Revisiting the village setting of the Apu Trilogy, Distant Thunder (New York Film Festival 1973) finds the bonds of a community pushed to their limits under the extraordinary stress of the manmade Bengali Famine of 1943. The pressures of a rice shortage unfold against an incongruously lovely natural backdrop, as the villagers’ efforts to survive wreak havoc with propriety and put a strain on traditional social boundaries. Ray brings his ongoing rural portraiture full circle by casting Soumitra Chatterjee—Apu himself—as an educated Brahmin whose wife struggles to make do.