BENGALURU: Renowned filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha (1977) is going to be restored. The initiative was taken by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in collaboration with the foundations run by Martin Scorsese (The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project) and George Lucas (Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation). The idea is to restore the film in time for its 50th anniversary from the original camera negatives preserved at the National Film Archive of India.
Kasaravalli is grateful to these legendary filmmakers for picking his film. “I was told about it a few days ago. I was in contact with Shivendra Singh (director of Film Heritage Foundation). It was his initiative because he liked the film so much that he thought they needed to restore the film.
He was the one who was in touch with the foundations,” says Kasarvalli. Based on a novella by eminent Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy, the landmark Indian film marked the debut movie of Kasaravalli. “I made this film when I was straight out of FTII (Film and Technology Institute of India). I was just 25. I aimed to make something that is on par with Samskara and Malgudi Days. It just happened to be based on a powerful story by Dr Murthy. I have repeated many times that anybody could have made an excellent film with a story like this,” says Kasaravalli.
Apart from the strong story, the 73-year-old filmmaker feels the ‘composition and the cinematic use of grammar and rhetoric’ has made it relevant over time. “A story alone cannot make a film good. You have to have control over the medium,” says Kasaravalli, adding, “The movie was also made during a time when it got noticed all over the world.”