Photograph

A struggling Mumbai street photographer who’s pressured to marry by his grandmother convinces a shy stranger to pose as his fiancée during a family visit in the new film by writer/director Ritesh (The Lunchbox) Batra.
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The Apu Trilogy: The World of Apu

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May 20, 21 
Wed 5:45
Thurs 7:45
 (India/1959/Writer/Director Satyajit Ray)
unrated/ 105 mins
*Use your ticket to get a 10% discount at Cinnamon Indian Cuisine May 15 – 21   
The third in the Apu trilogy follows budding writer Apu  (Sumitra Chatterjee) into his 20s;  it won Best Foreign Film from the National Board of Review in 1959.
Unable to afford to continue his college studies, Apu looks for work. While searching, he’s writing a novel based on his life. He’s sidetracked when he meets bride-to-be Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), whose wedding is canceled when the groom turns out to be mentally unstable. To save Aparna from a life of enforced spinsterhood, Apu marries her himself. The two find happiness and she becomes pregnant. What unfolds are some serious challenges as Apu deals with his new lot in life. The World of Apu was based on Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhaya’s semi-autobiographical novel Aparajito.
View TrailerRead Roger Ebert on Ray

The Apu Trilogy: Aparajito

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In Rhinebeck 
May 19
Tues 5:45
 (India/1956/Writer/Director Satyajit Ray)
unrated / 109 mins
*Use your ticket to get a 10% discount at Cinnamon Indian Cuisine May 15 – 21  
APARAJITO (“The Unvanquished”) follows the young and maturing Apu from the country to the city Varanasi and his studies in Calcutta. It won three prizes at the Venice Film festival in 1957 including the Golden Lion–the only sequel to do so.
The family moves to the holy city of Benares where their financial situation remains precarious. After his father dies, Apu and his mother Sarbajaya come back to a village in Bengal. His mother wants him to become a priest like his father, but he persuades her to send him to school. She makes it possible for him to study; he  turns out to be a brilliant student and wins a scholarship  and leaves for Calcutta. 
View TrailerRead Roger Ebert on Ray

The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali (1955 India) Directed by Satyajit Ray Shown: Subir Bannerjee
In Rhinebeck 
May 18
Mon 5:30 
 (India/1955/dir by Satyajit Ray)
ur / 125 mins
*Use your ticket to get a 10% discount at Cinnamon Indian Cuisine May 15 – 21 
PATHER PANCHALI (Song of the Little Road) was made after the young Ray saw the films of Jean Renoir and was inspired by such Italian neorealist films as THE BICYCLE THIEF. Overcoming many obstacles, Ray’s PATHER PANCHALI won the prize “Best Human Document” at Cannes in 1956, and later played in New York for eight months, winning Best Foreign Film from the National Board of Review in 1957.
Apu (Subir Bannerjee) is born to a poor but proud Brahmin family. When his father, Harihar Ray (Kanu Bannerjee), loses his treasury job, he sets out to find work elsewhere dreaming of a better life, but in his absence, their condition deteriorates. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga (Uma Das Gupta), and her young son, Apu, as well as Harihar’s elderly aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi). The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while their parents suffer the daily indignities heaped upon them. Months later, Harihar returns to face the tragedy that forces the family to leave their ancestral home.
View TrailerRead Roger Ebert

The Apu Trilogy

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Watch the whole trilogy in one sitting on Sunday in Rhinebeck 
May 17
PATHER PANCHALI at 12:15
APARAJITO at 2:45
90 minute break for dinner
WORLD OF APU at 6:15
(See individual film listings below for additional screening times)
(India/1955,’56,’59)/Writer/Director Satyajit Ray)
PATHER PANCHALI – APARAJITO – APUR SANSAR – 3 films – each will have shows Friday May 15 through Thursday May 21 (see all showtimes below).
It will be possible to see the entire Apu Trilogy on Sunday May 17th beginning at 12:15. If you’d like to buy a 15% discounted ticket for the entire Sunday Trilogy, special tickets will be available at the door that day ($25 Adults / $20 Seniors / $15 Members). If you’re watching the whole Sunday trilogy, there will be nearly 90 mins after the second film for a dinner break, and CINNAMON INDIAN CUISINE, a couple of miles south of the village of Rhinebeck, is offering 15% off its Sunday buffet to Sunday Trilogy ticket holders. Note: these films will be showing in our smaller theater (80 seats). 
Frequently cited as one of the top accomplishments in the history of cinema, the APU TRILOGY ushered India into the golden age of international art-house cinema, and now, two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed restoration. All three films were scored by Ravi Shankar, later friend of The Beatles and father of Norah Jones.
The Apu Trilogy follows one indelible character, a free-spirited child in rural Bengal who matures into an adolescent urban student and finally a sensitive man of the world. Based on two books by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, these delicate films — PATHER PANCHALI (Song of the Little Road), APARAJITO (The Unvanquished), and APUR SANSAR (The World of Apu) — were shot over the course of five years, and each stands on its own as a tender, visually radiant journey. They are among the most achingly beautiful, richly humane movies ever made—essential works for any film lover.

 Martin Scorsese called watching the Apu Trilogy “One of the great cinematic experiences of my life,” and the great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said, “Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or moon.”

View TrailerRead Roger Ebert on APU trilogy

The Lunch Box

THE LUNCH BOX
Now showing
in Rhinebeck 		 
Apr 30
 
Wed 6:00 (last show)
 
 
(India, France, Germany / 2013 / Directed by Ritesh Batra)
PG / 104 mins
**Special offer from Cinnamon Indian Cuisine: See the movie, then bring in your ticket stub and get 10% off your meal cinnamoncuisine.com**
Set in Mumbai, home to over 18 million, this delicate debut feature is predicated on a mistake in which a wife’s special lunch meant for her neglectful husband is instead delivered by the usually efficient lunch-box couriers to a lonely widower on the verge of retirement.
With no reaction from her husband, Ila (Nimrat Kaur) puts a note for her husband in his next lunchbox but it continues to be delivered to a stranger named Saajan (Irrfan Khan). Soon the two are sending one another notes through the lunchbox. What begins as an innocent mistake develops into an opportunity for the two to express themselves about their loneliness, memories, regrets, fears, and even small joys. They each discover a new sense of self and find an anchor to hold on to. A remarkable portrait of life in Mumbai that weaves in themes of gender, class, and generational difference into its delicate love story.
View TrailerRead Screen Daily Review

BOMBAY MOVIE (with filmmaker Q&A and catered reception)

In Rhinebeck 
Saturday May 10
2:30 pm*
(India, USA / 2014 / Directed by Alexandra Eaton)
*In Person: Director Alexandra Eaton. The film will be followed by a filmmaker Q&A and a catered reception at Cinnamon Indian Cuisine.
Tickets $15 Adults / $14 Seniors and Students / $13 Members. ON SALE NOW at the Rhinebeck box office.
In Bombay, a city of brutal working conditions and success stories so unreal they could be fairy tales, Raja Menon sets out to make a movie about the men and women who quietly serve the city’s wealthy.
A far cry from India’s typical song and dance films, Barah Aana has one problem: Bollywood would never make this film. To tell his story about the working poor, Menon enlists two foreign producers, a star cast, and a hardworking and seasoned film crew. Battling crowds and corruption, the team looks like a circus in the slums where they are shooting and like outlaws in the rarefied suburbs. Determined to succeed, they overcome every obstacle and finance their film’s release. But when opening weekend arrives, they face a new problem. How will they convince people who see extreme hardship every day to pay the high price to see it fictionalized on screen? Directed by Bard College graduate Alexandra Eaton, Bombay Movie is an intelligently composed film-within-a-film. Capturing the heart and the tenacity it takes to make an independent feature, Eaton’s documentary gives us a glimpse at the effects of the world’s massive entertainment industries, and a taste of the perseverance it takes to stand apart.
Unrated / 58 mins.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist

June 3 – 6
 
Mon 8:20
Tues 8:20
Wed 5:45
Thurs 5:45 (last show)
 
(India, Pakistan, USA / 2012 / Directed by Mira Nair)
R / 128 mins.
Adapted from the award-winning novel by Mohsin Hamid, Mira Nair’s (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) latest film tracks the divergent pull of two cultures, bringing the book to screen with both passion and insight. 
Beginning in Lahore, Pakistan in 2011, academic Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) is interviewed by American foreign correspondent Bobby (Liev Schreiber) amidst a climate of anti-American unrest and the abduction of one of Changez’s American colleagues. Himself a ‘person of interest’ for the CIA, Changez tells Bobby the story of his life in New York in the previous decade: how, fast-tracked as a financial analyst (and hatchet man) in a prestigious Wall Street company, this educated Pakistani Muslim was forced, in the wake of 9/11, to re-examine who he really is. Bolstered by a talented cast featuring Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, and Om Puri, Nair’s film carefully manipulates the viewers’ prejudices, encouraging us to look at multiple sides of a conflict more complicated than it first appears. In English and Urdu with subtitles.
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The Revolutionary Optimists

Apr 1 – 2
Mon 8:30
Tues 8:30 (last show)
(India & USA / 2013 / Directed by Maren R. Monsen and Nicole Newnham)
Unrated / 95 mins.

“The forces at work in the India of The Revolutionary Optimists, an engaging documentary portrait of several children seeking to improve life in India’s slums, appear overwhelming from almost every angle. Co-directors Nicole Newham and Maren Grainger-Monsen lace their largely observational study with numbers: one clean-water tap for three neighborhoods; 9 million children working in brick mills; 47 percent of girls married by 18. How does change come to such odds? One answer emerges from the mission of Bengali community leader Amlan Ganguly. Start small.
Ganguly, a former lawyer with a theatrical bent, teaches kids living in urban slums the power of dance, education, and leveraging information for local change. But his key emphasis is on attitude – encouraging those raised with little hope to see in their lives a continuum of possibility. We follow the subjects over several years, and in two cases Ganguly is no match for India’s numbers. A talented dancer marries her abusive boyfriend, and a brickmaster must curtail her education to provide for her family. Hop rides on the thin shoulders of Salim, a fast-talking 11-year-old determined to bring clean water to his community. Change may be elusive, Optimists confirms, but the will to make it blazes.” – Michelle Orange, Village Voice. Unrated / 93 mins.In Bengali with subtitles.
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