John Huston and Satyajit Ray. One might not think these two major directors had similar taste in movies. In the 1950s, Huston made “The African Queen” and “Moby Dick”; Ray made the three films generally known as the Apu Trilogy: the epic story of Apu, a boy born in a village in India who struggles for education and recognition as a man in the cosmopolitan city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). Yet, when I was writing a biography of Ray in the 1980s, Huston sent me a letter about Ray and his work. “I recognized the footage as the work of a great filmmaker,” he wrote. “I liked Ray enormously on first encounter. Everything he did and said supported my feelings on viewing the film.”

The footage was from Ray’s maiden venture, “Pather Panchali,” the first entry in the trilogy. In 1954, Huston saw part of this film in a silent rough cut in India. He strongly recommended it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where “Pather Panchali” received its world premiere the next year, before it was released in London in 1957. When eventually released in New York in 1958, “Pather Panchali” ran for eight months at the Fifth Avenue Cinema. Two years later, “Pather Panchali”; “Aparajito,” the middle installment, which had won the Golden Lion at the 1957 Venice Film Festival; and the final part, “The World of Apu” — all with music composed by Ravi Shankar — together entranced audiences in New York, including a teenage Martin Scorsese.

Akira Kurosawa once said of “Pather Panchali”: “I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it. I have had several more opportunities to see the film since then, and each time I feel more overwhelmed. It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.” Just before Ray’s death, at 70 in 1992, he was given an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, at Mr. Scorsese’s prompting. Now, a new generation of filmgoers has a chance to discover Ray’s humane genius in a rerelease of the Apu Trilogy, first in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles in May, and then in selected theaters around the country, after a lengthy and painstaking restoration by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.