Pather Panchali

Completed in 1955, Satyajit Ray's astonishing debut, Pather Panchali (the first part of the Apu trilogy, his classic cinematic Bildungsroman) creates a wonderfully detailed picture of a Bengali village where a mother gets into debt while raising a daughter and a small son and caring for an ancient aunt without much help from her husband, a feckless dreamer, who thinks his education has placed him above physical toil.

She's irritable, worn down by work and injured pride, and though resilient, she eventually gives in and moves to the city with her family after the daughter's death and the destruction of their home in a storm. The picture is made with subtlety and imagination. Its images by first-time cameraman Subrata Mitra are as memorable as anything in the movies of Renoir, Ford, De Sica, Kurosawa and Ozu, the foreign directors Ray admired.

In 1980, the star of Mother India, Nargis Dutt, who had become an MP, attacked Ray in Parliament for misrepresenting India abroad, and in a sneering newspaper interview claimed that the popularity abroad of the Apu trilogy was 'because people there want to see India in an abject condition'.

Pather Panchali is, however, one of the greatest pictures ever made. As revealed in his book Our Films, Their Films, Ray was a charismatic figure of immense intelligence and humanity, as well as a major thinker about cinema.