 Satyajit Ray is a cultural icon in India and in Bengali communities worldwide . Following his death , the city of Calcutta came to a virtual standstill , as hundreds of thousands of people gathered around his house to pay their last respects . Satyajit Ray 's influence has been widespread and deep in Bengali cinema ; a number of Bengali directors , including Aparna Sen , Rituparno Ghosh and Gautam Ghose as well as Vishal Bhardwaj , Dibakar Banerjee , Shyam Benegal and Sujoy Ghosh from Hindi cinema in India , Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel in Bangladesh , and Aneel Ahmad in England , have been influenced by his film craft . Across the spectrum , filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb Dasgupta , Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan have acknowledged his seminal contribution to Indian cinema . Beyond India , filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese , Francis Ford Coppola , James Ivory , Abbas Kiarostami , Elia Kazan , François Truffaut , Carlos Saura , Isao Takahata , Wes Anderson , Danny Boyle and many other noted filmmakers from all over the world have been influenced by his cinematic style , with many others such as Akira Kurosawa praising his work . Gregory Nava 's 1995 film My Family had a final scene that repeated that of Apur Sansar . Ira Sachs 's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue was a loose remake of Charulata . Other references to Ray films are found , for example , in recent works such as Sacred Evil , the Elements trilogy of Deepa Mehta . According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly , the " youthful coming @-@ of @-@ age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid @-@ fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy " . The trilogy also introduced the bounce lighting technique . Kanchenjungha ( 1962 ) introduced a narrative structure that resembles later hyperlink cinema . Pratidwandi ( 1972 ) helped pioneer photo @-@ negative flashback and X @-@ ray digression techniques . Together with Madhabi Mukherjee , Ray was the first Indian film figure to be featured on a foreign stamp ( Dominica ) . 
