Days and Nights in the Forest
(Aranyer Din Ratri)

Screening on Film

Directed by Satyajit Ray.
With Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja.
India, 1970, 35mm, black & white, 115 min.
Bengali with English subtitles.

Four men from Calcutta leave their urban world behind for a brief sojourn in the forests of Palamu. With no formal plans for lodging, the men coerce and cajole the local villagers into providing accommodations for them. As the excursion continues, they experience a series of mishaps which reveal their own naïveté about life outside the comfortable city environs. With shades of Renoir’s A Day in the Country, Ray’s light surface is penetrated by a sharp critique of imperialism and its effects on contemporary Indian life.