Annapurna Studios spent seven years restoring Nagarjuna’s cult classic Siva, overcoming damaged negatives, missing audio, and an intense frame-by-frame cleanup process. The remastered version debuted at IFFI, earning praise from Nagarjuna and industry veteran
Still from Siva
How does one even begin restoring a classic? With patience, persistence and a lot of faith. That’s exactly what the technical team at Annapurna Studios relied on when they took on the formidable task of remastering Nagarjuna’s iconic Siva for a grand theatrical comeback in a premium, cutting-edge format.
Nagarjuna lauds Siva remastered version
At the 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, Nagarjuna joined a special session to break down how the game-changing Ram Gopal Varma debut underwent a near-impossible transformation, which finally hit the big screens earlier this month after a seven-year odyssey led by CV Rao, Chief Technology Officer at Annapurna Studios.
“The remastered version of ‘Siva’ is stunning. I see so many films coming to life with this. I was talking to Ramesh Sippy sir and told him that I’d love to hear the sound of the coin in ‘Sholay’ in a new way! Since this is the 50th year of Annapurna Studio, we thought what better film to do this than ‘Siva’, which remains a cult classic,” said Nagarjuna at IFFI, where the new version of the film was screened.
The team began planning the restoration even before 2019, fully aware of the mountain ahead. The negatives were deteriorating rapidly, and with labs shutting down, maintaining them—controlling temperature, cleaning them every few months—had become nearly impossible.
On reviving Siva
“That’s when we realised we needed to digitise and secure the film properly. When we finally went back to inspect the picture negatives, they were so sticky we couldn’t even unroll them. We had to run them through four to five rounds of ultrasonic cleaning just to make them dry and rollable for scanning,” Rao said.
A 4K scan was eventually achieved, but the relief was short-lived: the footage was riddled with extensive “scratches, dust and torn frames”. The team had to clean the film frame by frame, a process that took eight to ten months.
The real shock came when they examined the audio and found that two reels of the sound negative were “completely damaged”.
“We checked whatever was available on YouTube, but that wasn’t good enough for a theatrical restoration,” Rao said, adding that the team had hit a huge roadblock, when an ambitious, but ultimately miraculous, idea came through: of finding the original prints stored by exhibitors.
“Fortunately, our distribution team at Annapurna Studios helped us track down prints across the Telugu states, approaching passionate exhibitors who still stored old film prints despite the space and conditions required. After reaching nearly 20 such exhibitors, the team found two surviving reels that allowed us to recover the missing audio!” Rao noted.
Backed by Annapurna Studios, 'Siva' is regarded as one of the greatest Indian films of all time, which, upon its release in 1989, broke box office records and garnered unprecedented acclaim. Apart from its enormous box office success, 'Siva' was also featured in the Indian Panorama mainstream section of the 13th IFFI (1990).
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