Where to Watch Every Satyajit Ray Film

Ray’s 36 films sit with a shifting set of rights-holders across four territories, and the platforms carrying the most Bengali cinema are the ones the streaming trackers do not index.

Satyajit Ray directed 36 films between 1955 and 1991 — 29 features, five documentaries and two short films — and no single streaming service in any country carries all of them.

That is the honest starting point for anyone trying to work through Ray in order, and it is not a temporary inconvenience. The films were made across 36 years for a changing set of producers, in three languages, and a number of them have never had a commercial home-video release outside India at all. What follows is a map of where the work actually sits and a method for checking it yourself, rather than a list of links that will be wrong within a year.

Begin with what the 36 are, because the number itself causes arguments. The features run from Pather Panchali (1955) to Agantuk (1991), and two of them are not in Bengali: Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), in Hindi and Urdu, and Sadgati (1981), an hour-long Hindi television film made for Doordarshan. The five documentaries are Rabindranath Tagore (1961), Sikkim (1971), The Inner Eye (1972), Bala (1976) and Sukumar Ray (1987). The two shorts are Two (1964) and Pikoo (1980). Counts that come out at 29, 30 or 37 are almost always counting a different subset rather than disputing a fact — 29 is the feature count, and the higher numbers usually fold in television work or the unfinished projects Ray left behind.

The reason no library holds the complete run is that Ray never had a single studio. The Government of West Bengal underwrote Pather Panchali with a loan; later films passed through a series of private production houses, through the National Film Development Corporation, and, in Sadgati's case, through Doordarshan. Three and a half decades of separate contracts do not consolidate neatly, and the non-Bengali titles sit in a different rights pool again. A complete Ray shelf has to be assembled from at least a dozen sources, and nobody has yet had a commercial reason to assemble one.

The single variable that governs what you can actually watch is your territory. In North America and much of Europe, the Ray titles in circulation are broadly the ones Janus Films and the Criterion Collection have restored and licensed; these appear on the Criterion Channel and, on a rolling basis, on general subscription services and on free ad-supported platforms that license from the same restored masters. In India the picture inverts. Amazon Prime Video has carried a set of Ray titles that the Western services do not, and Indian catalogues generally run deeper into the mid-period work. Any specific listing you read — including one you read here — should be treated as a snapshot. Licences on this material run for months, not decades, and titles move between services without announcement.

This is where the standard tools fail. Almost every "where to watch" answer on the internet, whether it comes from a search engine, a film database or a chatbot, is ultimately reading JustWatch or TMDb. Neither indexes Hoichoi, the Kolkata platform run by SVF; neither indexes Chorki, launched in Dhaka on 12 July 2021 by Transcom's Mediastar and opened to Indian subscribers in October 2023; neither indexes KLiKK. Those three are where a very large amount of Bengali-language cinema lives. The practical consequence is that "not available to stream" from any of those sources does not mean what it appears to mean. It means "not available on the platforms our data supplier tracks", which for Bengali cinema is a materially different statement.

For Ray specifically, the strongest predictor of whether a film is legally watchable today is not which platform you subscribe to but whether somebody has paid to restore it. The Apu Trilogy is the clearest case. The original negatives were severely damaged in a laboratory fire in London in 1993; the surviving cans and fragments were sent to the Academy Film Archive, where they sat unexamined for roughly two decades. Restoration by the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive began in 2013, with the physical work carried out at L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna; the standard account puts it at over a thousand hours of hand labour, with something in the region of 40 per cent of the Pather Panchali negative recovered and the remainder reconstructed from duplicate negatives and fine-grain masters. The restored trilogy premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 4 May 2015. Within a year it was everywhere.

Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) followed the same arc half a century after its release. Restored in 4K by The Film Foundation, with Wes Anderson's backing, it premiered in the Cannes Classics section in 2025, played the New York Film Festival, went out in North America through Janus Films and returned to Indian cinemas that November. A film that had been difficult to see in a decent copy became easy to see, in months, because restoration creates a distributor and a distributor creates a stream.

The corollary is bleak for everything unrestored. The documentaries and the two shorts are the hardest part of the filmography to complete honestly. Two (1964), Pikoo (1980), The Inner Eye (1972), Bala (1976) and Sukumar Ray (1987) surface at retrospectives, archive screenings and film-society programmes far more reliably than on subscription services. Copies circulate on video platforms; most of those uploads carry no visible licence, and a viewer who cares about the work being preserved has a reason to prefer the archive screening.

Sikkim (1971) is the extreme case and worth knowing about, because it explains why "unavailable" sometimes has nothing to do with commerce. Commissioned by the Chogyal of Sikkim, the film was banned by the Indian government after Sikkim's merger with India in 1975. The ban is reported to have been lifted in September 2010, after a surviving print was traced and restored. It remains among the least-seen things Ray made.

So the method. First fix your territory, because every answer changes with it, and be aware that a VPN changes what you are shown without changing what you are licensed to watch. Second, check whether the title has been restored in the last decade; if it has, it is probably available somewhere, and if it has not, expect to look harder. Third, consult the aggregators, but treat a negative result as inconclusive rather than final. Fourth, check the Bengali-language platforms by hand — Hoichoi, Chorki and KLiKK each have to be searched in their own apps, because no API will do it for you. Fifth, check archive and festival programming, particularly around Ray anniversaries, when restorations tend to tour. And sixth, for the films with good restorations, physical media remains the only version nobody can quietly delist.

Cholochitro records "where to watch" links by hand for the Bengali-language platforms, precisely because no data supplier covers them. Where a link is listed, it was checked by a person. Where none is listed, that is an absence of evidence, not evidence that the film cannot be watched — which is the distinction this entire problem turns on.