Inside the Race to Restore John Abraham’s Cannes Classics Film ‘Amma Ariyan’ Before It Was Lost for Good

When Shivendra Singh Dungarpur‘s Film Heritage Foundation first wanted to restore “Amma Ariyan,” he could not get permission.

The 1986 Malayalam film directed by John Abraham was not the property of a studio or a single estate. It had been made collectively – funded village by village, produced by a movement – and so the rights, such as they were, belonged to the Odessa Collective, the grassroots filmmaking group Abraham had co-founded. Many of its members had scattered. Some had died. Reassembling them took considerable effort.

“It needed Bina Paul, who is the editor of the film, and C.S. Venkiteswaran, a journalist, to bring the Odessa Collective people together to finally give me the permission to restore it,” Dungarpur tells Variety.

The effort was worth the wait. Film Heritage Foundation’s 4K restoration of “Amma Ariyan” (Report to Mother) receives its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday in the Cannes Classics strand – the fifth consecutive year the Mumbai-based non-profit has brought a restored Indian film to the French Riviera, and the only Indian feature with a world premiere at this year’s festival.

But the permissions problem was only the beginning.