Cannes 2025: Sharmila Tagore and Wes Anderson Talk About Satyajit Ray’s 'Aranyer Din Ratri'

When Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), Satyajit Ray’s 1970 film about a group of urban men seeking escape in the wilderness, returned to the screen at Cannes this week, it was not in faded form. Painstakingly restored by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and the Film Heritage Foundation, the film was selected for the prestigious Cannes Classics section as a reminder of Ray’s lasting resonance in world cinema.

To mark the occasion, The Hollywood Reporter India spoke to three individuals deeply moved by the film and the filmmaker: legendary actress Sharmila Tagore, who collaborated frequently with Ray; Wes Anderson, whose aesthetic and storytelling bear traces of Ray’s influence; and Dungarpur, whose archival mission brought the film back to life.

The memory game in 'Aranyer Din Ratri'

“I watched Teen Kanya (1961) first, just because it happened to be available in a video store in Texas,” Wes Anderson recalls. “That’s how I became interested in his films. I saw images from Ray’s work and thought, that’s the way I want to be.”

But Days and Nights in the Forest eluded him for years. “It was virtually unavailable, and the way I saw it was an extremely poor copy with a translation done by somebody who probably didn't speak Bengali or English,” Anderson says, laughing. “But I loved it. It reached me anyway.”

The film, a philosophical meditation on masculinity and disconnection, is also remembered by Sharmila Tagore as a turning point in Ray’s working methods. “He had complete control over his craft. I've never seen a more hardworking director. He wrote the script, the screenplay, and directed — but he did many other things,” she says. “In Days and Nights in the Forest, Subrata [Mitra] wasn't there, so he was also operating the camera himself. From that film onwards, he practically went solo.”

Tagore adds, “We’d get handwritten scripts, and we weren’t encouraged to memorize them. You could improvise, but Soumitra Chatterjee was not allowed to move even slightly away from what was prescribed,” she says explaining Ray's meticulous methods.

Still, Ray never lost his human touch. “He was never imposing,” Tagore recalls. “He was also very good with kids on set.” That gentleness, Anderson says, is felt in every frame. “You can feel his gentleness come through from his films.”

Anderson revealed that he often plays the memory game featured in Days and Nights in the Forest with his family. For the filmmaker, Ray is not just an influence but an essential part of his creative life. Film Heritage Foundation's Dungarpur recalls the long hours he spent restoring the film thinking about how meticulously Ray would storyboard each frame, how deeply he cared for the rhythm of small moments. Ray lives in these details, and it's in those details that you can find him again.