Adapted from Sunil Gangopadhyay’s celebrated 1968 novel, Days and Nights in the Forest is one of director Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievements, a modern search for connection that conjures the timeless resonance of a folktale. Filled with some of Ray’s most indelible characterizations and lavish images (shot by longtime cinematographer Soumendu Roy), the film touches on masculine vulnerabilities and Indian class divisions with the graceful complexity of a master at his peak.

Desperate to flee Calcutta’s rat race, four friends—Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh)—drive to Palamu, one of India’s rural “tribal lands,” where they bribe a watchman into letting them stay at a sylvan guesthouse. Despite vowing to get away from it all, the crew soon mixes with the locals, including a woodland family: the soulful yet mischievous Aparna takes to the overconfident Ashim, while her widowed sister-in-law Jaya grows closer to the bookish Sanjoy. At the same time, Hari, fresh off a break-up, woos a Santal girl named Duli; and Shekhar, despite his own penchant for gambling, tries to rein in his companions’ boozy hedonism.

Reviews
"At heart, Days and Nights is a scathing portrait of the complacent Bengali bourgeois (the student-supported Naxalite insurgency that then roiled Kolkata universities is a structuring absence), not to mention a study of male privilege." – The New York Times