Over the last few years, the influence and luxury of streaming platforms has given more people the chance to explore films in various Indian languages, going beyond the popular Hindi or Bollywood cinema. These are mainly from the Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu cinema industries, which are known to produce some of the country’s most experimental and entertaining films. However, even long before people had access to streaming platforms, there were many cinematic gems being produced in those regions, which aren’t easily available today. This highlights the need for film preservation and restoration, especially to showcase India’s rich film history. 

In one such attempt, the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in Mumbai collaborated with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, which runs the restoration programme ‘World Cinema Project’ and Italy’s Cineteca di Bologna to restore the classic 1979 Malayalam film ‘Kummatty’, made by G Aravindan. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of the city-based archive met with K. Ravindranathan Nair, founder of General Pictures, which produced many of Aravindan’s films and secured permission to access the film’s prints from the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). The film was restored by the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna in Italy from two surviving 35 mm prints that had gathered dirt, scratches, and glitches over time.