Reading auteurship and subregional subjectivities in the Sambalpuri cinema of Sabyasachi Mohapatra

The article situates the corpus of Sambalpuri films by Sabyasachi Mohapatra within western Odisha’s broader sociocultural, political and literary imaginings to examine its textual and contextual configurations. It interrogates the filmic texts at the intersections of tradition and modernity, literary and cinematic, to identify distinct intertextual motifs, visual aesthetics and figurations employed in the narratives and disseminates the defining cultural circuits of Sambalpuri films. The article also discusses Sambalpuri cinema as a site of study to address questions on regional and subregional identities through their digital inter-mediations. It examines how Sambalpuri cinema challenges a region’s conventional imaginations to extend Odisha’s cinematic public sphere while offering a fresh assessment of regional auteurship. It incorporates excerpts from personal interviews and contemporary media-archival materials to comment on the subregional subjectivities of Sambalpuri cinema as an emergent film culture.