Play It Again, Cannes

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Twenty-six years after he had to withdraw Khandar from the competition section at the Cannes festival, Mrinal Sen takes the restored film to the carnival at the CroisetteIt was 1984. At the sea-sprayed, star-swept Cannes Film Festival, two movies by two giants were being considered for the prestigious In Competition section — Mrinal Sen's Khandar and Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire. Even the French were in a quandary. As Sen recalls, "They did not want a situation where one filmmaker's work will have to be chosen over the other. Since Cannes was celebrating 30 years of Ray's cinema that year, the then secretary-general Gilles Jacob requested me to withdraw my film from that section for Ray's sake." Ray was recovering from a heart attack and Sen took Khandar out of the competition section and screened it in Un Certain Regard. Twenty-six years later, Sen is returning to Cannes with Khandar — this time to be screened in the Classics Section."I feel privileged to be extended this honour by Cannes. The Cannes committee had been discussing with me for some time to have screenings of my film in the Classics Section, but I discouraged them since the prints were in poor condition," says Sen, 88, over the phone from his home in Kolkata.Last year, Sen requested the Cannes committee not to screen his film Calcutta Trilogy in the Classics Section, due to the bad quality of the print. "I withdrew the film at the last moment since it was in terrible shape. Now I am glad to hear that the restored version of Khandar will be screened," says Sen, who has yet to see the restored version of the film. It will be the first Indian film to be screened in the Classics Section, which was introduced as a non-competition category in 2004.Khandar, starring Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, and Pankaj Kapoor, is the story of loneliness and longing told through the eyes of an aged mother played by Gita Sen (Mrinal's wife) and a daughter played by Azmi. The film — which earned Sen the National Award for Best Direction in 1984 — has been restored by Reliance Media Works (RMW) in their Mumbai laboratory last September. "The restoration of the film was a complex process and it took months since it had to be restored frame by frame, manually, to achieve 'pristine' restoration. The prints had to be chemically cleaned to remove the physical dirt and residue," says Anil Arjun, CEO of RMW. The company has restored at least 20 other films by Sen.The restoration became possible only after the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed the National Film Archives of India (in a letter dated August 27, 2009) to form a sub-committee to prioritise the digital restoration and preservation of the works of Sen and other master Indian filmmakers. "All films are sent to the Reliance Media Works since that is the official body for restoring NFAI movie prints," says Vijay Jadhav, director of NFAI. It has a collection of more than 2,500 films. So far, RMW has obtained an order for the restoration and digitisation of 1,000 films from the NFAI.This time, Sen, suffering from ill health, is unlikely to go to Cannes . But he recalls the summer of Eighties — when he first went to Cannes with Ek Din Pratidin in 1980 and won, three years later, a Jury Award for Kharij and a nomination for the Golden Palm. Sen still smiles at the charm of the Croisette.

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