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Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Italy honours Film Heritage Foundation Director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur with the prestigious Vittorio Boarini award
This prestigious award recognizes Dungarpur's extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent. Almost 10-15 years ago, when film restoration experts in India first began sounding the alarm that 75% of early Indian cinema had vanished due to neglect, decay, and indifference, the revelation was both staggering and sobering. The loss seemed irreversible. But this month, at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, one of the most tireless champions of India's cinematic legacy received a powerful global endorsement. National Award-winning filmmaker, archivist and Director of Film Heritage Foundation, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur , was conferred with the esteemed Vittorio Boarini Award at a special ceremony recently, during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy by Gian Luca Farinelli, Director of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. This prestigious award recognizes Dungarpur's extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent. Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Institute of Delhi says," The award is a very prestigious acknowledgement of Shivendra and Teesha's work. When Shivendra stated that 75% of early Indian cinema is lost due to neglect and absence of conservation, it was clear that unless someone started the process, future Indian generations would not have been able to know their heritage.' by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Dementia and Memory Loss Has Been Linked To This Common Thing. Memory Health Learn More Undo Italy has honoured Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and Teesha Cherian of the Film Heritage Foundation. Italy, through Bologna's Cineteca di Bologna and the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, has emerged as a key international partner in India's cinematic salvage mission. Many of the restored Indian classics that have travelled to global film festivals - Ishanou, Aranyer Din Ratri etc have been brought back to life with Italy's technical support and curatorial platform. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur states, "I am deeply honoured to be the recipient of the Vittorio Boarini Award which is a recognition of my work in film preservation under the aegis of Film Heritage Foundation that I founded in 2014. It has been a very challenging undertaking to work towards saving endangered film heritage in our part of the world with limited resources and support over a decade. But I am proud to say that we have built a movement for film preservation not just in India, but in neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal and achieved many milestones in an incredibly short span of time from training film archivists to doing world-class restorations of Indian films to bringing classic cinema back to the big screen and preserving every bit of film heritage we can find. It is wonderful to have this work appreciated and acknowledged and it only reaffirms our commitment to the cause as there is so much more to do.' Shivendra Singh Dungarpur Andrea Anastasio, director of Italian Institute of New Delhi says, "This is enough to understand the value and the relevance of the work the Film Heritage Institute does. After the award ceremony, we could see the restored copy of Aranyer Din Ratri, by Satyajit Ray at the Arlecchino Theatre, a great hall with a fantastic screen . It was a house full screening and it was really amazing to see the crowd of young viewers attending the screening. That's what Bologna is also relevant a year, for ten days the city is flooded with film buffs from all over the world in occasion of 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' (literally The Re-Found Cinema). It's a festival spread all over Bologna, where restored old films from all over the world are screened in the new splendour of 4K in the city's theatre, while every night a giant screening outdoor happens at Piazza Maggiore, exactly where the restored copy of Sholay was screened last 27th June." Dungarpur credits the Cineteca di Bologna as the inspiration behind the establishment of the Film Heritage Foundation, noting its integral role in the foundation's journey over the past fifteen years. Further elaborating on his personal connection to the Cineteca di Bologna and the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival he adds, "I first attended the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival conducted by Cineteca di Bologna in 2010 and it changed my life. I saw the best of world cinema beautifully restored, and entered a whole new world where people were dedicated to saving films for posterity and bringing them back to life again. I went as a filmmaker and cinephile and emerged wearing another hat of a film archivist and have been going back to Bologna every year since then. " The presentation of the Vittorio Boarini Award to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur highlights his significant impact on safeguarding cinematic history and underscores the global importance of film preservation efforts. The Vittorio Boarini Award, instituted in 2022 by the Cinetecadi Bologna as part of its annual Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, is an international recognition honoring individuals or institutions who have made exceptional contributions to the preservation, restoration, promotion or dissemination of cinema as cultural heritage. It is named in tribute to Vittorio Boarini (1938–2021), the visionary founder and first director of the Cineteca di Bologna, whose efforts were instrumental in transforming it into one of the world's foremost film archives. The award celebrates a lifelong commitment to cinema preservation, international advocacy for film heritage, leadership in archive building and programming and work that bridges archival and public access to classic and rare films.
News18
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
50 Years Of Sholay: Restored And Timeless
The restored Sholay will keep film scholars busy for a while; but I hope it claims a small place in the consciousness of an audience born many years after it set screens on fire On Friday, 27 June, the fully restored uncut version of Ramesh Sippy's Sholay had its world premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy. 'It was a magnificent evening in Bologna yesterday to watch the restored Sholay play out for the first time on a giant screen in the Piazza Maggiore in front of an audience that filled the seats, the steps around the square and even the floor as they watched one of India's most iconic films come back to life 50 years after it was released," Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation, which has painstakingly restored the classic, posted on Facebook. This version includes the film's original ending—changed due to objection from the censors—and deleted scenes. This work by the foundation could be the most important such project in India till date, given the near-mythical status that Sholay enjoys in our cinema. Sholay, billed as 'the greatest story ever told", was released on 15 August 1975. It went on to earn a still-standing record of 60 golden jubilees (50-week runs) across India, and was the first film to celebrate a silver jubilee at over 100 theatres. It was screened continuously at Bombay's 1,500-seat Minerva theatre for over five years. As a pre-teen schoolboy in Bombay, I watched it on Sunday, 18 August. Some 25 years later—I had watched Sholay many times more by then—quite by chance, the uncut version came to me, the one that Ramesh Sippy had originally submitted to the Censor Board. A colleague had bought a bootlegged CD of the film in Kuala Lumpur and watched it over the weekend. On Monday, a very puzzled man walked into my cabin. 'Sir," he asked, 'did Thakur Baldev Singh kill Gabbar Singh?" 'No," I said. 'He's about to, when the police arrive and stop him." 'But here he does!" my colleague said, producing his CD. I immediately knew that he had inadvertently bought a rare gem. It was fairly well-known among fans that Sippy and screenwriters Salim-Javed had originally killed off Gabbar, but the censors had insisted on getting the climax reworked. I borrowed the CD and watched it that night. The uncensored version is of course longer than the current one available to the public, but two scenes stand out. Young Ahmed, played by Sachin Pilgaonkar, is captured by Gabbar's men and brought to his den, where he is resting. Chunks of meat on a skewer are being roasted on a fire behind him. The bandits tell Gabbar: 'This boy is from Ramgarh. He was going to the station and we found him on the way." Gabbar thinks for a few seconds, watching a fly crawling down his forearm, then smiles and slaps it dead. The next sequence is Ahmed's horse, carrying his corpse, walking into Ramgarh. This is what see in the current censor-certified version. In the uncensored film, after he kills the fly, Gabbar shouts: 'Have you heard, all of you? The people of Ramgarh have started running away from the village now!" Ahmed asks Gabbar to let him go. The bandit replies: 'Tum jaante ho main kaun hoon? Hum Ramgarh ke baap hain, baap ('Do you know who I am? I am Ramgarh's father)." He then asks Ahmed to rub his nose on the ground at his feet. When Ahmed does not move, an enraged Gabbar yells at him to come forward. The young man tries to attack him and the bandit brings him down with one blow. His men are about to shoot Ahmed, but Gabbar stops them. 'You think a man feels any pain when a bullet kills him?" he says. 'Isko toh main tadpa tadpa ke maarunga, bahut tadpa tadpa ke maarunga (I'm going to give him a painful death, a very painful death)." He picks up a sharp iron rod from the fire, yanks Ahmed's head up by his hair and holds the rod next to his eye. We then see Ahmed's horse carrying his master's corpse home. In the current Sholay, in the climactic fight sequence between Thakur and Gabbar, a bloodied and exhausted Gabbar is lying on the ground and Thakur is about to kill him by stamping his face with his hob-nailed sandals when the police arrive and dissuade him. In the uncut version, the bloodied and exhausted Gabbar is still staggering around. Thakur is about to strike him again when he notices that right behind Gabbar is a sharp iron rod protruding from one of the two stone pillars which the bandit had used to string him up to hack off his arms. Thakur leaps, hammering Gabbar on his chest. Gabbar falls on the rod, gets skewered and dies. Veeru then drapes Thakur's shawl round his shoulders and holds him tight. Thakur rests his head on Veeru's shoulder and weeps uncontrollably. Over the years, Ramesh Sippy has said in several interviews that he did not agree with the cuts that the censors demanded, but had to comply because this was during the Emergency—a time of tough censorship. Even after the censored Sholay was released, there was a furore in the media about its 'extreme violence and cruelty"—that the film should have been certified Adults Only. By today's standards, the violence in Sholay is rather mild. And there is remarkably little blood that we see on the screen—only a few bullet wounds. Yet, in my opinion, Sholay is one of the few Indian films that the censors actually improved a bit, though absolutely accidentally. Film Heritage Foundation has recovered a priceless historic artefact of Indian cinema, but is the uncut version better than the one we are familiar with? My answer is no. The cruelty in Sholay lies in the acts that Gabbar commits, but the gory violence directly associated with them is off-screen. We do not see Thakur's arms being chopped off or his grandchild being shot by Gabbar. When Gabbar swats a fly dead, we know that the innocent Ahmed will be killed and the effect is far more chilling than a graphic description of how he is killed. The latter—with its iron skewer—is merely stomach-churning. The censors gave the scene a haunting—and aesthetic—subtlety by leaving the details of Ahmed's horrific end to the viewer's imagination. But the original ending with Gabbar dying exactly where he had chopped off Thakur's arms is much more emotionally satisfying than the current one. It is poetic justice, neatly closing the loop between the atrocities that Thakur suffered and the punishment that Gabbar deserved. I will certainly enjoy a Sholay with this sequence replacing the current one. But the dacoits chasing Basanti's horse-carriage for a full five minutes, which is a very long time in a movie? I can live without that. Or more of Soorma Bhopali and the jailor? We do not need that. Sippy himself pared Sholay down a few times. The film I watched in its 100-th week re-release was shorter, with a few sequences dropped or shortened from the 15 August 1975 one. The current DVD and streaming platform versions are even shorter. In 2007, I had the dire misfortune of watching Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, Varma's unauthorised remake of Sholay. The next day I wrote a column in the newspaper I was working for then that it was an act of barbarism—Varma had no clue what made Sholay… Sholay. Salim Khan, co-writer of Sholay, read the piece and took the trouble of finding my phone number, and called me. The conversation lasted more than an hour. I asked him about the various Hollywood films that he and Javed Akhtar had 'lifted" ideas and entire sequences from—after all, the basic Sholay storyline itself is redux The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Some of these sources are well-documented—Once Upon A Time In The West (the train robbery sequence and Gabbar killing Thakur's grandchild), The Professionals (the final chase as Veeru and Jai are escaping Gabbar's den with Basanti), Garden of Evil (the card draws inspired Jai's coin-flipping tricks that underpin the entire narrative)—and so on. I told him that I thought that every copied sequence was done far better in Sholay than the originals. Then I asked him the question that he must have faced a thousand times. 'Who was the real writer in Salim-Javed?" I asked. 'That's a wrong question," he replied. 'The man who sits outside a post office, a pen stuck behind his ear, waiting to fill up money order forms for poor illiterate people—he too writes (Woh bhi toh likhta hai). The correct question is 'Sochta kaun hai (Who is the thinker)?" I did not press that point. He revealed that Sippy was upset that some upstart had remade his epic, but he had told Sippy that Varma's misbegotten attempt would only add to Sholay's glory and make its status in the Indian film pantheon even firmer. Varma's film, I assume, would have been withdrawn by the theatres within a week. top videos View all I intend to watch the uncut Sholay when it is released in theatres in India. Of course Gen Z-ers may find it boring—it is almost three and a half hours long—and even insipid—computing power has made action sequences incredibly more awesome. Some may find it misogynistic. But like all great films, Sholay's fundamental themes remain universal and timeless—justice, loyalty and sacrifice. The restored Sholay will of course keep film scholars busy for a while; but I hope that it also claims a small place in the consciousness of an audience born many years after the film set screens all across India on fire. The reviewer is former managing editor of Outlook, former editor of The Financial Express, and founding editor of Outlook Money, Open, and Swarajya magazines. He has authored several books. He tweets @sandipanthedeb. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication. tags : Sholay view comments Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: July 01, 2025, 14:00 IST News opinion Opinion | 50 Years Of Sholay: Restored And Timeless Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Time of India
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Sholay's grand restoration premieres at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival
In a momentous occasion for , Ramesh Sippy's iconic film Sholay received a grand screening at the prestigious Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy, on June 27, 2025. This special event marked the world premiere of the film's fully restored, uncut version, complete with its original ending and previously deleted scenes, commemorating its 50th anniversary. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The screening took place in the magnificent open-air setting of Piazza Maggiore, providing a truly cinematic experience for thousands of cinephiles. The painstaking three-year restoration effort was a collaborative project between the Film Heritage Foundation and Sippy Films, ensuring that this cinematic masterpiece will captivate new generations with its authentic vision.
Time of India
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur receives prestigious Vittorio Boarini award for film preservation
Filmmaker, archivist and director of the Film Heritage Foundation, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur , was conferred with the esteemed Vittorio Boarini Award at a special ceremony on June 27, 2025, during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy. This prestigious award recognises Dungarpur's extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent. The Vittorio Boarini Award, instituted in 2022 by the Cineteca di Bologna as part of its annual Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, is an international recognition honouring individuals or institutions who have made exceptional contributions to the preservation, restoration, promotion or dissemination of cinema as cultural heritage. It is named in tribute to Vittorio Boarini (1938–2021), the visionary founder and first director of the Cineteca di Bologna, whose efforts were instrumental in transforming it into one of the world's foremost film archives. The award celebrates a lifelong commitment to cinema preservation, international advocacy for film heritage, leadership in archive building and programming and work that bridges archival and public access to classic and rare films. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Dhoni's Exclusive Home Interior Choice? HomeLane Get Quote Undo Talking about the award, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur said, "I am deeply honoured to be the recipient of the Vittorio Boarini Award, named after an extraordinary man who founded the Cineteca di Bologna, an institution and its people that has had a profound impact on me." He credits the Cineteca di Bologna as the inspiration behind the establishment of the Film Heritage Foundation, noting its integral role in the foundation's journey over the past fifteen years. Further elaborating on his personal connection to the Cineteca di Bologna and the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival he added, "I first attended the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival conducted by Cineteca di Bologna in 2010 and it changed my life. I saw the best of world cinema beautifully restored, and entered a whole new world where people were dedicated to saving films for posterity and bringing them back to life again. I went as a filmmaker and cinephile and emerged wearing another hat of a film archivist and have been going back to Bologna every year since then. "
India.com
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
Dharmendra reveals whom he considers the real ‘hero' in Sholay, Not Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bachchan, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar
Dharmendra reveals whom he considers the real 'hero' in Sholay, Not Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bachchan, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar You won't believe whom Dharmendra calls the real hero of Sholay- it's not an actor, director or writer, but... By Onam Gupta Advertisement Dharmendra reveals whom he considers the real 'hero' in Sholay, Not Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bachchan, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar The uncut version of the newly resorted Ramesh Sippy's blockbuster Sholay had its worldwide premiere at the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Italy on June 27. The special screening took place at the large open-air Pizza Maggiore, known for hosting lavish and memorable film events. The restoration, was a join project between Film Heritage Foundation and Sippy Films Pvt. Ltd, commemorating the film's 50th anniversary. According to Dharmendra, who was the real hero in Sholay? Dharmendra who starred in the film, called Sholay 'the 8th Wonder of the World.' He also reminisced some of his favourite scenes, stating, 'the film is being restored and I am sure it will have the same success as it had 50 years ago. Who can forget the dialogues of Salim-Javed and the direction of Ramesh Sippy? So many scenes have gone down in the history of Indian cinema and every character became a star. But the real hero was the coin.' Advertisement === Dharmendra was offered some other roles in Sholay? Many won't know this but Dharmendra was initially offered the roles of Gabbar and Thakur in Sholay, but he declined because, 'I was clear that I wanted to play the role of Veeru as he is so much like me. I had so much fun on the shoot. My favourite scenes were the tanki scene, the scene in the temple, and so many others, but the most powerful scene I feel was the death of Jai, which is still etched in my mind,' the veteran actor shared. Amitabh Bachchan, who also starred in the film, shared his thoughts and said, 'Some things in life remain permanently etched in your mind. Sholay is one such film. Shooting for the film was an unforgettable experience, but at the time, I had no idea that it would be a watershed for Indian cinema.' Advertisement === Originally released in 1975, Sholay became a cult classic in Indian cinema, all thanks to its interesting storyline, powerful dialogues and power-packed action sequences. Helmed by Ramesh Sippy, the film also starred Hema Malini, Jaya Bhaduri, Amjad Khan and Sanjeev Kumar and became an evergreen phenomenon.
