Simi Garewal on Satyajit Ray’s ‘Aranyer Din Ratri’: ‘A great director opens out the world to you’

When the Cannes Film Festival premieres a restoration of Satyajit Ray’s sexy and sobering Aranyer Din Ratri on Monday, lead actor Sharmila Tagore will be there. Producer Purnima Dutta will be there. American filmmaker Wes Anderson, a Rayphile who used scores from the Bengali master’s movies in his Darjeeling Limited, will be there. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose Film Heritage Foundation restored Aranyer Din Ratri along with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and The Criterion Collection /Janus Films, will be there.

Simi Garewal will be there too. Garewal, who plays an Adivasi woman named Duli in Aranyer Din Ratri, will be attending Cannes for the first time ever.

“I made this film in 1969, and I never thought that it would take me 56 years to get to the Cannes red carpet,” Garewal told Scroll. “When you work with a great director, it opens out the whole world to you.”

Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) will be screened on May 19 at Cannes in its Classics section. Ray made the black-and-white film, adapted from Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel of the same name, right after his comic fantasy adventure Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.

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