Veteran actress Moushumi Chatterjee has received the lifetime achievement award, while actor Ashish Vidyarthi was honoured for his contribution to Indian Cinema at the 80th Bengal Film Journalists' Association (BFJA) awards.
A galaxy of seasoned directors - Kaushik Ganguly ("Cinemawala" - 2016), Shiboprasad Mukherjee-Nandita Roy ("Belaseshe" - 2015), Aniruddha Roychowdhury ("Buno Haans" 2014), Srijit Mukherjee ("Rajkahini" - 2015) and Goutam Ghosh ("Sankhachil" - 2015) - were honoured with best direction trophies for their works at a function here last night.
"With the BFJA award not taking place in the past couple of years we included all the representative works during the time (2014-16)," a BFJA spokesman said promising that the award will be an annual occasion from now on.The BFJA, the oldest association of film scribes in the country was founded in 1937.
Bengali film superstar
Prosenjit Chatterjee was given the best actor award for his role in "Sankhachil", while Rituparna Sengupta was given the best actress crown for her role in "Rajkahini" along with Paoli Dam for "Natoker Moto" (2015).
Prosenjit shared the honour with actor Chiranjeet Chakraborty for "Chotushkone".
Rituparna said, "I feel honoured to be chosen by BFJA, which has such an illustrious past. This happens to be my 4th BFJA award. Two of the past three awards were for films by Tarun Majumder and Rituparno Ghosh. So, I dedicate this fourth award to late Ritu da."
Music composers Anupam Roy, Kabir Suman, Neel Dutta were awarded for their works in "Zulfiqar" (2016), "Jaatishwar" (2014), "Byomkesh Bakshi" (2016) respectively.
Kaushik Ganguly, Aniruddha (who was also felicitated for "Pink" getting the National award) were among those present at the ceremony.