Italy honours Film Heritage Foundation Director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur with the prestigious Vittorio Boarini award

Almost 10-15 years ago, when film restoration experts in India first began sounding the alarm that 75% of early Indian cinema had vanished due to neglect, decay, and indifference, the revelation was both staggering and sobering.

The loss seemed irreversible. But this month, at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, one of the most tireless champions of India’s cinematic legacy received a powerful global endorsement.National Award-winning filmmaker, archivist and Director of Film Heritage Foundation, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, was conferred with the esteemed Vittorio Boarini Award at a special ceremony recently, during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy by Gian Luca Farinelli, Director of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. This prestigious award recognizes Dungarpur’s extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent.Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Institute of Delhi says," The award is a very prestigious acknowledgement of Shivendra and Teesha’s work. When Shivendra stated that 75% of early Indian cinema is lost due to neglect and absence of conservation, it was clear that unless someone started the process, future Indian generations would not have been able to know their heritage.”

Italy, through Bologna’s Cineteca di Bologna and the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, has emerged as a key international partner in India’s cinematic salvage mission. Many of the restored Indian classics that have travelled to global film festivals - Ishanou, Aranyer Din Ratri etc have been brought back to life with Italy’s technical support and curatorial platform.Shivendra Singh Dungarpur states, "I am deeply honoured to be the recipient of the Vittorio Boarini Award which is a recognition of my work in film preservation under the aegis of Film Heritage Foundation that I founded in 2014.

It has been a very challenging undertaking to work towards saving endangered film heritage in our part of the world with limited resources and support over a decade. But I am proud to say that we have built a movement for film preservation not just in India, but in neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal and achieved many milestones in an incredibly short span of time from training film archivists to doing world-class restorations of Indian films to bringing classic cinema back to the big screen and preserving every bit of film heritage we can find.

It is wonderful to have this work appreciated and acknowledged and it only reaffirms our commitment to the cause as there is so much more to do.”

Andrea Anastasio, director of Italian Institute of New Delhi says, "This is enough to understand the value and the relevance of the work the Film Heritage Institute does. After the award ceremony, we could see the restored copy of Aranyer Din Ratri, by Satyajit Ray at the Arlecchino Theatre, a great hall with a fantastic screen .

It was a house full screening and it was really amazing to see the crowd of young viewers attending the screening.

That’s what Bologna is also relevant for.Once a year, for ten days the city is flooded with film buffs from all over the world in occasion of “Il Cinema Ritrovato” (literally The Re-Found Cinema). It’s a festival spread all over Bologna, where restored old films from all over the world are screened in the new splendour of 4K in the city’s theatre, while every night a giant screening outdoor happens at Piazza Maggiore, exactly where the restored copy of Sholay was screened last 27th June."Dungarpur credits the Cineteca di Bologna as the inspiration behind the establishment of the Film Heritage Foundation, noting its integral role in the foundation's journey over the past fifteen years.Further elaborating on his personal connection to the Cineteca di Bologna and the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival he adds, "I first attended the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival conducted by Cineteca di Bologna in 2010 and it changed my life.

I saw the best of world cinema beautifully restored, and entered a whole new world where people were dedicated to saving films for posterity and bringing them back to life again. I went as a filmmaker and cinephile and emerged wearing another hat of a film archivist and have been going back to Bologna every year since then.

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The Vittorio Boarini Award, instituted in 2022 by the Cinetecadi Bologna as part of its annual Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, is an international recognition honoring individuals or institutions who have made exceptional contributions to the preservation, restoration, promotion or dissemination of cinema as cultural heritage. It is named in tribute to Vittorio Boarini (1938–2021), the visionary founder and first director of the Cineteca di Bologna, whose efforts were instrumental in transforming it into one of the world's foremost film archives.

The award celebrates a lifelong commitment to cinema preservation, international advocacy for film heritage, leadership in archive building and programming and work that bridges archival and public access to classic and rare films.