In an attempt to have a better life with no sufferings, a young poor priest and poet, who lives with his family in Bengal, where he can't earn the money needed for his family, so he moves into living in the city to find work, the thing that challenges him.
It is a pastoral poem dappled with the play of brilliant images and strong, dark feelings, a luminous revelation of Indian life in language that all the world can understand.
Incredibly, Ray had never directed a scene before Pather Panchali, Mitra had never shot one, and the children who were cast hadn't even been tested. Just how this team of novices fashioned one of cinema's enduring classics is a miraculous mystery.
Fresh as a daisy after all these years, Satyajit Ray's 1955 spellbinder comes underpinned by a tumultuous Ravi Shankar sitar and paints a ground's-eye portrait of life in an impoverished Bengali village.
Extremely touching in its simplicity, emotional range and visual beauty, it's no wonder it became the first Indian film to achieve widespread international acclaim and establish Ray as a master filmmaker.
