'Sholay is back': Restored version of 1975 classic screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival

The screening, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the film, which featured an ensemble cast of Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bacchan and Amjad Khan.

New Delhi: A restored and uncut version of Sholay, one of India's most celebrated films of all time, was showcased in front of a packed audience at the prestigious Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy.

The screening, which happened at the open-air Piazza Maggiore on Friday night, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the film, which featured an ensemble cast of Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bacchan and Amjad Khan “Sholay” was written by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar and directed by Ramesh Sippy.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director of Film Heritage Foundation, shared photos from the screening on social media platform X.

"What an incredible feeling to see restored 'Sholay' with the original ending on the big screen at Piazza Maggiore in Bologna with so many people under the stars as they stayed awake till 1am for me it was my childhood memory come alive 50 years later 'Sholay' is back," he wrote in the caption.

The film is considered an inalienable part of Indian pop culture due to its popular characters like Jai, Veeru and Thakur as well as Gabbar Singh, one of the iconic villains of Hindi cinema, and plenty of dialogues and action sequences.

Its restoration process was spearheaded by Film Heritage Foundation and Sippy Films Pvt Ltd and took more than three years.

The restored version features six minutes of extra footage, including its original ending where Gabbar is killed.

In the original version of the 1975 movie, Sanjeev Kumar's Thakur extracts his revenge by killing Gabbar in the final moments, but it was changed by the censor board during the Emergency. In the released version, Thakur walks away from an injured Gabbar as cops swoop in to arrest him.