Uday Shankar’s 1948 Kalpana at Cannes Classics

Uday Shankar’s 1948 Kalpana will screen in the Classics Section of the 65th Cannes Film Festival, starting on May 16.

Uday Shankar’s 1948 Kalpana will screen in the Classics Section of the 65th Cannes Film Festival, starting on May 16.

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The movie was digitally restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. Fortunately, a copy of the original negative was found at the National Film Archive of India that the Foundation used to create a brand new print.

Renowned dancer Uday Shankar wrote and directed only one film, and Kalpana traces the story of a young artist’s dream to establish a dance academy. The movie has Shankar and his wife, Amala, playing the leads.

Some of the significant works in this year’s Classics are Once Upon a time in America by Sergio Leone, Tess by Roman Polanski, Jaws by Steven Spielberg, The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, Lawrence of Arabia by David Lean and Runaway Train by Andrei Konchalovsky.

The Cannes Classics was created in 2004 as part of the Festival’s efforts to perpetuate the memory of great cinema. Since then many restored films have been screened at the Festival, and they included Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Mrinal Sen’s Khandar. Ray was dead by then, but Sen was present to see his creation bright and beautiful. Both movies, classics indeed, looked unbelievably lovely.

The Festival runs till May 27.