Film · Around the world
1921–1992 · Indian (Bengali)
Parallel Cinema; Bengali humanist realism
Satyajit Ray was a Calcutta commercial artist who taught himself to direct, sold his wife's jewellery to finish his first film, and produced in the Apu Trilogy the work that put Indian cinema on the international map. Over thirty-six films he wrote his own scripts, drew his own storyboards and posters, and from 1961 composed his own scores. He also wrote children's fiction in Bengali, including the detective Feluda and the scientist Professor Shonku.
A poor Brahmin family in a Bengali village; a boy and his sister run through a field of kans grass to watch a train, and she dies in the monsoon (1955)
Pather Panchali — his debut, part-funded by the West Bengal government, and winner of the Best Human Document prize at Cannes in 1956.
The middle film of a trilogy: the boy moves to Benares, loses his father, and wins a scholarship to Calcutta, leaving his mother to die alone (1956)
Aparajito ('The Unvanquished') — won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1957.
A jobless would-be novelist marries a stranger at a village wedding after the bridegroom is found to be mad, and loses her in childbirth (1959)
Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) — the trilogy's close, with Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore.
A bored, clever wife in a Victorian Calcutta household falls for her husband's cousin; the film opens with her watching the street through opera glasses, and closes on a freeze-frame of outstretched hands (1964)
Charulata ('The Lonely Wife') — from Tagore's Nastanirh, and Ray's own favourite among his films.
A ruined aristocrat bankrupts himself staging one last concert in the chandeliered hall of his crumbling palace (1958)
Jalsaghar (The Music Room) — an elegy for the zamindar class, starring Chhabi Biswas.
Two absent-minded chess-obsessed noblemen in Lucknow ignore the East India Company's annexation of their kingdom in 1856 (1977)
Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players) — his only feature in Hindi/Urdu, with Richard Attenborough as General Outram.
Two banished musicians are granted three boons by the king of ghosts and sing their way to stopping a war (1969)
Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne — a children's musical fantasy from a story by his grandfather, and a huge Bengali hit.
Four city friends drive out to a forest for a holiday and are gently exposed by the women they meet, including in a memory game on the grass (1970)
Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).