'Thamp' screening at Cannes highlights Indian film preservation, heritage

The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) had elements of 'Thamp' in its collection, not the original negative, but a duplicate negative struck from a 35mm print. Photo: Film Heritage Foundation

The late Govindan Aravindan's 1978 masterpiece Thamp (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.

Thamp was painstakingly restored by India's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), an organisation founded by filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (Celluloid Man, CzechMate: In Search Of Jiri 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.