19 restored films to be held in two cities.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Bengali cinema legend Satyajit Ray’s films will come to Santa Monica, California, for a gala film festival next month.
“Satyajit Ray Restored” begins September 12th at the Aero Theater; before that, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles will be screening the “Apu Trilogy” – 1995’s Pather Panchali (“Song of the Little Road”), 1956’s Aparajito (“The Unvanquished”), and 1959’s Apu Sansar (“The World of Apu”).
The “Satyajit Ray Restored” festival is being held by the American Cinematheque, where a total of 19 films directed by Ray will be exhibited. The earlier event is being hosted by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which is the “academy” responsible for the annual Academy Awards, widely considered the highest honor in the film industry (an award which Ray won in his lifetime, making him one of the few Indians to have done so).
Ray is widely considered by filmmakers and scholars around the world as the greatest Indian film director ever. His “Apu Trilogy” is considered a masterpiece of cinema, while many of his other films – such as Jalsaghar (“The Music Room”) (1958), Mahanagar (“The Big City”) (1963), and Charulata (1964) have been picked up by the prestigious Criterion Collection label for restoration and home video distribution in the US for their aesthetic and historical significance to the art of filmmaking.
Born in Bengal in 1921, Ray began his filmmaking career in 1955 with Pather Panchali, the first film of what would become the “Apu Trilogy.” After getting a loan from the Bengal government and scraping together the rest of the funds, the film was made on a shoestring budget but became an incredible worldwide success, garnering international acclaim for Ray and bringing attention to India’s then-fledgling film industries.
Over the years, he made films mainly in Bengali, although he dabbled in Hindi cinema from time to time – in 1977, he directed Shatranj ke Khiladi (“The Chess Players”), which starred Amitabh Bachchan and Shabana Azmi and won three Filmfare awards. In 1992, just about a month before he passed away, he received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, “in recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world.”
This is not the first celebration of Satyajit Ray to be taking place in 2013. Earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, the biggest and most celebrated film festival in the world, Ray’s film Charulata was screened in a beautifully restored print in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema. Based on a story by famed poet Rabindranath Tagore, it tells the story of a lonely Bengali housewife who dreams of love that her husband never shows her. Ray himself considered it his “most flawless film.”
The screenings in California next month will be a gala event, attended by such notable actresses as Sharmila Tagore and Aparna Sen. University of California Santa Cruz professor Dilip Basu, founding director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, will also be in attendance.
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