[Shyam Benegal and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. Photo from Film Heritage Foundation]
June 1 was a red-letter day for Shyam Benegal. One of the most celebrated Indian film directors and screenwriters, regarded as the pioneer of parallel cinema, he was invited to attend and speak at the theatrical release of a film that held a special place in his heart: Manthan. As India’s first-ever crowd-funded film, the 1976 classic was made with tiny contributions from 500,000 farmers to capture the story of Amul.
Despite the fact that 48 years had passed since the film was first released, its appeal hadn’t faded. The restored film received more than its fair share of appreciation from the film industry and film goers, with almost full houses across 100 screens in 50 cities across the country. The 89-year-old veteran director couldn’t help but get emotional recalling that momentous evening. He and key members of his Manthan team—including the cast and crew, cinematographer Govind Nihalani and Naseeruddin Shah —presented the restored film at its premiere in Mumbai. The restored film was even praised internationally at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was displayed in the classics section, just a week before—to a standing ovation.
It isn’t just about Benegal’s legacy and emotional reaction. Manthan’s restoration marks an important turning point in India’s cinematic history. Despite a rich history of cinema (India is the world’s second-largest film producer) and the number of people these films influence, the country has absolutely no culture of storage and restoration—and fixing that is a formidable challenge. As the audience turnout for Manthan showed, these old classics have value and relevance even decades after their original theatrical release.
“We cannot leave it all on one man,” said Benegal.
Benegal was referring to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, former ad filmmaker and the founder of the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit venture. The 54-year-old Dungarpur spent the last decade committing himself to building awareness of the need to preserve the country's cinematic heritage.
“[I want to] reach kids in schools… show them classic films and heritage… and get them to understand that preservation doesn't just mean films from Bombay... it’s the audio-visual heritage,” Dungarpur said in an interview to The Print.
He helped restore several iconic films like Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha (1977), G. Aravindan’s Kummatty (1979) and Nirad N. Mohapatra’s award-winning Maya Miriga (1984)—all of which had fallen on bad times.
[Manthan: Before and after restoration. Image from Film Heritage Foundation]
He was a man on a mission. After a long, arduous journey trying to convince the film fraternity and attract ardent movie-goers, the public acclaim and recognition for the restoration of Manthan was validation that Dungarpur’s entrepreneurial journey was finally starting to deliver results.
Yet instead of shifting gears, Dungarpur is giving shape to a whole new plan that will cement his legacy over the next 5-7 years and make the Film Heritage Foundation bigger and more accessible. “I believe I have achieved just 1% of what I had set out to do. It is just the beginning of what is to come,” he said.
Around 30 conservators are giving shape to a multidisciplinary film archive, a conservation space for posters and memorabilia, a space for celluloid repair and an open film library. The vision is public access, with guides to walk you through the museum.
At an undisclosed location in one corner of Mumbai’s Ballard Estate, Dungarpur and his team are building a new centre. It will house film archives, a conservation space for posters and memorabilia, space for celluloid repair and an open film library. An expanded team of conservationists is in place. Dungarpur says he has sewn up funding for the first phase of his project. The all-new Film Heritage Foundation Centre will likely open its doors to the public in early next year. More on the assumptions behind the new plan a bit later.
Here’s the nub: Dungarpur has remained the moving spirit behind the foundation, almost like a one-man army. Over the next few years, he says he plans to reduce his dependence on himself, remove himself from the equation, and make the foundation self-sufficient. “I want to go back to restoring films. The plan for the centre is to make it so that our conservators can take it forward,” said Dungarpur.
Clearly, Dungarpur is at a crossroads. His decade-long mission to instil a film restoration culture has helped move the needle. There is now grudging respect for his work and the need to preserve and store all kinds of cinematic art—not just feature films, but documentaries, home films, ad films and shorts. Raising money remains a real challenge for the not-for-profit. Now, a clutch of individual funders, attracted by the attention generated by films like Manthan, are gradually starting to step up. (Their list of donors includes names like Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan Anurag Kashyap, Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, Nikkhil Advani, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Tata Trusts, Aamir Khan Productions, Hemendra Kothari Foundation, Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and many more.)
Also, an integral part of his work has been to train a cadre of conservationists in India. Some of those freshly minted conservationists are now coming on board to help run the new centre in Mumbai.
The key, however, is whether he can make his baby, the Film Heritage Foundation, financially sustainable. “The film restoration industry can only be sustainable if it is profitable,” said Benegal. The new centre is part of Dungarpur’s larger attempt to make it happen. But it won’t be easy. So can he pull it off?
The clues possibly lie in the lessons from the first ten years of his entrepreneurial journey—and what he learnt along the way.
The early years
Dungarpur got his love and passion for movies from his maternal grandmother. Growing up, he regularly visited her in Dumraon, Bihar. He was keen to pursue his passion for films after he completed his degree in History (Hons) from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. His uncle, Raj Singh Dungarpur, a stalwart in the cricketing world and a former president of BCCI, invited him to stay with him at his Churchgate Chambers apartment in south Mumbai.
When he first came to Mumbai soon after graduating, he was a reticent and shy young man. Raj Singh asked Shivendra if he watched films the way his uncle watched cricket, to gauge the depth of his passion. During his stay, Shivendra had the opportunity to watch first-hand how his uncle’s legendary charm and joie de vivre worked with a large circle of friends and business associates. That helped a nervous, callow young man discover the self-confidence that he would need to evangelise the power of film restoration later in life. “My uncle was probably the most important man in my life, who gave me everything I can imagine today,” said Dungarpur.
Yet when Shivendra first came to Mumbai to stay with his uncle, Raj Singh had left for a trip to London. Shivendra had no money to stay in a hotel, just a dream to work under the renowned Gulzar. A classmate from Doon offered to take him in.
The friend asked him what he was doing in Bombay and Dungarpur explained he wanted to find Gulzar to work with him. It was as if fate designed this moment when his friend pointed out the window and said that Gulzar was his neighbour! An excited Dungarpur promptly walked over to his house and pitched for a job, leaving his contact number behind. Gulzar himself called a few days later.
During this time, he got the opportunity to enter the film world by working under and assisting Gulzar on Libaas (1998) and Lekin (1990). During this stint, Dungarpur was exposed to the work of non-commercial filmmakers like Satyajit Ray. It opened his eyes to a world of cinema that he had never been exposed to before. Gulzar sensed Dungarpur’s passion for films and advised him to go to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune because “it was an opportunity to see and appreciate world cinema.”
At FTII Pune, he began studying under the guidance of famous film archivist P.K. Nair. He was thrown into a new world of films, which expanded to filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1994, he graduated from FTII, with a deeper knowledge of the film world. Milan Zaveri, a producer, came to FTII to see the previous year’s diploma options. He liked Dungarpur’s work at FTII and asked him to direct a film. At age 22, this was a huge break. Dungarpur recalls sitting at Gaylord's in south Mumbai with another writer to develop the script. However, after shooting 30% of the film, it had to be shelved. This was one of the worst periods of his life, living in railway stations, without work and fighting against his family who disapproved of his working in the film industry.
Good luck struck when D Ramakrishnan, deputy general manager at the National Film Development Corporation, saw some of the mock scenes from Dungarpur’s almost-movie, and he gave him the opportunity to shoot a 45-second ad for Vim, a hand dishwashing brand owned by Hindustan Lever (now called Hindustan Unilever).
This Vim Halwai ad took him to the next level. In 2001, he set up his own ad film production house, Dungarpur Films. Under this banner, Dungarpur produced over 800 films and commercials, and won five IDPA (Indian Documentary Producers’ Association) Gold and three IDPA Silver awards for its advertising campaigns.
Fate had other plans, however. In 2009, Dungarpur came across a Martin Scorsese interview about the restored films presented at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. That’s when inspiration struck. Running parallel to his successful production career, Dungarpur toured Bologna, FTII, the National Film Archives and many local film production houses to better understand the art of film restoration.
What he discovered was disappointing and shocking. After spending lots of time and money sorting through goods and storage boxes, Dungarpur found movies tattered, torn and dried up in dustbins. In one of his posts on X, he narrates the degrading state of film heritage. Madhubala’s negatives were found dumped in cartons. “Most valuable films have been found in the worst conditions.” Seventy to eighty percent of films before the 1950s have been lost due to bad storage, given that film conservation is a more nascent idea compared to art or built heritage conservation, said Deepika Sorabjee, the former head of the Arts and Culture Portfolio of the Tata Trusts since 2014. If producers don’t know how to properly store films and save Indian heritage, then who will, mused Dungarpur.
Amitabh Bachchan proved to be his shining angel. The mega star had always been deeply invested in the cause of film restoration. Once during a conversation, Bachchan complained about not seeing Dilip Kumar films anymore because “they have just gone,” said Dungarpur in an interview with BBC. In fact, it was on Bachchan’s urging that the idea of the Film Heritage Foundation came up and the Foundation was established in 2014. Bachchan directly asked him that he wanted to be the brand ambassador and representative of the Film Heritage Foundation, showing his drive for the cause.
Given the decrepit state of film storage and preservation in the country, it was always going to be a Herculean task. “Even if you don’t have the confidence, you have to at least try. You can’t be scared of life,” said Dungapur.
The challenges
Optimism alone, however, wouldn’t be enough to cut it. There were various challenges to building a restoration culture in India. His first priority was to restore regional films that talk about the local people. “We’re so consumed by contemporary cinema that we forget what else exists. People don’t seem to understand that films go beyond ‘Bollywood Masala’. Even for the Manthan weekend re-release, the media wanted a Bollywood star to inaugurate it (they were more interested in “Katrina ya Dishha ko le ao” than the restored work itself, said Dungarpur).
Deepesh Salgia, the man who led the Shapoorji Pallonji group project to restore and colourise Mughal-e-Azam and to re-release it across India and the United States, said Bollywood blockbusters like Mughal-e-Azam “get orders in 20 more prints” because people want to watch and understand them. Salgia said his biggest challenge in film restoration was funding. When films that aren’t Bollywood or aren’t commercial successes are restored, funding is tough because people don’t lend money to things they don’t understand or feel an emotional connection with.
Now, the funding is vital because the restoration process includes getting copyrights and paperwork which takes time and negotiation; trained conservators and the costs involved in training them; access to high-tech tools and a lab; storage costs to maintain the films at correct temperatures and humidity levels; and finally, investing in marketing to gain traction and make the films more accessible to the public.
The work
The Film Heritage Foundation has tried to make film restoration easy to understand for the general public through two main methods: celebrity-based film festivals and workshops. The Foundation has organised specialised events like “Bachchan: Back to Beginning” for Amitabh Bachchan’s 80th birthday and the Dev Anand 100. Through these festivals, specially chosen restored films from each of these actors were screened across cities in India to appeal to the newer generation as well as rekindle nostalgia for fans. By doing so, the Foundation and its collaborators were able to show the audience what film restoration can look like and allow them a closer peek into the world of preservation and its advantages. “It was important for the public to witness Dev Anand on the big screen in the quality it was meant to be seen,” a spokesperson for the National Film Development Corporation of India, a collaborator with the Film Heritage Foundation, said in an interview to Mid-day.
What Goes Into the Film Repair Process by Founding Fuel
The Film Heritage Foundation has made film restoration open to the general public by setting up workshops across all major centres of film production in India. It directly addresses the lack of conservators and restorers in the country.
After all, there was nobody that knew the art of film preservation and restoration and therefore, nobody to implement it. Dungarpur wanted to change this.
The Foundation has completed seven film preservation and restoration workshops as of 2022, one film projection in practice workshop in 2023 and one workshop for the preservation of audio and videotapes in 2024. These workshops are broadly aimed at teaching the art of film restoration, the conditions in which films should be stored, how to prevent further damage and creating awareness within the community. Several international and local specialists like Andreas Weisser, Florian Hohensteiger, David Walsh, Marianna de Sanctis, Nikhil Ramesh and many more experts were brought to these workshops to teach people the skill of preservation. Each workshop was designed for about 50-60 people. Since Tata Trusts stepped in with funding, selected participants received an 80% scholarship.
This way, not only did it help kickstart an ecosystem of preservation and restoration in India, Dungarpur figured he could find people who were genuinely interested in and passionate about films. He could hire them to work in his preservation team. Other trainees have found jobs in research teams, Kerala Film Archives, Manipur Film Archives, National Film Archive of India, and Godrej Archives, and some have even gone for further studies after completing the training workshops.
Along with Tata Trusts, the Martin Scorsese Film Foundation, Sudhanshu Vats (former CEO of Viacom 18 and MD Designate at Pidilite Industries), Amitabh Bachchan and Navin Natraj (Sales leader at Adobe) have acted as pillars for Dungarpur’s journey in film restoration.
The government, however, provided minimal support at best. This has been brought to light during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown imposed across India. With social distancing and increasing infections, Dungarpur and his people suffered challenges but worked hard through them. While abiding by health norms, Dungarpur continued to go to the storage spaces daily to maintain the perfect temperature for the film reels and carry out deep cleaning. He took the painstaking process of restoring films through a dangerous pandemic, yet people didn’t seem to understand it or its importance.
On the other hand, the Film Heritage Foundation has worked closely with other national governments to build and maintain film archives for them. The team went to Nepal and Sri Lanka on rescue missions to find films. The aim was to set up and help build the film archive in Nepal and restore some films in Sri Lanka. That was not all. The Film Heritage Foundation had interactions with the Afghan Film Archives and was also involved in helping with film preservation efforts in Bangladesh.
However, Dungarpur believes he’s merely scratched the surface. So what’s next?
The big bet
Dungarpur and his team are hard at work to build a new 10,000 square feet centre in Ballard Estate, one of Mumbai’s coveted business districts known for its stately colonial architecture, tree-lined thoroughfares and airy, spacious offices. Around 30 conservators are giving shape to a multidisciplinary film archive, a conservation space for posters and memorabilia, a space for celluloid repair and an open film library.
The inspiration behind the all-new Film Heritage Foundation Centre is to make film preservation and restoration more accessible to the people so that they can experience what it takes to save our film heritage. The vision is public access, guides to walk you through the museum, conservators, researchers, material protectors, specialists in cataloguing posters and memorabilia and preservation professionals trained at the Foundation’s workshops. To recruit these professionals, Dungarpur banked on their passion for film restoration and their drive to preserve Indian heritage. All these people are to be organised under a centre director who will ensure a smooth-running, well-functioning team.
Dungarpur hopes that the centre will eventually be able to run on its own, and the conservation work can be sustained in the long term. The assumption: the increased public visibility, access and awareness will help build an understanding of the film restoration process, and thereby bring in more funds for the cause—and help the Foundation become self-sustainable.
Dungarpur wants his expanded team to step up. He aims to professionalise the operations and reduce the dependence on him. However, it may take some time before the founding team—Shivendra, his wife Teesha Cherian and the core team—can step away from the operations.
The Film Heritage Foundation has a three year grant from Tata Trusts to build a lab in the same building in Ballard Estate. Dungarpur is using the funds to build a space for the Foundation’s restoration and preservation work. The plan is to eventually move this lab to the new centre and integrate it into its operations.
The plan though depends on how the centre fares. If it becomes self-sustaining and is able to attract sizeable retail donations, Dungarpur says the Foundation could also create a new lab at the centre, while running the existing one simultaneously. That option will come up for discussion at a later date.
The total cost of the project is about Rs 10 crore. For the moment, phase one, starting with the restoration work in the old building, where the centre will come up by next year, is underway. Dungarpur claims half the funding for this first phase is sewn up. His challenge is to secure funding for the second phase.
Dungarpur is hoping that more Indian funders will step up, attracted by the wider cause of preserving film heritage. That’s also linked to the new centre. Benegal sounds a note of caution: “One person’s passion is not enough. One person can’t undertake an entire country’s film restoration.”
