Comments From Eminent Personalities

Akira Kurosawa on Ray: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon”

Helen Goritsas on Ray: “His films come as close to complete personal expression as may be possible in cinema”

J.M.Coetzee on Apu Trilogy: “At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode - he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which - catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

Sir V.S. Naipaul on a scene in Shatranj Ke Khiladi: “Only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! Terrific things happen”

Terrence Rafferty observed in the Times article: “Some of the films in this series like the nutty fairy-tale picaresque Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), can be a little baffling for non-Indian audiences; nothing travels worse than folk humour. And some might make you feel as if you needed to know a good deal more about the history and politics of the subcontinent -- and specifically Ray's native Bengal, where most of his stories are set -- to understand the finer nuances of the characters' behavior... Ray, however, has nuances to burn: you can miss quite a few and still feel as if you know his people intimately.”