His mother (the marvellous Karuna Bannerjee) is mired in daily tasks – looking after Apu and his sister Durga, struggling with the demands of her ageing sister-in-law and her impractical husband. 'Pather Panchali' is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 2h 5min. It has a very high rating on IMDb: 8.3 stars out of 10. His father, a priest lost in dreams of writing plays and poetry, is so weak he won't even ask his employer for his back-pay. 'Pather Panchali' drama movie produced in India and released in 1955. A small boy, Apu (Subir Bannergee), is living with his impoverished Brahmin family in rural west Bengal. The story seems superficially insubstantial. Certainly director Satyajit Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra showed a miraculous gift for lighting scenes, coaxing intimate and utterly convincing performances from children and other non-professional actors, and allowing narrative to grow seamlessly – just as happened in the best of the films by Ray's western mentor, Jean Renoir. Perhaps this inexperience gave everyone involved the freedom to create something new. On the first day of the shoot, the director had never directed, the cameraman had never shot a scene, the children in the leading roles hadn't been tested and the soundtrack was composed by a then obscure sitarist (the great Ravi Shankar). I t was the birth of a cinema, certainly the birth of a new kind of Indian cinema. Shot from 1953 to 1955-under conditions of almost inhuman difficulty-by a 30-year-old newcomer working in a film industry that was primitive both technically and artistically, 'Pather.
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