Film festival played a major role in introducing foreign films to American audiences. Films in the first year included Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali". Today, thousands of film festivals take place around the world—from high-profile festivals such as Sundance Film Festival and Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, Utah), to horror festivals such as Terror Film Festival (Philadelphia), and the Park City Film Music Festival, the first U.S. film festival dedicated to honoring music in film. Film Funding competitions such as Writers and Filmmakers were introduced when the cost of production could be lowered significantly and internet technology
Pather Panchali the films were indeed destroyed by fire or the effects of age, other parts were salvageable. The materials were shipped to a restoration laboratory in Bologna, Italy: L’Immagine Ritrovata. Over a thousand hours of labor by hand were expended in restoring and scanning the negatives and, in the end, about 40 percent of the "Pather Panchali" negative was restored. (For those parts of the negative that were missing or unusable, duplicate negatives and fine-grain masters from various commercial or archival sources were used.) The Criterion Collection’s own lab then spent six months creating the digital version of all three films,