In his days as a student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and his friends had been intimidated by PK Nair, who’d show up in the campus and screen films for them. He was a man of great importance, the founder of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), who had just retired the year before Shivendra joined the FTII. Neither Shivendra nor Nair knew that, years from then, they’d make a film together about the astonishing journey that the older man took to build the archive of Indian films.
The making of that film, , would lead Shivendra to found the Film Heritage Foundation, and become a pioneer of film preservation and restoration in the country. Running about for the film preservation workshop he has put together in Thiruvananthapuram – the ninth such across India – Shivendra barely has the time to recall the story that led him here. But Thiruvananthapuram is a special place for him, he says — this is where PK Nair fell in love with cinema, as he watched films seated in the sand outside the Padmanabha Theatre.
Shivendra’s childhood in Bihar was a world away, but he too was drawn to the magic of cinema from a young age. “We had a projectionist called Chandi Mistry who would come to our house every evening, on his bicycle. He would stream the films of [American comedians] Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Danny Kaye and home movies of his and other families.
There was a room called the room (cold room) wi.
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