The representation of folk culture in cinema becomes especially significant when films attempt to transform local traditions, oral narratives, rural experiences, and community values into forms accessible to a mass audience. Satyajit Ray’s *Pather Panchali* (1955) and Ridley Scott’s *Robin Hood* (2010) provide two very different examples of this process. While *Pather Panchali* draws its cultural power from the everyday life of rural Bengal and from the literary world of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, *Robin Hood* reworks a legendary English folk hero whose story has circulated through ballads, oral traditions, popular literature, theatre, and earlier films. Both films therefore operate between folk and popular culture, but they negotiate this relationship differently. *Pather Panchali* moves from the folk and local toward the universal through realism and intimate observation, whereas *Robin Hood* transforms folk legend into a large-scale historical action spectacle designed for contemporary popular cinema. In *Pather Panchali*, folk culture is not presented primarily as a collection of spectacular customs or exotic traditions. Instead, it is embedded in the ordinary rhythms of village existence. The film portrays rural Bengal through family relationships, poverty, seasonal changes, religious practices, local social interactions, food, clothing, domestic routines, village paths, ponds, fields, and forms of oral communication. The lives of Harihar, Sarbajaya, Durga, Apu, and Indir Thakrun are shaped by a social environment in which individual existence is closely connected with community and tradition. Folk culture therefore becomes a lived social reality rather than merely an aesthetic ornament. This approach is particularly important from the perspective of folk theatre and classical Indian theatrical traditions. Indian folk performance has historically depended upon the close relationship between performer, community, locality, music, gesture, oral storytelling, and everyday experience. Although *Pather Panchali* is not a folk-theatre film, Ray’s cinematic method shares some characteristics with folk modes of cultural representation. The film pays attention to ordinary people rather than heroic figures, and its narrative emerges from everyday experiences rather than from extraordinary events. The emphasis on village life, oral exchanges, songs, sounds, and seasonal landscapes creates a cultural atmosphere in which the audience encounters a community rather than simply a plot. The character of Indir Thakrun is particularly important in this regard. She represents an older generation whose knowledge and identity are connected with oral memory, storytelling, and traditional community life. Her presence recalls the role of the traditional storyteller or performer in folk culture. She carries fragments of an older cultural world within the modernizing rural society. Her relationship with Durga and Apu