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"It took me one year and 11 visits to get permission to shoot with Nair Sahib in the Archive. He was finally returning home," narrates Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in his documentary film Celluloid Man, which has been screened at more than 50 film festivals worldwide and won multiple awards. We see the octogenarian P. K. Nair, unsteady on his feet and supported by a walking stick, gingerly re-enter the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) after many years: a reunion between the Indian subcontinent's most significant archivist and his cherished films. Sadly, what he encounters are stacks of rusted film cans covered with layers of dust and cobwebs, and unspooled films lying in the open. Not quite the "home" he left behind, the film indicates, for the NFAI, headed by Nair for 27 years until his retirement in 1991, now neglects the films he spent a lifetime collecting and preserving. "There was P. K. Nair, and after Nair, nothing!" laments the filmmaker Shyam Benegal, defining one of the two central threads of the film, characterized by nostalgic yearning for the NFAI under Nair, regret at his retirement, and despair at the sad state of film archiving in India. The other thread is a celebration of Nair's life and passion for cinema.
Celluloid Man is a lyrical paean to Nair, a biographical sketch not unlike Citizen Langlois (1995) and Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois / Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque (2004), which paints a fascinating picture of his legacy through testimonials from some of India's most critically acclaimed filmmakers and actors - Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Jaya Bachchan, Mahesh Bhatt, Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Shabana Azmi, Mrinal Sen, etc. These are intertwined with Nair's own recollections, and juxtaposed beautifully with clips from world cinema classics ranging from Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) to Tystnaden (The Silence, Ingmar Bergman, 1963), and dozens of Indian films....