Restoring Māyā Miriga has given us immense satisfaction. We literally raised the film from the grave, having found the negative in a very poor condition abandoned in a warehouse. Through its unhurried gaze set to the haunting soundtrack composed by Bhaskar Chandavarkar and remarkably subtle performances by the non-professional cast, this many-layered film, which tells the moving story of the disintegration of an extended middle-class family in a quiet town still has resonance in the India of today four decades since the film was made.
“I belong there, to the small-town extended middle-class family and have been fascinated by its dreams and agonising nightmares,” wrote director Nirad Mohapatra. “In it, I see a lot of warmth, fellow-feeling, sharing of experiences and a sense of responsibility. But I also see the tight-rope walking of the married sons, the bitterness of its locked-up daughtersin-law, their need for freedom, economic or otherwise, the maladjustment in marriages and above all, selfishness that can damage its very fibre.”
Māyā Miriga has been referred to as the most feted film in the history of Odia cinema, which propelled a lesser known regional cinema into national and international recognition at the time it was made. However, since that time both the film and the filmmaker faded away from the landscape of feature films in India. Noted film critic Maithili Rao termed the vanishing of Nirad Mohapatra from the movie-making scene after such an “exquisitely elegiac, immensely moving first film” as one of Indian cinema’s greater unanswered questions.
Having three world-class restorations to our credit of hidden gems of India’s regional cinema – Aravindan Govindan’s two Malayalam films Kummatty and Thamp and Aribam Syam Sharma’s Manipuri film Ishanou – we felt that Māyā Miriga was almost an obvious choice for our next project. This is not just for its beauty and the fact that it was in danger of vanishing, but also because it was a very important film from Odisha, whose restoration would serve to bring Odia film heritage back into the limelight.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur