Реставрация фильма «English, August» Дева Бенгала спасена благодаря найденным магнитным лентам

Dev Benegal ‘s “English, August” almost didn’t survive to be restored. Its original camera negative had melted. The dupe was gone too. All that was left were two surviving 35mm prints – and, it turned out, a box of DAT tapes nobody expected to matter three decades later. “It’s really sad that when I saw the original camera negative, it had melted. It was in terrible condition,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), the organization that took on the restoration. FHF was left to rebuild the film from whatever prints remained. What remained were two 35mm release prints: one Benegal had personally kept and donated to FHF, the other preserved by the NFDC-National Film Archive of India, the government body that houses India’s official film archive. “There was no other material, so we had to look at both these materials, do the comparison and use these particular prints,” Dungarpur says. Both prints, he says, were in decent condition – a stroke of luck given how little else of the film had survived. Popular on Variety Released in 1994, “English, August” follows Agastya Sen, a young, Westernized trainee nicknamed “August,” sent to a remote provincial town for a year of civil-service training in India’s elite administrative cadre. Adrift among Bob Dylan records, Marcus Aurelius and a bureaucracy he can barely stomach, Agastya finds himself a stranger in a country that is technically his own. The film is adapted from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s 1988 novel of the same name, a book that became a defining portrait of a certain post-colonial, urban Indian generation. Benegal says the screenplay only became the film in the editing room. “This is a film which was truly written on the editing table. I am a firm believer that’s where movies are actually written,” he says. “While we were editing, Upamanyu asked me, ‘Why did we even write a screenplay? We are writing the film right here.'” The soundtrack turned out to be the restoration’s unlikely triumph. Benegal recalls the constraints under which the film was originally mixed. “Vikram Joglekar had recorded the sound in digital. Ignoring industry advice not to do that!” he says. “In 1994 we did not have the money to create a stereo mix. Those were days of the License Raj, where we had to secure special permission to import six reels of Kodak Optical Sound Negative. Even after that we only had outdated equipment to make a flat mono mix.” What survived instead was a set of DAT tapes Benegal had quietly kept for thirty years. “Back in 1994, DATs were the cutting-edge digital recording medium, and I kept them in my personal archive purely out of my obsession with audio – never imagining they would save the film three decades later when the original 35mm sound negatives vanished,” he says. “Going back to those tapes with Vikram Joglekar was like opening a time capsule.” Dungarpur confirms the tapes gave FHF something restorers rarely get. “We went back to the studio, and Vikram Joglekar, who was the sound recordist, brought back Satish P.M., the sound engineer, to work on restoring these tracks,” he says. “We had the unmixes, so it was great.” Color grading brought its own rhythm to the process. Dungarpur says the palette was set by cinematographer Anoop Jotwani, who tested a single reel before the rest of the film followed his lead, with Benegal weighing in throughout from New York as the restoration work itself took place at L’Immagine Ritrovata, the film lab in Bologna, Italy. “You had Dev Benegal working almost daily on it. He did the English subtitles. We were talking daily about the look of the film, the way it was restored in Bologna, the grains and the color tone,” Dungarpur says. “There was a constant flow between Bologna and Dev Benegal, who was sitting in New York. He actually booked a suite to look at the grading, to look at the colors, to hear the sound.” Rahul Bose, who made his feature debut as the film’s lead, also came in to see part of the process, Dungarpur says. Benegal is unequivocal about why Bose was right for that role. “Rahul Bose understood that Agastya wasn’t someone the audience needed to like; he needed to be truthful,” Benegal says. “He wasn’t trying to perform alienation – he simply inhabited the character with remarkable honesty. He also had the confidence to do very little. That’s much harder than it sounds.” Not everything about the soundtrack could be fully reconstructed. Benegal says the production had gone to unusual lengths at the time to license its music. “Back in the day the producing team worked tirelessly to license and pay for music rights – something virtually unheard of then in India,” he says. One piece of paperwork never made it. “The paperwork documenting the Miles Davis’ “‘Round Midnight” clearance was lost in a torrential monsoon flood,” he says. The gap has created its own folklore among fans, he adds: “Some people have made a mix tape in their minds, from the box of tapes Agastya carried with him to Madna. Those tracks were never actually part of the original theatrical mix. Memory has a curious way of creating its own version of a film.” For Dungarpur, the restoration answered a demand that had been building for years. “There was a great demand by people who wanted, were looking for, something to watch it back on the big screen and to see a restoration of this,” he says of “English, August.” “There are many people coming from around the world” eager to see the film again, he adds, calling it one of the independently produced films FHF exists to bring back “into a different time” for new audiences – including at Venice where the restoration premieres. It’s also FHF’s third consecutive year premiering a restoration at the festival, following Girish Kasaravalli’s “Ghatashraddha” in 2024 and Bimal Roy’s “Do Bigha Zamin” in 2025. Watching “English, August” again more than 32 years after making it, Benegal finds the film’s portrait of isolation has only sharpened. “What feels familiar is the uncertainty,” he says. “India in the early 1990s was beginning to open up economically and culturally, but the old structures still shaped everyday life. There was a generation caught between inherited institutions and emerging freedoms. That sense of being in transition still resonates.” What has changed entirely, he says, is the texture of being alone. “The film unfolds in an India before mobile phones, social media and constant connectivity. Agastya is left alone with his thoughts… In 1994, if you were exiled to a small district town, you were genuinely off the grid. Agastya’s isolation was spatial and physical; today, isolation is algorithmic.” Benegal argues the character’s alienation was never really about the West. “Agastya isn’t alienated because he listens to rock and jazz or reads Marcus Aurelius. He’s alienated because he’s searching for authenticity in a role that feels imposed upon him. That’s a condition that transcends both geography and time,” he says. He sees that same restlessness in a different uniform today: “The modern Agastyas aren’t just urban civil servants reading Marcus Aurelius in small towns – they are scrolling through curated, globalized lives on their phones from anywhere. The absurdity hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been upgraded to high-speed internet.” The film’s satire of Indian bureaucracy has aged in a similar direction, according to Benegal. “Three decades later, the language of bureaucracy may have been digitized, but the core absurdities – the performance of power and the gap between official intent and ground reality – remain unchanged,” he says. “If anything, the satire feels almost prescient today.” Benegal is candid that the film could not be made the same way now. “‘English, August’ succeeded precisely because it fit into zero existing boxes – it rejected that one prescribed way of making films,” he says. The five languages spoken across the film famously baffled censors at the time: “English, August has five languages, and that stumped the Indian censors who insisted, ‘a film can only have one language.'” Distribution came down to one gamble. “I have to give a huge shout out to Sunder Kimat Rai, who was country head of 20th Century Fox at that time, who took the gamble to distribute the film. He said, ‘the demographics match.’ I had no idea what ‘demographics’ even meant,” Benegal says. He doubts that kind of bet would be made today. “While we have streaming platforms and festival infrastructure, we also have hyper-calculated algorithms. Everything gets filtered through target demographics, pitch decks, and comparative commercial comps. The tools to shoot and edit are democratized, but the willingness of financiers and distributors to take a gamble on pure, unclassifiable tone is far rarer.” Asked what a 20-year-old watching the film today might see that 1994 audiences couldn’t, Benegal points to something less generational than it first appears. “I hope they watch it as a portrait of someone asking timeless questions: Who am I? What kind of life do I want? What happens when the expectations of society don’t align with your inner life?” he says. “A young audience today may recognise mental and emotional states that weren’t discussed as openly in 1994. Agastya’s uncertainty may feel less like aimlessness and more like an honest search for meaning.” Benegal is already looking past the restoration to his next project. “I’m working on ‘A Love Supreme’ a contemporary re-imagining of the epic Shakuntala – a story of a resilient, enigmatic woman whose path defies societal norms to become an autonomous woman,” he says. “But, the impulse remains the same as it was in 1994 – finding the humor, absurdity, and humanity in spaces where people feel out of place.”