Pyaasa in Venice

“Venice Classics” is a significant section at the festival, which premiers restored classics and awards the best. Pyaasa will compete with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, The Power and the Glory by William K Howard and Akira Kurosawa’s Akahige (Red Beard), among others from various countries.

“We acquired the negative rights of all Guru Dutt films sometime back. We thought of restoring Pyaasa, which is acclaimed worldwide. It was a massive challenge to restore this film for theatres as the job is harder when the file sizes are very big. It’s relatively easy when a film is being restored for a television screening. Forty-five staff members have worked day and night to bring this film to life again,” said Sushilkumar Agarwal, CEO, Ultra Media in a conversation from Venice. He added that the restoration process took four months, apart from time spent in the preliminary process of digitising the film. “The problems with the negatives were way too many. All old negatives suffer because of our country’s climatic conditions,” says Agarwal adding that the repair process used a specialised film content mending and defect removal mechanism. The soundtrack of the film has also been completely remastered, since the original was full of static and clicks.

Agarwal will re-release Pyaasa worldwide early next year. “I hope we can find distributors for it because we don’t have more money for distributing it after the expensive restoration process,” said Agarwal. In the past, Ultra Media has restored films such as the Raj Kapoor-starrer Chori Chori and Kishore Kumar’s Half Ticket.
suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com