India, Sept. 6 -- Vivek Agnihotri's The Bengal Files takes its own time to get to the point. In an age when films rarely breach the three-hour mark, Vivek delivers a three-hour 20-minute runtime. Some might rue this, but cinema has never truly been bound by time. Sometimes, technical aspects can be ignored when the subject is something that has never been explored by any filmmaker before, especially in the sensitive times we live in today.

A cinematic retelling of the horrific Direct Action Day in Kolkata (then Calcutta) in 1946, the story unfolds through the perspectives of two characters, Shiv Pandit (Darshan Kumaar) and Bharati Banerjee (Pallavi Joshi). Both are haunted by ghosts of the past: one who lost everything in the Kolkata rio...