There’s something galvanic about a filmmaker going home to work, whether its Howard Hawks telling a story based on his grandfather in “Come and Get It” or Jean Renoir filming at his childhood home in “Picnic in the Grass.” That’s what Satyajit Ray did in his 1963 film “The Big City,” which I discuss in this clip. Ray filmed the movie in his native Calcutta, and the roiling power of his connection to the place is apparent from the very start. Ray perches the film on the front lines of history, and he captures with visual incisiveness and dramatic precision the vast political implications of intimate changes.

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