A classic film about the education of a young man

Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1957), the 2nd section of his Apu trilogy and unavailable on DVD for a long time, is a great film that stands up well over 60 years - in part perhaps because it was a period piece in its day, set in the 1920s in rural India w/ side journey to Calcutta. The trilogy follows the young Apu, born in a remote village, on his journey to adulthood, and on the family migration from the country to the city. Aparajito begins in the city of Benares on the banks of Ganges, the family having just arrived from their village. The father struggles to make a living as a priest - he dies young, and Apu and mother move to a village on the train line not too far from Calcutta. Apu enters school - in those times high school cost a fee; he's a top student and gets a scholarship to college in Calcutta, where he is clearly is one of the few impoverished students. He's torn by his love for and loyalty to his doting mother - who wants him to come home on every holiday, etc. - and his new life as a student and a young man in the city: a theme that just about anyone who's ever left home for work of school will understand. The series as a whole is a classic "bildungsroman," the education over time of a young man (or woman), another great literary design. What's truly outstanding about the Apu series is Ray's terrific use of open-air settings (the banks of the Ganges in particular) and of realistic interiors (the cramped apartment where Apu and family live, the print shop where his lives and works while in school, the crowded classrooms - all men, Apu arriving in Calcutta looking lost at a deserted street corner). Though most of these scenes are by no means beautiful in the conventional sense, they show us an entire culture and way of life - and they're often beautiful in an unconventional sense: flocks of birds swarming in a gray sky, the steps down to the Ganges so crowded during the day and so peaceful at dawn, the vast open field with a train - the lifeblood of India - crossing in the distance ... in fact, railroads are a major theme and design element throughout the film - they are Apu's way out, and his way back home - and we see many powerful shots of crowded railway cars and long shots of a seeming chaos of tracks at a station of junction.