Restoring old films in this country is perhaps as rare as the films themselves are. Dancer Uday Shankar made only one film, Kalpana (1948). And it is possibly India’s first all-out dance extravaganza independently produced featuring over 80 dance sequences.
Director Martin Scorsese’s World Cine Foundation restored the print for a special screening at the 65th Cannes Film Festival in 2012.
“We have lost a colossal amount of our film heritage and we continue to lose some everyday,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, filmmaker and founder of the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation.
He teamed up with Martin Scorsese's non-profit Film Foundation and a restoration lab in Italy to launch a film restoration school in India.
In this brief introduction video, Martin Scorsese extols the film's uniqueness not just as a dance film, but about the form as art. He goes on to reveal how Guru Dutt was an assistant on the film.
But that's not all. Here is a before and after video of the process work shown in panels. The results are beautiful to watch.
You can watch the film here.