There was a time, dear reader, when giants roamed the earth. Giants of cinema who viewed the planet in deep-focus black-and-white and spoke languages like French, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, and Bengali. Bengali?

Before the nouvelle vague or any other youthful waves crashed on western shores, Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray was already established alongside the Holy Trinity of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa. Ray’s godlike reputation was based largely on the international success of the Apu trilogy, his magnum opus, completed in 1959, following the life passages of a village infant into maturity—all minus the Hindi-based singing and dancing now associated with Bollywood.

In contrast, the trilogy introduced viewers to Ravi Shankar, who played his original score.

The Kolkata-born filmmaker, who started out as a graphic designer, was himself influenced by Vittorio De Sica and other Italian neorealists of the late 1940s. This Bengali Boyhood would prove inspirational to American auteurs as varied as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Wes Anderson, who dedicated his The Darjeeling Limited to Ray. So how come today’s film students don’t know the trilogy when they’ve all seen Persona and The Seven Samurai?

“That’s a byproduct of the fact that the films themselves have been difficult to obtain and work with over the years,” explains Peter Becker, president of the Criterion Collection. In fact, the original negatives for the Apus were destroyed in a 1993 fire.

“There was a composite print made the next year, and people occasionally see library copies in various states of decay, because it’s better to watch a great film in not-so-great condition than to not watch a great film at all.”

Thanks to Becker’s company, responsible for so much classic cinema being preserved and disseminated today, Vancouverites don’t have to settle for any Apu action that’s less than spectacular. That’s because Criterion oversaw a complete reconstruction of the set—consisting of Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar—from remnant negatives and the best prints available, augmented by the latest 4K digital technology.

Its distribution arm, Janus Films, brings the dazzling restoration to our Cinematheque in multiple screenings, running Friday through Tuesday (June 5 to 9).

“It’s so beautiful,” he continues. “The work that the restoration team did, based on the raw materials and how far they came to get to this image, makes me so proud. Even a few years ago, we didn’t have the technical means to do this kind of work.”

Janus Films, with its renowned two-headed-mask logo, was the trilogy’s original distributor in North America, and Mr. Criterion comes by the connection naturally. His father, William Becker, ran Janus with Saul J. Turell, whose own son, Jonathan, is now the younger Becker’s partner at Criterion and the revived Janus. Their combined outfits employ about 45 people full-time and have an oversize influence on how classic cinema is viewed today.

“What’s most striking,” Becker concludes, “is the universality of experience that shows up in films of this calibre. We can all recognize Apu’s village life as ‘exotic’ in its details but completely familiar in its human emotions. There was a lot of healing to do after the Second World War, and it’s no exaggeration to say that these films played a big part in knitting together the world culture that we live in today.”