Showing posts with label Shivendra Singh Dungarpur interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shivendra Singh Dungarpur interview. Show all posts
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur explains how he restored Pakeezah and kept its soul alive for the audiences in 2026
4:53 PM
For Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the main challenge about restoring Pakeezah was to keep its soul alive for the audiences of 2026
Komal RJ Panchal (MID-DAY; September 27, 2026)
Midway through our conversation about restoring Pakeezah, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s phone rang. “Mr [Amitabh] Bachchan is calling me,” he said, stepping away for a moment, for Bachchan to compliment him. It was a small, fitting reminder of how much Kamal Amrohi’s 1972 classic still means to people, more than 50 years on.
For Dungarpur, this one was personal. He grew up watching Pakeezah — his grandmother loved it — and had wanted to restore it for years. That finally became possible after he met Amrohi’s children, Tajdar and Rukhsar, and, through their son Bilal, convinced the family to let him take it on. Nearly two years later, he calls it one of the most fulfilling restorations of his career.
The problem with no “mother”
The first roadblock was simple but severe: there was no original camera negative. What survived was third-generation material — copies of copies, each one having bled away detail. “The original camera negative is the most important, it’s called the mother for that reason,” Dungarpur explains.
“It’s the material that came directly out of the camera.” He compares it to the difference between a high-resolution photo and a version that’s been screenshotted and reshared a dozen times over. “If you have the source, you have the origin.”
With nothing but degraded copies to work from, the team went almost frame by frame, pulling out whatever information they could. He’d faced a similar problem restoring Sholay (1975) — but Pakeezah’s tangled colour history made this one harder still.
When a colour disappears
Pakeezah actually began life as a black-and-white film before the switch to colour, eventually shot on Eastman Kodak stock in CinemaScope. But decades on, the surviving prints couldn’t be trusted to show what those colours actually were. The clearest case was Meena Kumari’s costume in Inhi Logon — the prints had faded so badly that nobody could agree what shade it was even supposed to be.
Rather than guess, the team went back to old photographs and worked with the Amrohi family to match the dress to its real, original tones. For Dungarpur, that’s the heart of restoration: not repainting a film in whatever colours look good now, but doing the research to get back to what audiences actually saw on release.
Fourteen years in the making
Part of what makes Pakeezah so tricky is that it didn’t get made in one continuous stretch — the production dragged on for roughly 14 years. It started in black and white, including the earliest version of Inhi Logon, before shifting to colour partway through. The delay even reshaped the cast: Ashok Kumar, originally attached to the film, had aged out of his part by the time shooting resumed, and Raj Kumar stepped in as the lead. Restoring the film meant preserving something that had physically passed through several different eras of Indian cinema before it ever reached a screen — which is part of why Dungarpur sees it as a film that shaped generations after it, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali onward.
Don’t scrub away the soul
For Dungarpur, restoration isn’t about making an old film look new. It’s about keeping what made the film feel the way it did — grain included. “Grain is like the bloodstream in your body,” he says. Strip it all out chasing a spotless digital image, and you lose something essential. That matters more now that audiences are used to the over-sharpened look of streaming platforms. “What does your eye see when you open your eyes, and what does your Amazon or Netflix show you? What they show isn’t what you actually see. There’s a difference.”
Celluloid, he says, came closer to how the eye naturally perceives things — so the goal with Pakeezah wasn’t to make it look freshly shot today, but to bring back its lost detail and colour while keeping its original texture intact.
Can AI bring back what’s gone?
That same philosophy shapes how Dungarpur thinks about AI in restoration. He doesn’t dismiss it outright, but he’s wary of calling something “restoration” when it’s really recreation.
His analogy: if a piece of the Taj Mahal’s original marble falls off, the instinct should be to track down the real marble first — not swap in a nicer-looking replacement just because it’s available. “There are shops outside selling even better marble than that. We could do that too. It won’t match.”
If the original element still exists, he says, use it. If it’s truly gone, AI might have a role to play — but the line between restoring and recreating has to stay clear. “There’s a lot of manual work in film preservation right now. Maybe AI evolves into something more. Whether that makes things better, we’ll have to see.”
He points to the runaway success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — shot on celluloid, no digital effects, no AI — as evidence people haven’t lost their appetite for the real thing. He sees the same pull in how audiences are responding to restored classics like Sholay at Film Heritage Foundation screenings. “There must be a reason people want to connect back to their roots.”
Did you know?
International première
The restored 4K version of the 1972 classic Pakeezah is set to have its world première at the Festival Lumière in Lyon, France, in October, followed by a screening at the BFI London Film Festival in the United Kingdom.
The original negative is gone
Pakeezah’s original camera negative — the closest surviving source to what was filmed — was unavailable for the restoration. Dungarpur’s team had to work with much poorer, third-generation material.
That “pink” costume may not have been pink
The surviving prints had faded so severely that the colour of Meena Kumari’s costume in “Inhi Logon” was difficult to establish. The team referred to photographs and consulted the Amrohi family to recreate the original colour tones.
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Soumya Vajpayee (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 3, 2026)
Some love affairs start early. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s began at three, in Bihar, at his grandmother’s side. Maharani Usha Rani of Dumraon was, he says, “absolutely crazy about Pakeezah”, and the LPs of Inhi Logon Ne and Chalte Chalte spun repeatedly at home. “The colours, the impact of Meena Kumari, the songs, the story. There was something magnetic about that film.”
Nearly six decades later, that fascination has become a two-year labour of love. This month, Film Heritage Foundation’s 4K restoration of Kamal Amrohi’s 1972 classic has its world premiere at Festival Lumière in Lyon, presented by Thierry Frémaux, before a gala premiere at the BFI IMAX during the BFI London Film Festival.
A negative gone to ruin
It very nearly did not happen. After Dungarpur persuaded Amrohi’s children, Tajdar and Rukhsaar, and grandson Bilal to entrust the film to FHF, he inspected the original camera negative. “I was utterly distraught because the film had melted,” he says. “In fact, the images from the negative had gone.”
Pakeezah already had a complicated history. Amrohi began it in 1956 in black and white, then restarted in Eastmancolor in 1958. Production stretched across some 15 years, through cast changes, rewrites and personal upheaval; part of the early negative was lost in a studio fire.
With the camera negative unusable, the restoration became cinematic archaeology. FHF turned to a 35mm interpositive in its collection and a colour reversal intermediate preserved by the NFDC-National Film Archive of India. Both bore the scars of age, from scratches and mould to chemical deterioration and faded colour. The work was undertaken at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna.
“You’re almost looking at something which is third generation,” Dungarpur says. “You have to make it look like that film was one of the most important films in India’s cinematic history. That was really challenging.”
The hunt for Meena Kumari’s colours
Colour proved particularly tricky. The film had been shot across so many years that its sections had aged differently, while no member of the original crew survives to say exactly what Amrohi wanted.
His family became the restoration team’s memory bank. Rukhsaar had photographs and costume references; Tajdar, who knew the sets as a boy, remembered individual scenes. An original still helped establish the colour of Meena Kumari’s costume in Inhi Logon Ne.
“You need a reference and a history,” says Dungarpur. “The research into restoration, into piecing together the history, is very important so that you don’t go wrong.”
The aim was to preserve the richness of Josef Wirsching’s cinematography and early Eastmancolor. “Eastman Kodak had just come in, and it had very vibrant colours. I was trying to keep that vibrancy.”
There was better news with the soundtrack. The original sound negative survived, allowing Ghulam Mohammed’s music to be restored in 5.1, along with Amrohi’s own voice. Even the train demanded fidelity. “Kamal Amrohi was so particular about getting that particular sound of the train,” Dungarpur says.
Giving Amrohi his due
Dungarpur believes Amrohi himself has never quite received his place in Indian cinema. Before Pakeezah came the eerie romance of Mahal in 1949, with Lata Mangeshkar’s Aayega Aanewala, and his work on Mughal-E-Azam. Dungarpur also counts the lesser-discussed Daera among his favourites.
“Kamal Amrohi is one of the greatest Indian directors who’s not got his dues,” he says. Pakeezah, with its exquisite Urdu, music and sumptuous visual world, perhaps makes the argument most completely. “It is the language, the Urdu language, and the way it’s been crafted, and the characters, and the story in it.”
Back to the big screen
For Dungarpur, saving films also means putting them before audiences. FHF now has two functioning 35mm projectors at Mumbai’s Regal Cinema, where screenings have drawn a new audience for old films.
He wishes more of Indian cinema’s biggest names would publicly champion preservation. Christopher Nolan, who first came to India with artist Tacita Dean to advocate for celluloid, has remained a supporter of FHF with producer Emma Thomas; Wes Anderson worked with the foundation on its restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri.
“Public advocacy for film preservation is something I feel we miss in Indian cinema,” says Dungarpur, citing Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation as a model.
But Pakeezah may be the most eloquent argument he can make. “I always wanted to restore Pakeezah because it was one of my earliest memories of my childhood.” Now, all these years later, he has made sure somebody else can have that first memory too.
Films, esp those on celluloid, need to be saved; There were no trained archivists to take over NFAI after P K Nair-Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
4:29 PM
Filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur started his Film Heritage Foundation in 2014, which has since introduced over 150 individuals to the highly specialised world of film preservation. He talks to Mohua Chatterjee about the shortage of trained archivists in India and how to fix it
Mohua Chatterjee (THE TIMES OF INDIA; November 2, 2018)
Why did you think of taking up preserving films when the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) is there for the purpose?
Countries like France, Italy, Germany, the UK and US to name a few, have several film archives for preservation of their moving image heritage and very few of these archives are run by government or are dependent solely on government funds. India has an over 100-year-old film history and we are the most prolific film industry in the world, besides being one of the most diverse. It would be impossible for a single archive to preserve even a fraction of the best films that we produce.
Film preservation is a highly specialized field that requires trained archivists. NFAI was run by P K Nair, for whom it was a passionate obsession, but he was one of a kind. There were no trained archivists or curators to take over after him.
My decision to establish Film Heritage Foundation, a non-government organisation, was an outcome of discussions with the film industry as we felt we should start our own movement, rather than wait for government to do all the work. Many more film archives and public-private partnerships have to be encouraged if we are to safeguard our films.
How many films have you preserved and how do you store them?
Currently we have a growing film collection of about 300 titles on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm formats that is preserved in a temperature-controlled storage facility. We maintain films of leading personalities like Amitabh Bachchan, Shyam Benegal, N N Sippy, Mani Ratnam, Kumar Shahani, Govind Nihalani, Chitra Palekar, Onir, Shaad Ali, Sumitra Bhave, Sunil Sukthankar among others. The films are periodically checked, cleaned and repaired with inspection reports on their condition.
Every day we get a call asking for help to rescue films. Recently I was invited by the Odisha State Archives to look at their collection and advise them. We found hundreds of films, some very important ones, lying abandoned and in urgent need of preservation. This is why advocacy is a priority for our foundation as we try to reach out to different parts of the country to spread the word that films, and especially those on celluloid, need to be saved.
Tell us about your documentary film Celluloid Man?
I always had an interest in preservation – something that I learnt from my father. I had read an interview with Martin Scorsese about the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy where they screened restored films. I was fascinated by this and attended the festival.
On my return from Bologna, I went to meet P K Nair in Pune for whom building the collection of the NFAI had been a single-minded purpose. This meeting brought back all the old memories of the time I spent at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) when Nair saheb had shown us so many wonderful films. Thanks to him we began to love and live for films.
So Celluloid Man was really an organic process. It was a journey of discovery. Nair saheb had an encyclopaedic memory not just of the films in the Archive, but of all the films he had seen in his lifetime.
The history of Indian cinema as well as the terrible loss of this heritage unfolded over many hours and days of conversations with Nair sahib, and is captured in Celluloid Man. But I realised that to really make a change, I couldn’t stop with the film, which was just the first step and gave birth to the foundation in a sense.
As for your seven-hour film on Jiri Menzel, you may get international festival acclaim but how will you show it to regular audiences?
I make films based on what I feel at the moment and what inspires me. It is not about indulgence or need. Why should there be an ending? This film has been a labour of love that has been eight years in the making. It took me almost a year of phone calls and emails to convince Menzel to meet me in a cafe in Prague in 2010. And so began a conversation and a friendship that has culminated in a seven-hour film that not only explores the deceptively whimsical comic films of Menzel, but also discovers the fascinating world of the Czechoslovak New Wave. This was a movement peopled by brilliant artists paradoxically making films funded by an oppressive regime, beautifully disguising their subversiveness through humour and artistry.
I would like to show it to general audiences. I firmly believe that we should not underestimate our audiences. The journey of this film has just begun and I hope that it will find its own audience.
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