Late Malayalam filmmaker G. Aravindan’s 1979 classic Kummatty will be restored as part of a collaboration between The Film Foundation’s (TFF) World Cinema Project, Film Heritage Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna. Kummatty tells the story of a Pied Piper-like character of Malabar folklore. He casts a spell and turns children into animals. One boy, Chindan, is transformed into a dog, but misses the moment when the other children are turned back to human form and has to wait a year for Kummatty to reverse the spell. Chindan’s life as a dog and his return to a human state is a journey through which he realises that life is a gift and freedom is precious. Kummatty won the Kerala State Film Award for the Best Children’s Film in 1979.
The film will be restored at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, Italy and will have its world restoration premiere at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in late July. Created in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, TFF is dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history. TFF’s World Cinema Project, created in 2007, has restored 44 films from 26 different countries, representing the rich diversity of world cinema. Film Heritage Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation set up by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2014. It is dedicated to supporting the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the moving image.
Singh described Kummatty as a film that combines poetry, landscape, nature and folk tale through stunning visuals and an unbelievable use of music and sound design. He said: “I regard Aravindan as one of the most poetic filmmakers in the world. He is a poet who writes in the language of cinema and silence. Watching his films is like a meditative experience. I am honoured to be a part of this project and we hope to restore his acclaimed film ‘Thampu’ in the near future.” Cecilia Cenciarelli of Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna said: “Restoring Kummatty reminded us once again of the core mission that The Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna embrace through the World Cinema Project; to give a new life to masterpieces, shed a light on obscure cinematic gems, and expand the canon of world cinema in multiple directions.”
Only two 35mm prints (one with photographed English subtitles) of Kummatty survive. The two copies were worn-out, very dirty and deeply scratched, one containing a consistent vertical green line on the right-hand side of the image, which required painstaking frame-by-frame work by the team to remove. The film’s natural environment, which could be considered one of the main characters of the film, was lit by master cinematographer Shaji N. Karun, Cenciarelli said, had completely lost its rich palette that illuminated the skies, grass, foliage and fields, becoming instead a homogeneous magenta. “Thanks to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory was able to be in contact with G. Aravindan’s son, Ramu Aravindan, and Shaji N. Karun who helped recapture, as much as possible, the original aesthetics as well as the magical dimensions of the film.”
