Renoir’s first feature film in color is a vibrant, visual tour de force (Martin Scorsese calls it one of the most beautiful color films ever made). Shot entirely in India, this coming-of-age tale, based on the 1946 novel by Rumer Godden, explores the perspective of young Harriet and the daily lives and dramas of her upper middle-class English family living on the banks of the Ganges River. Through her eyes—those of a Westerner, a colonizer, a child—and Renoir’s masterful, painterly compositions, THE RIVER, on which a young Satyajit Ray was an assistant director, delicately unfolds as a story of both the small and significant moments of life that turn children into adults. Patient, languidly paced, and seemingly simple—Roger Ebert remarked that the film “regards life without trying to wrest it into a plot.” THE RIVER’s profundity rushes over you like, well…a river; one that continuously flows, irrespective of the lives and people at its banks.