THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Spirited attempts by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) to track down a restorable print of the G Aravindan film ‘Oridathu’ has, so far, failed to bear fruit.The search has been on for some years now, but apart from a Japanese sub-titled copy in a city archive in Japan, the Pune-based NFAI has been unable to locate a workable print, NFAI director Prakash Magdum said.
‘’The film is apparently there on YouTube, but you would need a really high quality print if you are planning to restore a work. We have restored all the other films of Aravindan except ‘Oridathu.’ You can’t do it with an inferior quality print,’’ Magdum, who visited Thiruvananthapuram over the weekend for the FILCA film festival which showed Aravindan films, said.
NFAI had been in talks with the Japanese officials since 2016. According to him, the problem with the print in the Japanese archive is the subtitles. ‘’It will be difficult to remove the Japanese subtitles and install new ones,’’ he said. NFAI, which has an active national-level programme for restoring and preserving Indian films, today boasts the restored versions of all the Aravindan movies including ‘Vaastuhara,’ ‘Chidambaram,’ ‘Uttarayanam’ and ‘Kanchanaseeta.’ ‘Oridathu’ alone has proven elusive.
The 1986 satire starring Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan and Sreenivasan is about a small village which gets power supply. In 2014, NFAI had launched the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM) with the aim of preserving selected films from all over the country through a massive restoration and digitisation exercise. Work on the Aravindan movies, however, had begun much earlier. But NFAI is not ready to admit defeat. ‘’We will explore all options and see what we can do,’’ Magdum said.