Forty years after John Abraham made Amma Ariyan, one of the remarkable independent films to come out of Kerala, a 4K restoration of the film is set to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film with a cult following, restored by the not-for-profit organisation Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) is the only Indian feature film selected for world premiere at the festival this year. The premiere is scheduled on May 16.
John, who began working on the film based on a sliver of an idea based on the suicides of persons associated with the Naxalite movement, followed an alternative method of production and distribution with his friends at the Odessa Film Collective. The collective staged street plays and screened films to collect voluntary contributions from the public to make the film. Although it was never released in the theatres, the film has acquired a cult following over the years.
Restored version of John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director, Film Heritage Foundation, told The Hindu that his memories of Amma Ariyan goes back to his student days at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where legendary archivist P.K. Nair used to show the film to the students. “He used to tell us beautiful stories about John. At the institute, it was one of my favourite films. The restoration was challenging as we had no original camera negative to work with. The whole process, from searching out the last surviving unsubtitled print from the National Archives to identifying the copyright holder at the Odessa collective to restoring the print took close to 5-6 years, with the restoration work alone taking 2 years,” he says.
