Inside the koothambalam (temple theatre) at Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram, Marianna De Sanctis peers closely at an old film reel, using cleaning agents and tapes to return it to its old glory. Gathered in rapt attention around her are students ranging in age from the 20s to the 50s, the latest entrants into the emerging field of film restoration. De Sanctis — who worked on restoring Malayalam auteur G.
Aravindan’s classics Thampu (1978) and Kummatty (1979) — got into film restoration two decades ago because of her love of silent cinema. “A good part of the heritage of silent cinema was lost because it was printed on nitrate, which is quite fragile and decays over time,” says De Sanctis, who heads film repair at L’Immagine Ritrovata, a famed film restoration laboratory in Italy. “Our laboratory has around 70-80 people working in various aspects of restoration.
Annually, we manage to restore around 80 films from all over the world.” At present, she is readying to restore avant-garde filmmaker John Abraham’s crowd-funded classic, Amma Ariyan (1986). A still from Amma Ariyan De Sanctis was one of many experts from countries such as the U.
S., the U.K.
, France and Portugal, who was part of the Film Heritage Foundation’s (FHF) Film Preservation & Restoration Workshop India 2024. Organised earlier this month, the travelling workshop’s ninth edition also happens to be its last. In 2025, the foundation is set to open the Centre of the Moving I.