Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Mumbai, filmmaker and founder-director of the Film Heritage Foundation

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur represents a very rare example of a director, a producer and an
archivist; that is, an artist who decided to dedicated his entire life to safeguarding the films of
others.

Having fallen in love with the cinema of his country and obtained an Honours degree in History
from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, he studied cinema at the Film and Television Institute of India
(FTII) in Pune, where one of his professors was P.K. Nair, the former director of the National Film
Archive of India and the foremost Indian authority in the field of film preservation. In Pune, he
became acquainted with the films of masters of international cinema, such as Andrei Tarkovsky,
Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni. Upon graduating from FTII in 1994, his
destiny was written.

After producing and directing almost 1,200 advertising films, he made three documentaries:
Celluloid Man (2012), The Immortals (2015) and CzechMate – In Search of Jiri Menzel, a seven-hour
epic exploration of the Czechoslovakian New Wave.

These documentaries reveal the one thing that has always most driven Shivendra Singh
Dungarpur: his passion for the dissemination of knowledge. Indeed, they are all works that
transmit his profound and inexhaustible passion for cinema and its history as instruments of
human knowledge. The discovery that a significant part of his country’s cinema was at risk of being
lost forever pushed him to get in touch with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, to promote
the restoration of the Uday Shankar 1948 masterpiece Kalpana, which was later presented at
Cannes Classics 2012. After receiving encouragement from Amitabh Bachchan, a legend of Indian
cinema, he founded the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in 2014, a non-profit organisation
dedicated to the preservation and restoration of Indian cinema heritage.

From the very beginning, the idea of dissemination was Shivendra’s guiding star. So much so that
the Foundation’s first action was to create a training policy that would allow it to put together a
team of suitably skilled individuals; to realise this goal he established a network of international
relations that saw him become a member of the FIAF Executive Committee, as well as various
other international boards. Together with FIAF he has organised nine editions of the itinerant Film
Restoration and Preservation Workshop, in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and
Delhi, training over 400 aspiring archivists from all over Southeast Asia. Some of whom, in turn,
have also become educators.

In the meantime, the activities of the Film Heritage Foundation continued to expand, to include
the preservation and restoration of Indian film heritage, the development of interdisciplinary
educational programmes that use cinema as an educational instrument and the distribution of
heritage films to cinema theatres throughout India (800 theatres last year).

The quality and breadth of the work carried out by Shivendra has resulted in significant
international interest, as well as the presence at FHF initiatives of directors such as Christopher
Nolan and Wim Wenders, who have become FHF supporters. With the opening of the Film
Heritage Foundation’s first dedicated headquarters in Mumbai, which hosts all the collections that
have been saved or donated over the last 15 years, today India no longer has a question mark over
its name in the world of international film archives.

To conclude this acclamation of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, we would also like to give a special
mention to his wife Teesha Cherian, a brilliant lawyer who left her profession to pursue her
husband’s passion, becoming his vice-director, close collaborator and accomplice.

For all of these reasons, it is our great pleasure to present the VITTORIO BOARINI AWARD 2025, created in 2022 in memory of the founder of Il Cineteca di Bologna and awarded every year during
Il Cinema Ritrovato to international figures who have distinguished themselves in the preservation
and promotion of cinema heritage, to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.