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Mrinal Sen's classic gets make-over for Cannes

Reliance MediaWorks Ltd has restored Mrinal Sen's award-winning film Khandahar, one of Indian cinema's greats, that premieres in the Cannes Classic 2010 programme on May 15.

The original 1984 Khandahar which tells the story of a city-based photographer who falls in love with a heartbroken woman living in a ruined village, had suffered from a number of material issues including bad splices, tearing, dirt, scratches, flickers, stabilization, grains, noises, splice bumps, and image warps. Similarly the film's audio was impaired with various anomalies following years of deterioration.

As a part of the National Film Archive of India's initiative for digital restoration and content processing of over 1000 classic films, Reliance MediaWorks undertook a pristine restoration process for Khandahar, at its India facility.

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Mrinal Sen's classic gets make-over for Cannes

The team repaired Khandahar's film reels and carried out a chemically cleaning process using an ultrasonic film cleaning system to remove the physical dirt and residues.

The audio and images were processed through a series of automatic restoration modules and manually repaired by skilled restoration artists to clean up the majority of the problems.

The film was digitally captured in 2K resolution, without any pre-processing, using a film scanner specially designed for scanning archival films which preserved the resolution and arrangement without clipping or crushing the image of the original film.

Khandahar now benefits with sharper, consistent visuals and audio. The restored files were colour graded under guidance of veteran filmmaker Govind Nihalani and rendered out in XYZ as per DCI specification, therefore resulting in a richness of colour.

The film was encoded into Digital Cinema Package (DCP) in the original aspect ratio of 1.37 along with French subtitles.