Tasked with creating illustrations for a new edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali, Ray was so captivated by the story of the Roy family―father Harihar, mother Sarbajaya, daughter Durga, baby brother Apu, and widowed aunt Indir― that he became a filmmaker in order to adapt it. The Roys share a tumbledown, ancestral home on the rural outskirts of Calcutta (Kolkata), where a distant train’s smoke on the horizon offers a faint trace of the urban world. A timeless family saga, Pather Panchali was shot over three years and is still considered to be one of cinema’s greatest debuts.

Director: Satyajit Ray. Cast: Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Banerjee. 1955. 115 minutes. India. B&W. Bengali. DCP. Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project through a collaboration of the Academy Film Archive, the Merchant-Ivory Foundation, the FilmFoundation, and the Packard Humanities Institute.

All film screenings of Satyajit Ray: 1955–1968 are available here.