Ritoban Roy Burman

Ritoban Roy Burman is a Kolkata-born, London-based writer-director. He holds an MFA in Directing Fiction from the National Film and Television School, where his graduation film RICE, a supernatural horror rooted in the colonial legacy of the Bengal Famine, was completed in 2025.

Before the NFTS he spent a decade in the Indian industry, including staff writing on Netflix's Mai and post-production on Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple. His work returns to one question: how ordinary, well-meaning people become complicit in harm, not through cruelty, but through the performance of goodness.

His films keep returning to ghosts. In the Bengal he grew up in, the dead were never far. They lived in ponds and tamarind trees, in stories told after dinner, in warnings about walking alone at dusk. Every ghost had once been a person, and most had been wronged. That is what holds him. A ghost is a culture's way of keeping account: the person a household agreed to forget, refusing the agreement. He is less interested in whether ghosts exist than in what they know.

Tuktuki has screened at the Kolkata International Film Festival, the London Indian Film Festival, and Nefiltravanae Kino, the Belarusian festival now held in exile. Singing is for Sissies screened at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival. RICE is currently beginning its festival run.

He is developing his first feature, the Bengali-language horror Tuktuki (Our Own People): after a young domestic worker dies in a middle-class Kolkata household, the family that called her one of their own discovers she has not left.