DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (SATYAJIT RAY, 1970)
ARANYER DIN RATRI
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
7:00 PM
Friday 01 May
11:30 AM
Saturday 09 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
7:00 PM
Friday 08 May
11:15 AM
Sunday 17 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 116 minutes
Country: India
Language: Bengali with English subtitles
Cast: Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Soumitra Chatterjee, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Rabi Ghosh
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
7:00 PM
Friday 01 May
11:30 AM
Saturday 09 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
7:00 PM
Friday 08 May
11:15 AM
Sunday 17 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 116 minutes
Country: India
Language: Bengali with English subtitles
Cast: Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Soumitra Chatterjee, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Rabi Ghosh
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘To explain why Days and Nights in the Forest is a masterpiece is a bit like explaining why flowers are beautiful: the film’s glories are so natural and self-evident that describing them feels redundant.’ – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
Four young middle-class men from Kolkata venture north-west for a weekend in the forests of neighbouring state Jharkhand, hoping to find respite from their careers and relationships at home. The arrogance and prejudices of these urbanites are tested, however, by their encounters with the people they meet in the forest. Amid a weekend of conversations in which caste, gender and romance are never far from the surface, life emerges in all its depth.
Featuring performances brimming with charm and wit – particularly from Satyajit Ray regulars Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore – that reveal matters of heart and mind, this tale of conflicting virtues has long been somewhat overshadowed by some of its director’s more celebrated works. Yet even amid its more leisurely and seemingly uneventful moments, Ray’s virtuosic flair shines through as brightly as ever.
INTRODUCTORY SPEAKERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED CLOSER TO THE FESTIVAL.
Presented in partnership with the Consulate General of India, Melbourne, Consulate General of India, Sydney and the Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, Sydney.
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‘To explain why Days and Nights in the Forest is a masterpiece is a bit like explaining why flowers are beautiful: the film’s glories are so natural and self-evident that describing them feels redundant.’ – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
Four young middle-class men from Kolkata venture north-west for a weekend in the forests of neighbouring state Jharkhand, hoping to find respite from their careers and relationships at home. The arrogance and prejudices of these urbanites are tested, however, by their encounters with the people they meet in the forest. Amid a weekend of conversations in which caste, gender and romance are never far from the surface, life emerges in all its depth.
Featuring performances brimming with charm and wit – particularly from Satyajit Ray regulars Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore – that reveal matters of heart and mind, this tale of conflicting virtues has long been somewhat overshadowed by some of its director’s more celebrated works. Yet even amid its more leisurely and seemingly uneventful moments, Ray’s virtuosic flair shines through as brightly as ever.
INTRODUCTORY SPEAKERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED CLOSER TO THE FESTIVAL.
Presented in partnership with the Consulate General of India, Melbourne, Consulate General of India, Sydney and the Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, Sydney.
FILM NOTES
By Dr Helen Goritsas
By Dr Helen Goritsas
Dr Helen Goritsas is a filmmaker and screen production lecturer. Best Interactive Media winner for Lightwell, associate producer of Alex and Eve, festival director and film scholar.
Days and Nights in the Forest, directed by Satyajit Ray and based on Sunil Gangopadhyay’s celebrated novel, is a modern film in the most inwardly radical sense. It refuses spectacle and moral exhibitionism, and instead allows us to see how character gives itself away in gesture, rhythm, and tone. Ray takes us into the tribal forests of Palamau with unsentimental precision. Heat presses down. Dust rises in thin veils. The landscape is not “beautiful” in any easy sense. Instead, it is framed as rough, indifferent, and self-contained. He gives it the weight of a presence. Soumendu Roy’s cinematography captures this with understated clarity.
Four bachelors, Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh), set out on a short road trip, assuming that, for a little while, nothing will be asked of them. The film begins as if freedom were simply a matter of leaving Calcutta behind. Their banter carries the ease of long familiarity, full of quick jokes and barbed little moments disguised as humour. It is the casual confidence of men who assume the world will make room for them. Ray allows the trip its surface pleasure because he recognises how easily pleasure can conceal.
The forest is steady and withholding, and it quietly unsettles what the men have assumed they can take for granted. Gradually, the trip feels less like a getaway and more like an encounter. Under its gaze, their practised ease begins to fray. Jokes turn a shade too loud. Laughter grows a touch too eager. They meet a stillness that does not reassure or answer. Consequences seem far away, like the city itself, receding in the rear window.
Comfort takes shape in the rush of talk and appetite, and that rhythm can feel harmless. Questions go unasked, not out of malice but out of habit. The holiday glow does not excuse them. It reveals them. It lets the men keep up the performance, and in keeping it up, disclose themselves.
Those terms sharpen when they reach Palamau and head for the Kechki Forest Rest House. The rooms are not part of the holiday. They are secured through a bribe. One of the men exclaims, ‘Thank God for corruption.’ Ray does not underline the ugliness of the line. He lets it hang in the air, gathering in the caretaker’s smile and anxious posture. Hospitality becomes negotiation. The bungalow becomes the film’s decisive space because it makes power visible without raising its voice. The music refuses grand emphasis. Ray composed it himself and it feels like an extension of his camera’s restraint.
The men sprawl on the verandah. Camaraderie begins to read as ownership, and ownership begins to read as the natural order of things. The caretaker, by contrast, is held at the edges of the frame. He hovers in doorways and corners. He is never permitted the comfort of taking up space. His movements are small and practised, a body trained to anticipate and reassure before a request has even been spoken. In that choreography of service, Ray makes visible what the men’s freedom takes for granted.
Ray favours medium shots and ensemble framings. He keeps the characters in relation so entitlement reads as collective rather than merely personal. Power is staged through composition and blocking. It is there in who claims the centre, and who is assigned to the margins. Doorways and verandahs do as much work as dialogue. For the visitors, corruption registers as convenience. For the caretaker, it registers as coercion disguised as choice.
Within this staging, their behaviour comes sharply into focus. Charm hardens into entitlement. Politeness becomes retreat. Masculinity grows quick and brittle. Comedy works as deflection, waving away responsibility and reducing harm to just a bit of fun.
Ray grounds this in small exchanges where misunderstanding tilts into humiliation and suspicion settles on the poor as if it belongs there. The forest becomes a sanctioned zone where city rules loosen and confidence grows louder. Ray keeps returning the frame to the edges, to labour and service. Privilege is most visible when it is relaxed, when it assumes it will not be challenged, and when it mistakes that assumption for freedom.
Then the atmosphere shifts with the women’s arrival. Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), Jaya (Kaberi Bose), and Duli (Simi Garewal) are not offered as trophies. With them, the men’s easy confidence begins to jar. Ray does not present the women as diversion or reward. He lets their presence press on the men’s sense of permission. There is something Renoir-like in this, closer to A Day in the Country (1936), where warmth and irony make leisure feel less innocent than it first appears. There is something Chekhovian too. Meaning gathers without announcement. A silence can carry more than any declaration.
Aparna refuses to play along. She listens with patience. She pauses without apology. She lets the moment stand, and does not make it easier for them. The charge that forms, comes from her steadiness, from a gaze that is neither impressed nor unkind, only clear. Jaya is warm, gentle, and grieving. Duli brings a harder realism that makes class and desire legible. Escape begins to look like bargaining. Nothing is underlined, and nothing is announced as a lesson. The holiday sharpens into focus as a social arrangement, and what the men have been calling freedom begins to look, more clearly, like permission.
Even leisure becomes a test. A memory game begins in lightness, then quietly reveals its stakes. Names become currency. Knowledge is traded as status. Charm reaches for control when being liked is no longer enough. Defensiveness flickers. Humour returns in a different key. Confidence thins into embarrassment.
In the end, Days and Nights in the Forest does not so much resolve as return us, with measured restraint, to the same men with their self-myths rubbed raw. What the forest exposes is not only their privilege, but the fragility beneath their confidence and swagger. It shows how bravado stands in for feeling and how the comfort of the group shields a man from himself. The film ends on an unsettled tone, where leisure can no longer dull what has been exposed and the smallest discomfort becomes the only honest souvenir.
Four bachelors, Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh), set out on a short road trip, assuming that, for a little while, nothing will be asked of them. The film begins as if freedom were simply a matter of leaving Calcutta behind. Their banter carries the ease of long familiarity, full of quick jokes and barbed little moments disguised as humour. It is the casual confidence of men who assume the world will make room for them. Ray allows the trip its surface pleasure because he recognises how easily pleasure can conceal.
The forest is steady and withholding, and it quietly unsettles what the men have assumed they can take for granted. Gradually, the trip feels less like a getaway and more like an encounter. Under its gaze, their practised ease begins to fray. Jokes turn a shade too loud. Laughter grows a touch too eager. They meet a stillness that does not reassure or answer. Consequences seem far away, like the city itself, receding in the rear window.
Comfort takes shape in the rush of talk and appetite, and that rhythm can feel harmless. Questions go unasked, not out of malice but out of habit. The holiday glow does not excuse them. It reveals them. It lets the men keep up the performance, and in keeping it up, disclose themselves.
Those terms sharpen when they reach Palamau and head for the Kechki Forest Rest House. The rooms are not part of the holiday. They are secured through a bribe. One of the men exclaims, ‘Thank God for corruption.’ Ray does not underline the ugliness of the line. He lets it hang in the air, gathering in the caretaker’s smile and anxious posture. Hospitality becomes negotiation. The bungalow becomes the film’s decisive space because it makes power visible without raising its voice. The music refuses grand emphasis. Ray composed it himself and it feels like an extension of his camera’s restraint.
The men sprawl on the verandah. Camaraderie begins to read as ownership, and ownership begins to read as the natural order of things. The caretaker, by contrast, is held at the edges of the frame. He hovers in doorways and corners. He is never permitted the comfort of taking up space. His movements are small and practised, a body trained to anticipate and reassure before a request has even been spoken. In that choreography of service, Ray makes visible what the men’s freedom takes for granted.
Ray favours medium shots and ensemble framings. He keeps the characters in relation so entitlement reads as collective rather than merely personal. Power is staged through composition and blocking. It is there in who claims the centre, and who is assigned to the margins. Doorways and verandahs do as much work as dialogue. For the visitors, corruption registers as convenience. For the caretaker, it registers as coercion disguised as choice.
Within this staging, their behaviour comes sharply into focus. Charm hardens into entitlement. Politeness becomes retreat. Masculinity grows quick and brittle. Comedy works as deflection, waving away responsibility and reducing harm to just a bit of fun.
Ray grounds this in small exchanges where misunderstanding tilts into humiliation and suspicion settles on the poor as if it belongs there. The forest becomes a sanctioned zone where city rules loosen and confidence grows louder. Ray keeps returning the frame to the edges, to labour and service. Privilege is most visible when it is relaxed, when it assumes it will not be challenged, and when it mistakes that assumption for freedom.
Then the atmosphere shifts with the women’s arrival. Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), Jaya (Kaberi Bose), and Duli (Simi Garewal) are not offered as trophies. With them, the men’s easy confidence begins to jar. Ray does not present the women as diversion or reward. He lets their presence press on the men’s sense of permission. There is something Renoir-like in this, closer to A Day in the Country (1936), where warmth and irony make leisure feel less innocent than it first appears. There is something Chekhovian too. Meaning gathers without announcement. A silence can carry more than any declaration.
Aparna refuses to play along. She listens with patience. She pauses without apology. She lets the moment stand, and does not make it easier for them. The charge that forms, comes from her steadiness, from a gaze that is neither impressed nor unkind, only clear. Jaya is warm, gentle, and grieving. Duli brings a harder realism that makes class and desire legible. Escape begins to look like bargaining. Nothing is underlined, and nothing is announced as a lesson. The holiday sharpens into focus as a social arrangement, and what the men have been calling freedom begins to look, more clearly, like permission.
Even leisure becomes a test. A memory game begins in lightness, then quietly reveals its stakes. Names become currency. Knowledge is traded as status. Charm reaches for control when being liked is no longer enough. Defensiveness flickers. Humour returns in a different key. Confidence thins into embarrassment.
In the end, Days and Nights in the Forest does not so much resolve as return us, with measured restraint, to the same men with their self-myths rubbed raw. What the forest exposes is not only their privilege, but the fragility beneath their confidence and swagger. It shows how bravado stands in for feeling and how the comfort of the group shields a man from himself. The film ends on an unsettled tone, where leisure can no longer dull what has been exposed and the smallest discomfort becomes the only honest souvenir.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Film Heritage Foundation, India
Restored in 4K in 2025 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Film Heritage Foundation in collaboration with Janus Films - The Criterion Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original camera and sound negatives provided by Purnima Dutta and the magnetic track preserved by The BFI National Archive. Funding provided by Golden Globe Foundation. Special thanks to Wes Anderson and Sandip Ray.
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Director: Satyajit Ray; Production Company: Priya Films; Producer: Asim Dutta, Nepal Dutta; Script: Satyajit Ray; based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay; Photography: Soumendu Roy; Editor: Dulal Dutta; Production Design: Bansi Chandragupta; Costume Design: Haru Das; Music: Satyajit Ray // Cast: Sharmila Tagore (Aparna), Kaberi Bose (Jaya), Simi Garewal (Duli), Soumitra Chatterjee (Ashim), Subhendu Chatterjee (Sanjoy), Rabi Ghosh (Shekhar), Samit Bhanja (Hari).
India | 1970 | 116 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Bengali with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
Restored in 4K in 2025 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Film Heritage Foundation in collaboration with Janus Films - The Criterion Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original camera and sound negatives provided by Purnima Dutta and the magnetic track preserved by The BFI National Archive. Funding provided by Golden Globe Foundation. Special thanks to Wes Anderson and Sandip Ray.
Director: Satyajit Ray; Production Company: Priya Films; Producer: Asim Dutta, Nepal Dutta; Script: Satyajit Ray; based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay; Photography: Soumendu Roy; Editor: Dulal Dutta; Production Design: Bansi Chandragupta; Costume Design: Haru Das; Music: Satyajit Ray // Cast: Sharmila Tagore (Aparna), Kaberi Bose (Jaya), Simi Garewal (Duli), Soumitra Chatterjee (Ashim), Subhendu Chatterjee (Sanjoy), Rabi Ghosh (Shekhar), Samit Bhanja (Hari).
India | 1970 | 116 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Bengali with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+