| Neecha Nagar | |
|---|---|
 Poster | |
| Directed by | Chetan Anand |
| Written by | Khwaja Ahmad Abbas |
| Story by | Hayatullah Ansari |
| Produced by | Rashid Anwar A. Halim |
| Starring | Rafiq Anwar Uma Anand Kamini Kaushal Rafi Peer Hamid Butt Zohra Sehgal |
| Cinematography | Bidyapati Ghosh |
| Music by | Ravi Shankar |
Production company | India Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 122 minutes |
| Country | India |
| Language | Hindi |
Neecha Nagar (transl. Lowly City) is a 1946 Indian Hindi-language film, directed by Chetan Anand, written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Hayatullah Ansari, and produced by Rashid Anwar and A. Halim. It was a pioneering effort in social realism in Indian cinema and paved the way for many such parallel cinema films by other directors, many of them also written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. It starred Chetan Anand's wife Uma Anand, with Rafiq Anwar, Kamini Kaushal, Murad, Rafi Peer, Hamid Butt, and Zohra Sehgal. Neecha Nagar (Lowly City) was a Hindi film adaptation in an Indian setting of Russian writer Maxim Gorky's 1902 play The Lower Depths.
Neecha Nagar became the first Indian film to gain recognition at the Cannes Film Festival, after it shared the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (Best Film) award at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946 with eleven of the eighteen entered feature films.[2] It is the only Indian film to be ever awarded a Palme d'Or.[3] Ironically, the film was never released in India.[4] However the film was telecasted on Doordarshan, (India's national broadcaster) in 1980s.
- ^ "Celebrating Zohra Segal". Google.com. 29 September 2020. Retrieved 29 September 2020.
- ^ Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (1939–54)
- ^ "Revisiting Neecha Nagar, The Only Indian Film to Win Palme D'Or at Cannes". The Quint. 16 July 2021. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
- ^ "Everything You Need to Know About Neecha Nagar - 1st Indian Movie to Make It to Cannes in 1946". India Times. 17 May 2016.