In the three films which comprise Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the director charts the experiences of a young boy who faces great hardships as he leaves his family to attend school and mature as an adult. Ray’s films have offered a similar trajectory revealing the complexities of life in post-colonial India, a country bound by its traditions yet working to become more modern. Over the course of his career, Ray emerged with a style unlike his Bollywood contemporaries and has come to be regarded as one of the great humanist filmmakers, along with Ozu, Renoir and De Sica. Although social context is always evident in his work, the struggles of the individual carry even greater emotional power. For the past twelve years, Ray’s work has been the focus of an ongoing restoration project headed by the Academy Film Archive and the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection at University of California, Santa Cruz.