Pather Panchali has won many national and international awards.[108] At India's 3rd National Film Awards in 1955, it was named Best Feature Film and Best Bengali Feature Film.[109] The next year, it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes,[110] where it won Best Human Document[108] and an OCIC Award – Special Mention.[111] More awards from film festivals across the world followed: the Vatican Award (Rome),[112] the Golden Carabao (Manila),[108] and the Diploma of Merit (Edinburgh) in 1956;[112] the Selznick Golden Laurel for Best Film (Berlin), the Golden Gate for Best Director and Best Picture (San Francisco) in 1957;[112] Best Film (Vancouver), and the Critics' Award for Best Film (Stratford) in 1958.[112][113] It also won several awards for best foreign-language film: at the National Board of Review Awards 1958;[114] at the Afro Arts Theater, New York, 1959;[112] the Kinema Jumpo Award in Japan, 1966;[112] and the Bodil Award in Denmark, 1969.[115] In 1958 it had been nominated for Best Film at the 11th British Academy Film Awards.[116]
Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute's (BFI) magazine, has included Pather Panchali several times in its Critics' Polls of the greatest-ever films. In 1962, it ranked 11th;[117] in 1992, 6th;[118] and in 2002, 22nd.[119] It also topped the British Film Institute's user poll of "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time in 2002.[120] The magazine ranked the film 42nd in its 2012 critics' poll of "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time"[121] and 48th in its 2012 directors' poll.[122] In the most recent 2022 edition of BFI's Greatest films of all time list the film ranked 35th in the critics poll[123] and 22nd in the director's poll.[124][125] In 1998, in a similar critics' poll from Asian film magazine Cinemaya, Pather Panchali was ranked the second-greatest film of all time.[126] The Village Voice ranked the film at number 12 (tied with The Godfather) in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[127] In 2010, The Guardian ranked the film 12th in its list of 25 greatest arthouse films.[128]
Pather Panchali was included in various other all-time lists, including Time Out's "Centenary Top One Hundred Films" in 1995,[129] the San Francisco Chronicle "Hot 100 Films From the Past" in 1997,[130] the Rolling Stone "100 Maverick Movies of the Last 100 Years" in 1999,[131] "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" in 2002,[132] the BFI Top Fifty "Must See" Children's Films in 2005,[133] and BFI's "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time.[134] It was included in NDTV's list of "India's 20 greatest films",[135] and in 2013 in CNN-IBN's list of "100 greatest Indian films of all time".[136] Akira Kurosawa ranked Pather Panchali at No. 37 on his Top 100 favourite films of all time list.[137][138] The Apu trilogy as a whole was included in film critic Roger Ebert's list of "100 Great Movies" in 2001[139] and in Time's All-Time 100 best movies list in 2005.[140]
