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Growing up, I always thought film would last forever. Somehow one never thought that these images that seemed so much larger than life on a big screen and evoked such powerful emotions, actually had such a fragile existence. As a filmmaker, one is so engrossed in the craft of cinema that one tends to forget how ephemeral the lives of our creations can be if they are not preserved.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur'
The Indian filmmaker and producer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur created the Film Heritage Foundation in January 2014. A non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the Indian film heritage, as well as developing educational programmes, the Foundation became an associate member of FIAF at the 2015 Congress in Canberra. In February 2015, the Foundation organised the first-ever Film Preservation and Restoration School in India. Its collaborators were all organisations involved, in one way or another, in saving the Indian film heritage: the Cineteca di Bologna, L'lmmagine Ritrovata, and The Film Foundation - World Cinema Project. FIAF and the National Film Archive of India both gave their support to the venture. Films Division (a structure created in 1948 by the Indian Government) hosted the sevenday school in its facilities in Mumbai, one of the largest film production centres in the world.
The course was divided into several sections: a module on Film Preservation prepared and presented by the FIAF Technical Commission, lectures and panels by international experts on film archiving and restoration, practical classes conducted by the staff of L'lmmagine Ritrovata, and screenings of restored classic films. As in earlier FIAF Restoration Schools, the students were given a pre-school theoretical grounding in film technology and restoration by means of an online training facility.
The course was attended by 53 students (chosen from 180 applicants), most of them from different parts of India, with three from Sri Lanka, and one from Nepal. The participants were selected according to their professional experience and academic training, covering a wide range of film-related activities. Two of the students were enabled to attend the school through FIAF grants.
TECHNICAL TRAINING FOR FILM ARCHIVES BY FIAF'S TECHNICAL COMMISSION
Each day began with a training module devised by David Walsh (Head of the FIAF Technical Commission) and...