Film Heritage Foundation’s Dungarpur on Saving India’s Cinema History

Seventy per cent of India’s films made before 1950 are gone forever. Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is trying to save the rest.

Not long ago, a food-delivery worker turned up at Mumbai’s Regal Cinema on a Thursday evening, caught a screening between shifts, and handed INR1,000 ($10.65) to the wife of Dungarpur. The man told her he could never get to see films like these at a multiplex, Dungarpur recalls, but here the 6:30 show fit between his deliveries – and he wanted to contribute.

For Dungarpur, it was the kind of moment that makes the rest of it worthwhile – the years of chasing deteriorating prints across continents, the workshops, the fundraising, the slow work of persuading a country that its cinema was worth saving. “I believe in showing films to the common man, to people on the street, to anyone who wants to watch cinema,” he says. “There’s not a single moment when I’m not thinking about cinema.”

The packed weekly screenings at Regal – free, open to all, with a capacity of 1,400, every Thursday night – are one expression of that belief. The other is the work itself: Film Heritage Foundation, which Dungarpur founded in 2014, has titles premiering at Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto, workshops that have trained close to 500 archivists, and a reach that now extends to Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan. It remains the only non-governmental body in India doing this work.

The journey to all of this began at a festival in Italy. Dungarpur was a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India who had moved into advertising – over 1,500 commercials, by his count – when he read an interview in which Martin Scorsese spoke about the Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna’s annual celebration of restored and rediscovered cinema.. He went. He saw what other countries were doing to preserve and celebrate their film heritage. And he came home asking a question he couldn’t stop asking. It dawned upon him, he says, what was happening to India’s heritage. “What about India? What about myself?”

The experience led directly to “Celluloid Man,” his documentary portrait of P.K. Nair, the founding director of the National Film Archive of India, and to his involvement in locating the elements that would allow Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation to restore Uday Shankar’s “Kalpana” (1948) – a film that had its world premiere at Cannes in 2012. Two years later, FHF was born.

From the beginning, Dungarpur was clear about what kind of organization it would be. Not a repository for Bollywood’s Hindi-language cinema alone, but a defender of India’s full linguistic and regional range. “Our regional cinema is the cinema which represents our country the best,” he says. Restored FHF titles have come from the Indian states of Manipur, Karnataka, Odisha and Kerala, alongside Hindi and Bengali-language productions. He is also director of the Mumbai Film Festival, where he has introduced a strand called MAMI Independent devoted to films from across the country – from Meghalaya, from Sikkim, from wherever the work is rooted in a particular place and time.

The work is as much a detective story as it is preservation. For “Sholay – The Final Cut,” FHF’s restoration of Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 classic that features in the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Film Festival program, there was no original camera negative to work from. The search for usable elements, conducted through the FIAF international archive network, eventually turned up material in London that contained something no one had seen since the film’s original release: the censored climax, and two deleted scenes. Dungarpur was six years old when “Sholay” first opened. His mother thought it too violent for him to watch. “All of us knew the dialogs, we knew the characters, we knew each and every scene,” he says. “And believe me, when I was restoring the film” – he pauses – “there was no negative.”

The personal charge runs through much of the slate. FHF is currently restoring Kamal Amrohi’s “Pakeezah,” a film Dungarpur first encountered as a child through his grandmother, the Maharani of Dumraon, who introduced him to cinema. Shyam Benegal’s “Bhumika” is also in progress – a particular challenge, as only a single print survives. Dev Benegal’s “English, August” is in the pipeline. “You take it like a child,” he says. “You want to show it to the young generation. These great films found a new home, and a new generation views it differently.”

The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Film Festival program also includes Satyajit Ray’s “Days and Nights in the Forest” (Aranyer Din Ratri, 1970), which had its restored world premiere at Cannes 2025 with filmmaker Wes Anderson presenting it. Anderson called it a near-forgotten gem and another masterpiece from Ray. “Anything signed Satyajit Ray must be cherished and preserved,” he said.

It is that discovery – the encounter between a great film and an audience that has never seen it – that drives the Las Palmas showcase, where FHF is presenting six restorations across Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali and Sinhala, and where Dungarpur is serving on the jury. The selection runs from Benegal’s “The Churning (Manthan, 1976) and Bimal Roy’s “Two Acres of Land’ (Do Bigha Zamin, 1953) to Aravindan Govindan’s “The Circus Tent” (Thampu, 1978) and Sumitra Peries’ “The Girls” (Gehenu Lamai, 1978) – the latter now the first Sri Lankan film to have been released theatrically in France. “It’s a great feeling – almost – that some part of the world, a restoration of ours is getting screened, whether it’s in Cairo or Brazil or Poland or Taiwan,” Dungarpur says. “The journey we took from 2014, when people didn’t even understand what film preservation and restoration was – it’s just incredible.”

What comes next is the Moving Image Centre, which FHF has been building in Mumbai since 2024. Its conservation spaces are already operational; a library is under construction. The vision is a public hub where anyone can walk in and get lost in the history of Indian cinema – not unlike a Thursday night at Regal, but permanent. “I grew up watching stars on the large screen, not straight up but looking up,” Dungarpur says. “And that’s what I feel like, even now, when I go into that theater. I’m like a child. I’m lost in that world. And I want to give back that love and that feeling.”