Pather Panchali (English, "Song of the Little Road") Apu's early experiences in rural Bengal as the son of a poor but high caste family are presented.

Their blossoming marriage ends in her death in childbirth, after which the despairing Apu abandons his child, but eventually returns to accept his responsibilities.

In 1950, Ray had decided that Pather Panchali, the classic coming of age story (bildungsroman) of Bengali literature, published in 1928 by Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, would be the subject matter for his first film.

Besides the influence of European cinema and Bengali literature, Ray is also indebted to the Indian theatrical tradition, particularly the rasa theory of classical Sanskrit drama.

[5] Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra and art director Bansi Chandragupta went on to achieve great acclaim.

[6] With a loan from the West Bengal government, the film was finally completed and released in 1955 to great critical and popular success, sweeping up numerous prizes and having long runs in both India and abroad.

[7] Even greater help than Renoir's encouragement occurred when Ray showed a sequence to John Huston who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King.

Huston praised Ray to Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art, saying that a major talent was on the horizon.

The film is also notable for its application of bounce lighting to recreate the effect of daylight on sets with the use of large scale diffusers, pioneered by the cinematographer Subrata Mitra.

[15] This trilogy is considered by critics around the globe to rank among the greatest achievements of Indian film, and it is established as one of the most historically important cinematic debuts.

Ray himself at the time of directing Pather Panchali had primarily worked in the advertising industry, although he had served as assistant director on Jean Renoir's 1951 film The River.

From this foundation, Ray went on to create other highly acclaimed films, like Charulata, Mahanagar, and Aranyer Din Ratri, and his international success energised other Bengal filmmakers like Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak.

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 lasts long after the film has ended.On Rotten Tomatoes, Pather Panchali has a 98% fresh rating based on an aggregate of 82 reviews[16] and in 2009 was included in its list of top 100 foreign films.

[20]Andre Robinson, in his book Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, comments that the three films differ in their predominant moods, and he compares the trilogy to the development of an Indian classical raga.

12 (tied with The Godfather) in its top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list, based on a poll of critics, while The Apu Trilogy was ranked separately at No.

[52] The original trilogy has been reconstructed via the Harvard Film archive & Criterion and was shown in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA the 1st week of July 2015.

[55] The director mentioned in an interview that he found similarities between certain parts of the life of Subir Banerjee and the iconic character Apu.

[56] According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly in 1994: In the four decades since Ray's debut as a writer-director—with the first Apu movie, Pather Panchali (1955)—his influence has been felt both in the type of work other directors attempt and in the means they employ to execute it.

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".

In baggy-pants homage to Ray, American TV's cartoon-burlesque Bildungsroman, The Simpsons—which could be called "The Education of Bart Simpson"—contains an Indian convenience-store owner named Apu.

[57]Across the world, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese,[58][59] James Ivory,[60] Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, Carlos Saura,[61] Isao Takahata,[62] Barry Jenkins,[63][64] Philip Kaufman,[65] Wes Anderson[66] and Danny Boyle[67] have been influenced by The Apu Trilogy, with many others such as Akira Kurosawa praising the work.

[68] Filmmaker Martin Scorsese when talking about The Apu Trilogy remarked "without a doubt, in [Ray's] films the line between poetry and cinema, dissolved".

[72] The technique of bounce lighting pioneered by Subrata Mitra, to recreate the effect of daylight on sets, has also had a profound influence on the development of cinematography.