and send a friend the link.
• Write with us. Notes on films, Bengali titles that are missing or wrong, posters for films that have none, and where a film is streaming.
• Donate, once donations open. Nothing to give today. This page will say when there is.

Who built it