Titas Ekti Nadir Naam” at Cannes Classic Film restored by the World Cinema Foundation

Ritwik Ghatak's cinematic opus “Titas Ekti Nadir Naam” was screened at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival (earlier this year), as part of its Classic section, according to a press release. This is the first Bangladeshi film that has had this honour.
“Titas Ekti Nadir Naam” is an adaptation of a book by Adwaita Malla Burman. The film explores the lives of the Malo community whose existence is inextricably intertwined with the Titas river in Brahmanbaria, Bangladesh. The black and white film has a dark, brooding character, probably derived from Ghatak's excruciatingly painful move from Dhaka (then East Bengal) to Calcutta (West Bengal).

The film was restored earlier this year by the World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna. The restoration used the camera and sound negatives and a positive print provided by the Ritwik Memorial Trust and held at the National Film Archive of India. As the original negative is incomplete and some reels were severely damaged, a combined lavender and a positive print provided by the Bun-desarchiv-Filmarchiv were also used. The digital restoration produced a new 35 mm internegative.
The World Cinema Foundation helps developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures. The foundation wants to help strengthen and support the work of international archives, and provide a resource for those countries lacking the archival and technical facilities to do the work themselves. On the Advisory Board are renowned filmmakers Martin Scorsese (chairman), Fatih Akin, Soulemane Cissé, Guillermo Del Toro, Stephen Frears, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, Abbas Kiarostami, Deepa Mehta, Elia Suleiman, Bertrand Tavernier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar Wai, Tian Zhuangzhuang and others.
About the film and Ghatak, Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta (of “Fire,” “Earth” and “Water” fame) says, “If you were eighteen years old, growing up in New Delhi, a student of cinema, a cinephile or a plain film snob, it was given that you would swoon over the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and spend endless hours discussing his films, and his eventual death.
“It was only years later when I saw his epic, 'A River Called Titas,' that I swooned for totally different reasons. The film is a work of pure genius. A passionate elegy for a dying culture, it moved me profoundly, and continues to haunt me to this day.”
The film is currently distributed by Ashirbad Chalachchitra, Bangladesh. Habibur Rahman Khan is the producer of the film.