In Days and Nights in the Forest, Ray puts the dilemma of urban intellectual Indians into sharp focus by removing his characters from Calcutta to the country. Four men decide to get away from it all, and drive to a country retreat, with “nothing but” a forest and the nearby village to entertain them. They soon find that this is plenty. On the film's 1970 screening at the San Francisco Film Festival, Albert Johnson wrote, “Ray manipulates his characters, forming and re-forming the various individuals with psychological skill.... Days and Nights in the Forest is full of sudden revelations of hidden memories, of unseen dangers behind the foliage of darkness. Its expected visual poetry is there, with the provocative sight of small fires glimmering from afar, and cynicism, too, in an important telephone number, scrawled on a five-rupee note.”