Shivendra Singh Dungurpur graduated from FTII turned filmmaker, met Jaya Bachchan and she inspired him to start archiving films. She introduced him to Amitabh Bachchan and entrusted his film library to Dungarpur’s newly launched Film Heritage Foundation and slowly more filmmakers, authors, historians joined the bandwagon and today Film Heritage Foundation is an institution film industry and India are proud of.
Dungarpur says that the idea to host a Bachchan Retrospective happened out of the blue, when somebody from Finland called him and asked him for old movies of Bachchan. They said they were celebrating his 80th birthday. “I felt ashamed that while other countries had a plan for our superstar‘s milestone birthday we were twiddling our thumbs. So, I called a quick meeting with the team and collectively we got cracking. I met up with the PVR chief and the rest is history. I believe that when you set out to do something special the entire cosmos collaborated to make the dream into reality. I am proud that the Film Heritage Foundation is paying tribute to Amitabh Bachchan and I am sure this is just the beginning. I want to do many more such festivals with many superstars and bring our cinematic heritage back to where it belongs, theatres!!”.
To be continued…