Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road) (1955)
Script, Direction: Satyajit Ray
Running time: 126 minutes
Satyajit’s Ray’s debut film put India on the world map of cinema. An adaptation from Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s novel of the same name, Ray has created a black and white classic, which with its two sequels form the Apu Trilogy . It centres around the impoverished family of Harihar, a Brahmin who has a hard time fending for his family consisting of his wife, aged sister Indir, and his two little children Durga and Apu. Harihar nurses literary ambitions but is forced to go to the city to earn money as a priest, leaving his wife Sarbojaya to care for the rest. Sarbojaya has to work in neighbourhood households to make both ends meet She is humiliated by the daughter’s stealing fruit from their yard. Durga is closely linked to her grand aunt and Apu. In the father’s absence, the house is blown down in the monsoon rainstorm. What is far worse: Durga and the elderly aunt die. Harihar returns to a despondent family. His life is totally changed. They are forced to leave for the city in search of a new life.
The story might appear commonplace but the way Ray treats it is what makes it great. It is a tale of children growing up, of relationships among family members of the old and the new, of joy and sorrow in the midst of poverty and illness, of the relationships between the human and the natural world. It is a deeply compassionate humanist work, rendered in evocative black and white, with the haunting music provided by the then upcoming Sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar. It shows the social changes in an Indian village at the beginning of industrialization. Much of the film is seen through the eyes of children, especially Apu. Striking scenes: the children seeing a train for the first time, the strong monsoon rain, Indir’s death that first exposes Durga and Apu to the reality of death, and of course the scene where Harihar discovers the truth of his daughter’s death. The film won seven international awards in a year including the Vatican Award. Pather Panchali has not lost its appeal even after six decades of its making.
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Children of Heaven (1999 )
Screenplay & Director: Majid Majidi
Majidi’s Children of Heaven is regarded as a classic children’s movie which will haunt moviegoers by its simplicity and utter realism of presentation. It is about a pair of working class children living in a village near Teheran. Their father is an impoverished labourer and the mother an invalid. Ali takes his sister Zahara’s broken pink shoes to the cobbler on his way to the market, but afterwards loses them while he is in the grocer’s shop. A blind rag picker unknowingly takes them. Ali knows that his father won’t forgive him for the negligence. He enters into a secret pact with his sister to hide the fact from his father, offering her his sneakers which they have to share. She wears the loose fitting sneakers in the morning and Ali attends the afternoon classes when she returns home. But it often lands Ali in trouble for being late. One day Zahara notices one of her classmates wearing her lost shoes, and the brother and sister spy on her only to find that her rag picker father is blind and had not stolen the shoes knowingly. They leave it at that. Ali helps his father find work as a gardener and takes advantage of his father’s good mood to suggest that Zahara could use a pair of new shoes. The father offers to buy new pairs for both the children. But he is hurt in an accident.
Ali gets an opportunity when there is an interschool marathon announced. The third prize is a pair of shoes and a free vacation trip. Ali is a good runner and joins the race, trying to come out third. But towards the last lap he trips and falls and tries to keep his position with a desperate dash that lands him first on the finishing line. Amid the cheers of the crows, he is weeping. He returns home with his badly bruised feet and saddened spirits. Ali’s father comes home with two pairs of shoes.
Majidi’s story haunts us with convincing portraits love in the midst of poverty and suffering and the pangs of growing up. The movie may redraw our image of Iran and provide the insight that human beings and their problems are the same everywhere.
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