Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (born 25 August, 1969) is an award-winning Indian filmmaker, producer, film archivist and restorer who has won acclaim for his films "Celluloid Man", "The Immortals" and "CzechMate - In Search of Jirí Menzel". He founded Dungarpur Films in 2001 and also founded Film Heritage Foundation in 2014. In 2012, he won two National Film Awards for his documentary Celluloid Man, based on the life of noted film scholar, preservationist and the founder of National Film Archive of India, P.K. Nair. Dungarpur was born in Patna, Bihar and belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Dungarpur State that still has its family seat in Dungarpur, Rajasthan and is the nephew of Raj Singh Dungarpur. He was first introduced to the cinema by his maternal grandmother, Usha Rani, Maharani of Dumraon. It was with her and his grandfather Maharaj Kamal Singh of Dumraon that he first saw classics ranging from "Pakeezah" to Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and Danny Kaye at summer evening screenings on 16 mm and 8 mm projectors in the veranda of their home in Dumraon. He is an alumnus of The Doon School in Dehradun and graduated from The Doon School in 1987. He went on to do a degree in History (Hons) from St. Stephen's College, Delhi and shifted to Mumbai soon after to begin his career in film as an assistant director to writer-lyricist and director, Gulzar and worked with him on films like "Lekin" and "Libaas". Subsequently, he enrolled in the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune to study film direction and script-writing. He graduated from FTII in 1994. Dungarpur started his production house Dungarpur Films in 2001. The company has produced over 800 commercials and several documentaries and short films and has won innumerable awards for his work in advertising including five IDPA gold awards and three silver awards. In 2014, Dungarpur founded the Film Heritage Foundation to preserve India's endangered film heritage. The foundation's collection has about 500 films, including Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Raj Kapoor's Shree 420, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. He directed his first documentary in 2012, called Celluloid Man, which won the National Film Award for Best Biographical Film and National Film Award for Best Historical Reconstruction/Compilation Film. The filming of the documentary begins in 2010 and it was completed in May 2012. The film premiered at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy on June 26, 2012. It was the opening film at the Sierra Leone International Film Festival, 2013, and the Kyiv International Documentary Film Festival, 2013 where it won the "Nestor The Chronicler" award for the best archival film. Dungarpur's second documentary The Immortals was completed in August 2015 and premiered at the 20th Busan International Film Festival in October. This film is a personal journey travelling through time and space to unravel hidden stories and rediscover objects and images that at one time were an integral part of the lives of these artists through which their creations came into being. The film was screened at the 17th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and was the opening film in the Documentary Section at the 21st Kolkata International Film Festival. The Immortals won the Special Jury Award in the National Competition Section of the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) for Documentaries, Short and Animation Films in 2016 and was screened at the 30th edition of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna in June 2016. In 2018, Dungarpur released the 420-minute documentary CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel, based on the life of Czech film and theatre director, screenwriter, and actor, Jirí Menzel. The seven-hour-long film was eight years in the making and features extensive interviews with 85 filmmakers, actors and film historians including Woody Allen, Ken Loach, and Emir Kusturica. The film had its debut at a screening at the UCLA Film & Television Archive on September 2018 and has also been screened at the 20th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. The film has been at the 24th Kolkata International Film Festival, the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, and screenings in Prague, Slovakia and London. The British Film Institute and Sight & Sound The International Film Magazine polled "CzechMate - In Search of Jirí Menzel" in the top 5 Blu-Ray and DVD releases of 2020 in a vote by eminent film critics. In 2018, Dungarpur was invited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to speak about his efforts in preserving India's cinematic heritage, which was followed by a screening of his documentary Celluloid Man. Shivendra directed a 26-episode series Rahe Na Rahe Hum produced by Contiloe Films for Star TV and hosted by scriptwriter and lyricist Javed Akhtar. Each episode was a trip down memory lane during which Javed Akhtar would analyse a classic film of Indian cinema like "Mughal-e-Azam", "Ganga Jamuna" and "Pyaasa". He also produced a five-episode serial for Doordarshan based on the classic novel Bhoole Bisre Chitra written by Shri Bhagwati Charan Verma. Dungarpur Films has produced two short films I became... and Room 19. I became... was given a gold medal at the IDPA Awards 2006 for the Best Short Fiction film of the year. It also won the award for the Best Short Film at the Marbella Film Festival in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Kathmandu Film Festival 2008. Shivendra was a donor for the British Film Institute's restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's silent film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. He facilitated the restoration of the Indian film, Uday Shankar's Kalpana (1948), by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation, that was premiered in the Cannes Film Festival Classic section in 2012. In 2010, Dungarpur was approached by Martin Scorsese's organization World Cinema Project, which was interested in restoring the 1948 Hindi classic Kalpana. In the end, the project was successful in restoring the only surviving print of the film, and the film was screened at Cannes Classics 2012. In 2013, Shivendra collaborated with the World Cinema Foundation again for the restoration of the 1972 Sinhalese film "Nidhanaya" directed by eminent Sri Lankan filmmaker Dr. Lester James Peries. The restored version of the film was premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, 2013. He is a supporting member of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Italy along with the legendary Pathé film company. He is a member of the Artistic Committee of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna and also a member of the Honorary Committee of the Nitrate Picture Show, George Eastman House's Festival of Film Conservation. He was a member of the Expert Committee of the National Museum of Indian Cinema. In 2019, he was elected to a second term as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) at the FIAF Congress in Lausanne. Shivendra's essay "Magic of Celluloid" has been published in the book "From Darkness into Light - Perspectives on Film Preservation and Restoration" edited by Rajesh Devraj.