Diary of a first timer at Cannes 2016: Restored classics and Indian cinema's German connectionMay 19(AZINS)

May 17

At the 2015 New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese said about film preservation: "Then they realised that there’s no such thing [as] “an old film is just a film,” but, as Peter Bogdanovich said, “there’s also film that you’ve never seen.” And so, the Salle Bunuel theatre saw a packed crowd for the screening of Ugetsu Monogatari, a 1953 masterpiece by Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi. The film was shown in the category ‘Cannes Classics‘, restored by The Film Foundation (TFF) which was formed in 1990 by Scorsese.

It all started in 1980 when Scorsese wrote a letter to his friends and colleagues which read, "Everything we are doing right now means absolutely nothing. All of our agonizing labour and creative efforts is for nothing because our films are vanishing." He did not stop by merely writing but took the lead and ten years later along with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg, TFF was founded to address the urgent need for film preservation.

Till date, TFF has restored over 600 old films, including Indian film Kalpana which was released in 1948. TFF asks for donations and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has helped for the restoration of Ugetsu Monogatari.

Cannes, in its Classics category, has 18 feature films (out of which 11 have been restored by TFF) and 6 documentaries.

May 18

Stephan Ottenbruch from Berlin is a graduate of the highly regarded Film and Television Academy, Munich. He has more than 25 years of experience as a producer, commissioning editor and event manager in the field of film and television. He has produced more than 30 movies and TV-serials. But more than all this, he has a strong bond with Indian films.

'It all began eight years ago when I worked on 44 episodes of the Indo-German comedy series Kookaburra - The Comedy Club, featuring an Indo-German couple and its family which ran a comedy club in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. We had a lot of fun creating the family stories where Sanjay, the owner of the comedy club, got in conflict with his aunty from India, with whom his marriage with Svenja, a German, did not go down well," says Ottenbruch .

He then wanted to develop a feature film centred around the clash between Indo-German cultures. "I went to Mumbai Film Festival in 2010 to find Indian partners for that idea and I fell in love with Mumbai," he says with a grin. "I was amazed by the fantastic and great creative energy there. I developed an Indo-German Script Development lab with the help of eminent writers such as Anjum Rajabali, Sooni Taraporavela, Shyam Benegal and others. I invited Raju Hirani, Abhijat Joshi and Anurag Kashyap to a workshop and conference to Berlin in early 2012 and started to build up an annual festival to showcase Indian Films to a German audience as well as to cater the Indian Diaspora in Berlin."

But, most importantly, Ottenbruch is developing Indo-German features and documentary films. Right now they are working on a documentary called Two Film Pioneers, featuring the work of Franz Osten, his brother Peter and Himanshu Rai. Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai worked together on three silent films from the 1920s and 30s (Light of Asia, Shiraz and Throw of Dice) before Rai founded the Bombay Talkies in Mumbai in the 1930s with his wife Devika Rani and made her and Ashok Kumar one of the first successful movie couples in the beginning of the sound film era.