Cannes to Venice, India’s forgotten films are getting a second act at the world’s biggest festivals

A three-decade-old Indian film will share screen space with the works of some of the most influential filmmakers at the Venice Film Festival in September. Dev Benegal’s English, August (1994) is part of Venice Classics, alongside movies by Luis Buñuel, Roberto Rossellini and Andrzej Wajda.

Later in the month, as the film festival circuit moves to Canada, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) will screen John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan (1986) in the Toronto Classics section.

This year, possibly for the first time, re - stored Indian films have made it to the top four international film festivals—Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto—landing a big moment for Indian cinema.


Earlier, Pradip Krishen’s in Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), starring Arundhati Roy in writer’s role and leading role, was shown in the Berlinale Classics at the Berlin Film Festival. And Amma Ariyan was a big draw at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cannes Classics in May.

While the rare feat of restored Indian movies getting selected to the biggest festivals offers a celebratory moment, it also draws attention to the dire need of conserving thousands of films in danger of being lost forever.

SCREEN SAVER

Over the past decade and half, film restoration has been making its mark in India. It mirrors a global trend in which film conservation has emerged as a multi-billion-dollar industry, due to the high cost involved in maintaining the quality and integrity of a movie.

Indian classics have been in a state of disrepair for a long time. Prints of decades-old movies are in varying degrees of decay, deterioration and disintegration due to a frightening mix of factors like fire, flood, humidity and sheer neglect. “Film is a fragile medium that is prone to scratches, vinegar syndrome (chemical decay) and deterioration over time unless kept in optimum conditions,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation has restored both Amma Ariyan and English, August. “Sadly, in India with its track record of neglect and complacency, most films are in a very poor condition.”

However, disaster struck when a massive nitrate fire broke out in Henderson’s lab in 1993, burning many classics, including Ray’s Apu Trilogy. The Academy Film Archive began a desperate attempt to save Ray’s films. Engineers from Italy’s L’Immagine Ritrovata —one of the best film restoration labs in the world—spent thou - sands of hours salvaging them from the re - mains. In 2015, the restored Apu’s Trilogy had its world premiere at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Mughal-e-Azam (1960) was the first Indian film to be digitally restored for a theatrical rerelease in 2004. Five years later, American filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation restored and screened a rare Indian movie for a global audience—Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948).

CONSERVATION AS MISSION

In 2009, India launched a major initiative to digitally restore old movies from prints available at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune. The first film to be restored under the mission was Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar (1983), which was shown in Cannes Classics. Significantly, all of Sen’s films have been digitally restored. Other restored movies include a 1937 Tamil film, Ambikapathy, and a 1958 Hindi action film, Ten O’Clock .

In 2015, the Centre announced the National Film Heritage Mission, promising to restore 2,200 films across languages. Among the films digitally re - stored are all the eight works of Ritwik Ghatak. In June this year, six of the films were screened at Cinema Ritrovato, a festival of restored movies in Italy, to celebrate Ghatak’s birth centenary.

The success of Scorsese’s Film Foundation in conserving cinema across the world resulted in a major private initiative in India in 2014—Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. The combined efforts of the Film Foundation, Film Heritage Foundation, the central government and the film industry in preserving India’s cinematic heritage are beginning to show results.

With English, August, a restored Indian film will be shown in Venice Classics for the third year in a row—it follows Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin and Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha. Two out of seven films in TIFF Classics last year were from India— Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri and Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975). A restored Indian film has been featured in Cannes Classics for five straight years since 2022. As Gérald Duchaussoy, head of Cannes Classics, told the reporter earlier this year: “It has been a fantastic collaboration with India, which is ideal in the framework of what we are trying to promote—arthouse movies and at the same time accessible films, which will ap - peal to the audience today.”

Restoration is creating new audiences for Indian classics at home and abroad, drawing a young crowd to old movies. As Dev Benegal says, “Restoration is more than preserving a film. It is the preservation of a conversation across generations.”