tweet
shareSunday, April 27, 2025
In 2017, Rima Das burst to the forefront of Indian cinema with Village Rockstars, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the top prizes from India’s National Film Awards and the Film Critics Circle of India. Typically, independent features by emerging auteurs don’t spawn sequels, but in 2024, Village Rockstars 2 premiered to similar acclaim.
It’s overly tempting to compare new directors with internationally-known masters, but the gift of double Village Rockstars begs revisiting the debut feature by the legendary Satyajit Ray and its own sequel. The first two films of the Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito put Indian cinema on the international map in the 1950s, sparked debates domestically about the identity of its national cinema, and continued to inspire future directors like Das, who has confessed that Ray’s films “stunned” and motivated her to return to her own village and produce films there.
Beyond being rare indie sequels, both pairs of films are coming-of-age tales extending across years and features. They take inspiration from the tall grass, rain, and water of West Bengal and Assam. They incorporate non-professional actors, especially children, to populate communities undergoing industrial and environmental change. They are about mothers and their modern teens. They are enamored by music, from Ravi Shankar’s immortal Apu Trilogy score to the strums of the titular Village Rockstars. Seeing the films in succession, two by two, they become a joyous medley of parallel themes and variations, of enchantments and heartaches that reverberate across the decades.
Seeing them together also underscores the filmmakers’ differences. The patrilineal anxieties of Apu’s family become the bonds between mother and daughter in Das’ films. The precise mise-en-scene of Satyajit Ray becomes the wind-swept, Malick-like impressionism that is childhood in Village Rockstars 1 & 2. Rima Das is a master in her own right, finding new rhythms and cinematic melodies to pay tribute to her 21st century family and the river village she calls home.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
One of cinema’s great directorial debuts is also the debut of one of its most beloved characters: Apu. We also meet his older sister Durga and their headstrong mother, who watches over the family through the seasons as her poet-priest husband searches for work outside the village.
12:30 pm
UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley
Aparajito
Directed by Satyajit Ray
If Pather Panchali gave its young hero a mere glimpse of the outside world, its sequel takes him to the city and beyond. Apu’s family has moved to Varanasi, where he catches the attention of his teachers, who know that his academic promise will open doors. His mother, quietly and perhaps reluctantly, knows this too.
3:00 pm
UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley
Village Rockstars
Directed by Rima Das
In an Assam village where floods threaten livelihoods and evoke memories of loved ones past, 10-year-old Dhunu dreams of rock ’n’ roll. From carving her own guitar out of styrofoam, to saving up for a real one, she imagines a future for young women as only a child could.
5:20 pm
UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley
Village Rockstars 2
Directed by Rima Das
Seven years after we first met her, Dhunu still harbors music dreams. But she’s also a young adult now, and her mother, still tending the crops, is that much older. With growing up comes a new connection to the village: the trees she once climbed as a child, the breeze that brings her a smile.
7:15 pm
UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley
