The team of director James Ivory, who was born in Berkeley and lives in India, and producer Ismail Merchant, who was born in Bombay and studied in America, is one of the most unusual in international cinema. Their films, including the recent release, Heat and Dust, Bombay Talkie (shown in this series in October), and Shakespeare Wallah, deal with the delicate interaction between life and art in the lives of artists, and the tenuous relationship between British and Indians in modern India. In Shakespeare Wallah (“wallah” means “peddler”), a family of English Shakespearean actors find themselves lost in the new India, reduced to giving performances at golf clubs, schools and the palaces of decaying Maharajahs. Their conflict is heightened when the daughter of the family falls in love with a young Indian playboy. The Kendal family--mother, father and daughter--play themselves in the film, which has been called Chekhovian in its emphasis on “life glowing fiercely amid the decay of an old order; the tragic comedy of indecisiveness...the humor and poignant details... The Kendals...are complex, eccentric, and irrepressibly creative.” (Bernard Oesch, Film Society Review) The film's score was composed by Satyajit Ray, and the cinematography is by Ray's cinematographer, Subrata Mitra.