Director Satyajit Ray had no thought of making a sequel to Pather Panchali until the rapturous reception the film received, both critically and financially. Aparajito (The Unvanquished) would become the second in the Apu Trilogy, followed by Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959. All three are in the Bengali language with subtitles.

Critic Roger Ebert would later say of the trilogy, “The three films … swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India, whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances. Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture.”

Indeed, Aparajito itself would win the Golden Lion of St. Mark, the Cinema Nuovo Award and the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1957; the FIPRESCI Award at the London Film Festival in 1957; the Best Film and Best Direction awards as well as the International Critics Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1958; the Golden Laurel for Best Foreign Film of 1958-59; the Selznik Golden Laurel at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1960; and the Bodil Award for Best Non-European Film of the Year by the Danish Film Critics Association in 1967.

Ray went back to the books of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay on which Pather Panchali was based; Aparajito is based on the last section of the first book and the beginning of the second.

The story picks up from the end of Pather Panchali. Apu’s family have moved from their ancestral home in Boral, the village outside Calcutta where the first film was set, to Benares (now Varanasi, a holy city to the Hindus with more than 2,000 temples and shrines). Apu’s father, Harihar, continues working as a priest, ministering to the many faithful who come to Benares to pray and bathe in the Ganges river until he unexpectedly dies of a fever. Apu’s carefree life of running around the ghats comes to an abrupt end, and his mother, Sarbajaya, is forced to work as a servant until a family relation helps them return to rural Bengal and settle in the village of Mansapota. Sarbajaya wants Apu to be a priest like his father, but Apu wants to go to school. She reluctantly permits him to do so, and Apu turns out to be a stellar student – so much so that his teacher offers him a scholarship to study in Calcutta. Again, Sarbajaya has misgivings but gives Apu some of her meager savings to allow him to make the move. In the manner of all heedless youth, Apu is seduced by the big city and rarely comes back to visit, leaving his mother alone and neglected.

Ray’s characters are ordinary folk, with no outstanding talents or lucky breaks in their lives. His neo-realistic style of filmmaking shows their simple existence, but also seeks to illuminate their struggles, their dreams and their sorrows in poetic ways, focusing on the aggregation of small moments to reveal truths about human behavior. He does not preach; there are no messages in his movies. Despite a locale and language which is unfamiliar to many, his audiences recognize that the human condition is universal. The Indian quality of stoicism in the face of fate, the acceptance of the hand dealt, resonates with them as Ray reveals his characters with profound compassion.

The whole trilogy was filmed by Subrata Mitra, who started out as a 21-year-old still photographer whom Ray had hired for Pather Panchali because he didn’t have money to hire a professional cinematographer. That Mitra could achieve the lyrical visuals of the films with a 16 mm camera is remarkable – in this film he illuminates the panorama of the ghats along the Ganges in the opening scenes, the wooded path trudged by a lonely figure, the train in the distance that symbolizes different meanings to different characters, the jump cut to a sudden flight of birds after a death.

One scene, in which a character sees fireflies in the distance before a crucial event occurs, could not be captured even by the fastest film stock. In his book “My Years with Apu,” Ray recounts how they fixed the problem. “We chose the toughest members of our crew, had them dressed up in black shirt and trousers and let each of them carry a flashlight bulb and a length of wire and a battery. The bulbs were held aloft in their right hands while they illustrated the swirling movements of fireflies in a dance, alternately connecting and disconnecting the wire to the bulbs.”

Mitra invented “bounce lighting” to simulate the outdoors in scenes that were shot in a studio. In the Encyclopedia of Cinematographers, Mitra’s innovation is explained. “The fear of monsoon rain had forced the art director, Bansi Chandragupta, to abandon the original plan to build the inner courtyard of a typical Benares house in the open and the set was built inside a studio in Calcutta. Mitra recalls arguing in vain with both Chandragupta and Ray about the impossibilities of simulating shadowless diffused skylight. But this led him to innovate what became subsequently his most important tool – bounce lighting. Mitra placed a framed painter white cloth over the set resembling a patch of sky and arranged studio lights below to bounce off the fake sky.”

Ray further explained in an interview with Film Comment in 1968, “ … the Benares house where Apu lives is a studio set. We had a cloth stretched overhead, you see, for the light from above. Our lighting gives you a kind of dark eye-socket effect, but it doesn’t matter really, because it’s not a question of beautifying everybody. Ultimately it pays off, because you are sticking to a realistic mood.”

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times (who panned Pather Panchali) gave the film a glowing review, particularly noting the cinematography. “Mr. Ray’s remarkable camera catches beauty in so many things, from the softness of a mother’s sad expression to the silhouette of a distant train, that innuendos take up the slack of drama. Hindu music and expressive natural sounds complete the stimulation of the senses in this strange, sad, evocative film.”

In Aparajito, Ray did work with a few professional actors, in particular Kanu Banerjee who plays Apu’s father and Karuna Banerjee (no relation) who plays the mother. But the two boys who play the child Apu and the adolescent Apu had never acted before, and neither had many in the supporting cast. In the same interview, Ray explained his technique of getting realistic performances from amateur actors with the example of a scene in which an old man consoles Apu after a tragedy. “Now, that old man was a complete amateur . . . We found him in Benares on the grass. He had never seen a film because he was living a retired life in Benares for thirty years . . . He seemed to be the right type, so we went up to him – we hadn’t cast that particular part yet – and I asked him whether he would be willing to act in the film. Immediately he said yes, why not? And then in this scene, the only scene where he needed to speak for a certain length of time – I couldn’t possibly cut because it needed to be a single set-up all the way through to suggest that kind of gloom and, you know, hopelessness. I split up the dialogue into parts; between sentences he was asked to smoke, just take a pull at the hookah. Then stop for a certain length of time, then I would say, go on. Well, he knew where to smoke, where to take a pull at the hookah, but he didn’t know where to resume speaking, and that I would dictate.”

At a 2002 festival of Ray’s films held at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, Martin Scorsese spoke about the influence of Ray’s films on his career. “Film is an art that can bring cultural awakenings and new waves of life to people who have never seen such cultures before,” he said. “I remember going to see my first Ray film in New York at 15 and witnessing a whole new world presented visually before my eyes. Without a doubt, in Ray’s films, the line between poetry and cinema dissolved.”

He continued in an interview after the event, “His characters were both distinct and tragic, portraying issues which were still unfolding historically around him. His work is something that I personally cannot wait to show my own daughter, once she is old enough to understand. In the end, I believe that such work must be preserved so that the children of the future can see what Ray was visually able to represent.”

After Ray won the Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy, a restoration project was started to preserve many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy. Original negatives of several films were destroyed by a nitrate fire in a London lab in 1993, and whatever could be salvaged was stored, then sent to the Academy Film Archive in 2013. Then L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna stepped in. The brittle film had to be rehydrated in a special solution. Restorers then spent almost a thousand hours rebuilding the perforations and cleaning the film. Duplicate negatives were sourced through Janus Films, the Academy, the Harvard Film Archive and the British Film Institute to find replacements for missing sections.

The restoration was funded in part by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. An excellent version is available to view on HBO Max and Kanopy.