Gurudatt's "Pyaasa" becomes the only Indian Restored Film for the 72nd Venice Film Festival

- Planet Bollywood Special Correspondant           Let us know what you think about this story

Pyaasa will compete with 20 other prestigious restored films from all over the world for the coveted “ Venice Classics Award” for the best restored film.

Ultra Media & Entertainment, who are the negative rights owners of Pyaasa, have restored this film completely for the grand occasion with an objective of preserving and presenting it in its original quality to the global audience.

Ultra had 45 experts working round the clock for over 4 months to restore and bring back the film. The most challenging part after acquiring the rights was sourcing the authentic materials to complete the preservation. After much effort, Ultra found the original camera negatives of the film at an archive in India, However a lot of the parts of the negatives were either damaged or lost.

Ultra decided to use as much parts as possible from the original Camera Negative and a few parts were used from 35mm prints. A new digital transfer was created in 2K resolution on the ARRISCAN film scanner.This in-house technology of Ultra Studio & Digital Lab (a division of Ultra Media & Entertainment Pvt. Ltd) helped in applying a multidisciplinary, data-centric approach to the entire film’s restoration process.

Once the complete film was digitally transferred, came the most challenging part of restoration. Thousands of instances of dirt, lines, scratches, splices, warps, jitters and green patches were manually removed frame by frame under careful supervision by experienced artists The in-house talented professionals used a specialized film content mending and defect removal mechanism in their repair process. They carefully selected the best way to restore this priceless classic to its original quality.

The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 35mm optical soundtrack. Clicks, thumps, hiss and hum were manually removed frame by frame at the sound studio of Ultra Media & Entertainment.

The film will be presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1

“Venice Classics” has been a crucial section of the Venice Film Festival which has been successfully premiering world class restored classics in the festival. The prime objective of this section is to bring back to spotlight old, underestimated and neglected films of the past which has been restored an year back by film archives, cultural institutions or production companies around the world.

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