Film Heritage Foundation Chief on Restoration of Cannes Classics Selection ‘Thamp,’ Indian Film Preservation

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran The late Govindan Aravindan’s 1978 masterpiece “Thamp̄” (“The Circus Tent”) is one of two Indian films at this year’s Cannes Classics selection, alongside Satyajit Ray’s “Pratidwandi” (“The Adversary”) from 1970.“Thamp̄” was painstakingly restored by India’s Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), an organization founded by filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (“Celluloid Man,” “CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel”) in 2014.

Dungarpur facilitated the restoration of Uday Shankar’s landmark film “Kalpana” (1948) by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the restored version of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.

He also collaborated with the World Cinema Foundation again for the restoration of the 1972 Sinhalese film “Nidhanaya” directed by eminent Sri Lankan filmmaker Lester James Peries.

The restoration premiered at Venice in 2013. The restoration of “Thamp̄” was a process that took eight months to achieve. FHF, as a member of the International Federation of Film Archives, also put out a call to all the 171 member institutions around the world to check if they had film elements of “Thamp̄.” However, the only response was from the Fukuoka Archive in Japan that had prints with Japanese subtitles burned into the print, which made the material unusable for a restoration.The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) had elements of “Thamp̄” in its collection, not the original negative, but a duplicate negative struck from a 35mm print. “As per our condition assessment report, there were tears and broken sprockets in the films which needed to be repaired by our conservators,” says Dungarpur. “Also, as the dupe negative was struck from a print, it did not have as much latitude as an original camera.