Question 1

True or false: Apu's wife in the trilogy is played by the same actress in all three films.

Accepted Answer

False. Apu's wife appears only in the third film, 'The World of Apu', played by Sharmila Tagore. The first two films have no wife character.

Question 2

True or false: The music for the trilogy was composed by a Bengali folk musician, not Ravi Shankar.

Accepted Answer

False. Ravi Shankar, the renowned sitarist, composed the iconic scores for all three films.

Question 3

True or false: The music for the trilogy was composed by a famous Indian classical sitarist.

Accepted Answer

True. Ravi Shankar, an internationally acclaimed Indian classical sitarist, composed the entire score for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959).

Question 4

True or false: The actor playing Apu as a child was a professional child star from Calcutta.

Accepted Answer

False. Subir Banerjee was a real, non-actor boy discovered by Ray in a neighborhood, not a trained professional.

Question 5

True or false: Pather Panchali, the first film in the Apu Trilogy, was initially rejected by Indian film distributors and was only released after winning a prize at Cannes.

Accepted Answer

True. Satyajit Ray struggled to find a distributor for Pather Panchali; it was released after winning the Best Human Document award at Cannes in 1956.

Question 6

True or false: Satyajit Ray learned filmmaking on the job while making 'Pather Panchali'.

Accepted Answer

True. Ray had no formal film training; he learned by watching Hollywood films and consulting with cinematographer Subrata Mitra on set.

Question 7

True or false: The New York Film Critics Circle awarded 'The World of Apu' Best Foreign Film in 1960.

Accepted Answer

True. The third film won that honor, helping introduce Ray to American audiences.

Question 8

True or false: The entire trilogy was shot on a single roll of Kodak film stock.

Accepted Answer

False. This is false. Each film used multiple rolls; the budget was low but not that low.

The Apu Trilogy Trivia Questions