Auteur Girish Kasaravalli talks about his restored 'Ghatashraddha'

After a brilliant reception at Venice, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram, the restored film was screened in Bengaluru on Tuesday

The restored version of Girish Kasaravalli’s ‘Ghatashraddha’ was a moment of nostalgia for cinephiles at the 16th BIFFes on Tuesday evening. Based on U R Ananthmurthy’s novella by the same name, ‘Ghatashraddha’ is the first Kannada film to undergo restoration. 

It was screened in Karnataka for the first time. 

The restoration was a collaborative effort between Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), with funding from George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

The restored film was first showcased at the Venice Film Festival (Biennale) in 2024. 

“The visual quality has improved a lot. The scratches, specs and dirt on the negative have been removed,” Kasaravalli told DH. The film was made in 1977. “The negative was not stored properly. After Chamundeshwari Lab shut down, we didn’t know where to store it. It was left unattended in the open in a lab. Someone noticed it and shifted it to the National Film Archives in Pune,” he shared. 

Girish Kasaravalli

While the entire negative was in a bad condition, two reels were severely damaged. “Archivist P K Nair had created a duped version but duped reels don’t retain the original quality, it contains many grains. It has all been carefully restored,” he added. 

Speaking about the restored sound quality, he said, “The original sound itself wasn’t very great because we had to shuffle between Madras and Bangalore. All that is now corrected and is more uniform.” 

Kasaravalli also added that the reception was very good in Venice. The film was also screened at the Kolkata International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Kerala.