Aparajito (Bengali: অপরাজিত Ôporajito; The Unvanquished) is a 1956 Indian Bengali-language drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray, and is the second part of The Apu Trilogy.

[2] Unlike his previous venture, where he stayed faithful to the novel, Ray took some bold artistic decisions here, such as portraying the relationship between Apu and his mother in a very different manner from the book.

As a result, in contrast to its predecessor, the film was not received well locally; Ray recalled that "as for the suburban audience, it was shocked by the portrayal of the mother and son relationship, so sharply at variance with the conventional notion of mutual sweetness and devotion".

[5] Bosley Crowther wrote that "it is done with such rare feeling and skill at pictorial imagery, and with such sympathetic understanding of Indian character on the part of Mr. Ray, that it develops a sort of hypnotism for the serene and tolerant viewer".

[6] The critical acclaim this movie received encouraged Ray to make another sequel, Apur Sansar (1959), which was equally well received, and thus concluded one of the most critically acclaimed movie trilogies of all time, as Roger Ebert later pointed out: "The three films ... swept the top prizes at Cannes, Venice and London, and created a new cinema for India – whose prolific film industry had traditionally stayed within the narrow confines of swashbuckling musical romances.

[7] In 1920, Apu and his parents, who have left their home in rural Bengal, have settled into an apartment in Varanasi where his father Harihar works as a priest.

[12] According to Ray's biographer, Robinson, among the three films of the Apu trilogy, Aparajito bears the closest resemblance with its literary source.

[13] Ray's wife Bijoya also voiced her concerns when she discovered the plot, asking him "Do you think people in our country will accept a son's relief at having won his freedom at his mother's death?"

[15] Subrata Mitra, the cinematographer of The Apu Trilogy, made his first technical innovation with this film: the application of bounce lighting on large scale diffusers to match studio sets with location shooting.

[16] According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers: The fear of monsoon rain had forced the art director, Bansi Chandragupta, to abandon the original plan to build the inner courtyard of a typical Benares house in the open and the set was built inside a studio in Calcutta.

James Berardinelli wrote: Aparajito was filmed forty years ago, half way around the world, yet the themes and emotions embedded in the narrative are strikingly relevant to modern Western society (thus explaining why it is called a "timeless classic"). ...

[18]Roger Ebert said that "the relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood. ...

[21] Emanuel Levy said: "Made in 1956 (and released in many countries a year later), Aparajito indicates India's processes of modernization and industrialization and their inevitable impact on both individual and culture.

Nonetheless, in his upbeat outlook, Ray suggests that individuals can rise to the occasion and might not be compromised by the corruption that characterizes the society at large".

[22] Bosley Crowther, who had earlier given a lukewarm response to Pather Panchali, saying that it was so amateurish that "it would barely pass for a rough cut in Hollywood",[20] praised Aparajito, saying that "Mr. Ray's remarkable camera catches beauty in so many things, from the softness of a mother's sad expression to the silhouette of a distant train, that innuendos take up the slack of drama.

Apur Sansar depicts Apu's adult life, his reaction to his wife's premature death, and his final bonding with his son whom he abandoned as an infant.

[36] According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly in 1994: "The youthful coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy, which Terrence Rafferty has rightly called 'cinema's purest Bildungsroman'".

[37] Across the world, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese,[38][39] James Ivory,[40] Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, and Wes Anderson[41] have been influenced by The Apu Trilogy, with many others (such as Kurosawa) praising the work.

He worked on scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing, and designing his own credit titles and publicity material, developing a distinctive style of film-making[43] based on visual lyricism and strong humanism,[44][45] as in his Apu trilogy, and established himself as an auteur of cinema.

[46] In 2013, the video distribution company The Criterion Collection, in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Archive, began the restoration of the original negatives of the Apu trilogy, including Aparajito.