Satyajit Ray shot Pather Panchali over three years with no studio backing, a crew that was learning on the job, and a budget that ran out before the film did. The West Bengal government eventually stepped in to finish it. When it screened at Cannes in 1956, it won Best Human Document. The lesson is not that genius overcomes poverty. The lesson is that Ray had a specific set of working habits that made the constraint productive rather than fatal.
