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 attention. For "Pather Panchali", remarkable as it may be, is something of a chore to sit through." Early in the 1980s, Ray was criticised by Nargis Dutt, parliamentarian and former actress, for "exporting poverty". Darius Cooper writes that while many critics celebrated the Apu trilogy "as a eulogy of third-world culture, others criticized it for what they took to be its romanticization of such a culture". As of October 2017, the film has a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on an aggregate of 42 reviews with an average score of 9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A film