Aranyer Din Ratri (অরণ্যের দিনরাত্রি Araṇyēra Dinarātri; English: Days and Nights in the Forest) is an Indian Bengali adventure drama film released in 1970, written and directed by Satyajit Ray.

The plot of the movie goes back to a similar outing the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay took in the early days of his poetic career.

The four friends are all educated and come from different layers of society, but the urge to escape the daily grind of city life forces them to wander in tribal lands.

Of the four friends, Asim, the leader of the pack, owns the car they drive in, has a cushy job, likes the company of girls and yet is very conscious of how he should be perceived by them.

Asim feels his pride and self-confidence shattered when Aparna reveals her more vulnerable side behind her composed exterior.

She also holds up a mirror to his bourgeois and urban insensitivity by pointing out how despite having spent three days at the bungalow, he and his friends never bothered to inquire about the chowkidar's wife.

Meanwhile, Shekhar finds himself helping all his friends (especially Hari, when the latter gets injured and robbed), despite being fondly considered to be the buffoon of the gang.

Sanjoy, held back by his bourgeois moralities, is unable to respond to Jaya's bold advances.

The New York Times described the film as a ‘rare, wistful movie that somehow proves it’s good to be alive.’ British film critic Tom Milne praised the film writing “Ray gradually distils a magical world of absolute stasis: a shimmering summer’s day, a tranquil forest clearing, the two women strolling in a shady avenue, wistful yearnings as love and the need for love echo plangently… Beautifully shot and acted, it’s probably Ray’s masterpiece.”[5] But the Village Voice critic, William Paul, was one of the detractors of the movie in the West.

He wrote, "Days and Nights seems anachronistically the ideal art-house film of the 50s: vaguely humanistic without any feeling for the complexities of human life, pretentious, short on plot but striving to be long on character, stylistically awkward as a sign of sincere emotions, and all of it held together by a title that is more poetic than anything in the movie itself" (Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, The Biography of a Master Film-Maker, by Andrew Robinson, Bloomsbury Academic, reprinted 2022, 181).