Her meticulously detailed screenplays, mostly scripted from her own story, offer an insight into her growth. 36 Chowringhee Lane's script is typed in English, neatly bound with a soft cover, detailing each sequence, each shot, with bracketed directions for herself and for the cameraman.

Paromitaar Ek Din was published in the screenplay annual number of a Bangla magazine, it was that professional.

Though she chooses her technical crew with great care, she never allows the work of a brilliant technician to overwhelm or to overshadow her directorial treatment whether it is Ashok Mehta who cinematographed her first film 36, Chowringhee Lane, or whether it is Anay Goswami, a FTII graduate who did the cinematography for The Japanese Wife.

Kolkata was the setting for all her films till Paromitar El Din. With Mr. & Mrs. Iyer she moved beyond the confines of the city. For 15, Park Avenue, the story and its characters moved between Bhutan and Kolkata.

For The Japanese Wife, it was the Sundarbans with fleeting flashes of a Japanese ambience. Sen made a departure by moving outside the city with Mr. & Mrs. Iyer. She comes back to her home city in her latest film Iti Mrinalini scheduled for release at the end of this month.

Sen's journey has been shaped by her convictions and her desire to make different kinds of films. Her recent films, Mr.& Mrs. Iyer, a strong statement for secularism, and 15, Park Avenue, a moving statement on a different world inhabited by people we consider out of the mainstream, are just two examples of her versatility in terms of theme, storyline and characterization.

Before making The Japanese Wife, Sen's original plan was to make a fictionalized film on the five trekkers from Jadavpur University who died in a trekking tragedy. Then Kunal Basu narrated the storyline of his unpublished work, The Japanese Wife and she decided to make this film instead.

The subject, treatment and theme of her films offer more than a glimpse of her belief in love in its multilayered forms, and in the essential goodness that underlies humanity. The nine films she has made are – 36, Chowringhee Lane (1981), Parama (1985), Sati (1989), Yugant (1996) Parnomitaar Ek Din (2000), Mr. & Mrs. Iyer (2002) and 15, Park Avenue (2005), The Japanese Wife (2009) and Iti Mrinalini (2010).

Iti Mrinalini revolves round the life of an actress looked at in retrospect where the actress looks back at her life in the past. Iti Mrinalini is autobiographical only in the sense that it carries images and experiences Sen has gathered over the years as an actress in the film industry.

It is not, she insists, autobiographical in the literal sense. It is the first film that casts a daughter and her mother portraying the same character in two different phases of time. Konkona Sen Sharma plays the younger Mrinalini while Aparna plays the older one which she did with some reluctance because she does not really like to carry the dual burden of director and actress.

As an actress, Sen ruled mainstream Bengali cinema for more than 25 years. The director in Aparna Sen has outshone the actress.

As a director's actress, she has demonstrated her latent histrionic talents in Satyajit Ray's Samapti, her debut film when she was barely 14, followed by Tapan Sinha's Ekhoni, Inder Sen's Ashamay, Ajoy Kar's Nauka Dubi and Bish Briksha, Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Kotwaal Saab, Prabhat Roy's Swet Patharer Thala, Biresh Chatterjee's Kori Diye Kinlam and Partho Pratim Choudhury's Jadu Bangsa.

Her directorial films showcase her rare insight into human relationships. The relationships are familiar, but the perspective she places them in make them appear strikingly unusual.

Along with Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Rituparno Ghosh and Goutam Ghose, she defines a genre within Bengali cinema where the universality of emotions like love – and hate, transcend the borders of culture, language and geography.

The uniqueness of Aparna lies in her diversity within a brief oeuvre of the seven feature films and two telefilms she has directed over a span of 31 years. Every single film explores a miniature world of human relationships, each distinctively different from the other.

The Best Director Award for Iti Mrinalini at the NYIIFF in December 2010 has come after a long string of awards.

She received the Best Actress Award for her performance in Mrinal Sen's Mahaprithibi at the Moscow Film Festival. 36, Chowringhee Lane (1981) won the Grand Prix at the Manila International Film Festival in 1982 and the National Awards for Best Direction and Best Cinematography in India.

The Munich International Film Festival held a retrospective of her works as actress and director in 2002. The Calcutta International Film Festival held a retrospective of her films in the same year. Mr. & Mrs. Iyer fetched her The Best Director Award at the National Awards in 2003 while daughter Konkona Sen Sharma complemented this with the Best Actress Award for the same film.

The Japanese Wife won the Best Film Audience Award – the only award in the festival at the Hidden Gem Film Festival at Calgary in Canada last year.