The first film in Ray's now-classic Apu Trilogy (with Aparajito and The World of Apu). Sometime in the early part of the century, a boy, Apu, is born to a poor Brahmin family living in their ancestral village in Bengal. The father-a dreamer, a poet, an optimist, but not a worker-leaves to his wife the burden of raising Apu and his sister, Durga, in poverty. As the years go by, the children bring home the increasingly complicated results of their forays into the village life. Drawing from neorealist technique, using a cast of largely non-professional actors, Ray weaves this, his first film, into a portrait of Bengali life that is exquisitely nuanced, neither comedic nor tragic, but, as Pauline Kael said: "...beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love; an extraordinary beginning in the career of a modern master."