The 11th Mumbai Film Festival, brighter and bigger than ever before, kicked off on Thursday evening with a glittering opening show attended by several movers and shakers of Bollywood.

But this event, organised by the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image and supported by the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Big Entertainment, certainly isn't only about glitz and glamour.

The focus is firmly on cinema, with a wide array of great films from around the world and the country in its line-up.

On Friday evening, the festival hosted the mother and daughter duo of Sharmila Tagore and Soha Ali Khan and their first film together, London-based Sangeeta Datta's wistful directorial debut, Life Goes On.

"I am really proud to be here with this film," said Tagore prior to the world premiere.

Post-screening, she pointed out that she and her daughter had shared screen space once before - in Dooriyan, when "Soha was in the cradle".

Datta, a journalist and academic who grew up in Kolkata and worked in Mumbai before moving to London, said: "From the day this idea germinated, I shared it with Sharmila Tagore. She was always on board. Soha playing her on-screen daughter has given the film an added resonance. I have known her from the time I assisted Rituparno Ghosh during the making of Antarmahal."

A sensitive, easy-flowing portrait of a Bengali immigrant family in London, the English-language film revolves around an ageing doctor whose wife dies suddenly. During the five days from the death until the funeral, the old man, respected and feted in UK's Indian community, has to come to terms with the demons lurking in his mind and heart as he seeks to reconnect with his three daughters who have over the years drifted away from him.

Soha's character, the youngest daughter, is rehearsing for a performance of King Lear when her mother dies with a 'dark' secret in her heart. Her little daughter, barely out of her teens, is pregnant with the child of her Muslim doctor-boyfriend.

The father, a victim of the partition who has deep-rooted prejudices, has no inkling. He erupts in anger and agony when he learns what his daughter has been up to behind his back. As the painful process of reconciliation between father and daughter unfolds, the parallels with King Lear and Cordelia become obvious.

Soha's interpretation of a character torn between love and filial duty is wonderfully nuanced, restrained yet powerful. "I cannot say whether this is the most complex role I've ever played," she said. "The comfort level was high - I was working with my mother, the film is in a language that I am at ease with and the situations were real."

Added the actress who has been part of critically acclaimed films like Rang De Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan: "I have done layered roles all through my career. In Life Goes On, I play myself even as I use my imagination to put myself in situations that I haven't actually been through in real life."

Life Goes On is liberally peppered with cultural and musical references drawn from the director's growing up years in Calcutta of the 1970s - Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, the Bauls and Fakirs.

The eclectic soundtrack has a significant first. Lyricist Javed Akhtar translated Tagore songs into Hindi for the film. "He came down to London for the assignment. He now wants to do more of this," said Datta, who, incidentally, sang the numbers herself both in the original and the translated form.

The afterglow of the lilting renditions lingers long after the film has ended.

(Saibal Chatterjee is a National Award-winning film critic who has covered film festivals around the world, including the ones in Cannes and Toronto)