alr

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.

Part of film series

Read more

Humanist Masterworks:
The Films of Satyajit Ray

Other film series with this film

Read more

Five Directors (Part II)

Read more

Sharmila Tagore and Soha Ali Khan: Two Generations in Indian Cinema

Read more

From the collection – Satyajit Ray

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès

Read more

Activism and Post-Activism. Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022

Read more

Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue