Come October 3, and Indian cinema buffs in Brazil will catch the country’s silver screen magic sitting in the comfort of their homes. For the first time in South America, Brazil’s biggest Video On Demand (VOD) platform launches six digitized restorations of Satyajit Ray films for a contemporary viewing experience.
The time span of just two years has passed since the hundredth anniversary of Satyajit Ray’s birth, but countries that have never been part of his traditional distribution markets, such as Brazil, are currently embracing his works with infectious enthusiasm. This year, it is already given a VOD launch in Poland, Greece, and even Indonesia and South Korea.
Ray films to be released by Brazilian film platform Imovision include some of his best, such as Charulata, Mahanagar, and Nayak all made between 1963 and 1966. Mahapurush, Kapurush, and Jai Baba Felunath round out the package for Brazil VOD.
Satyajit Ray is a big name in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and France,” said Varsha Bansal, head of international sales at Kolkata-based RDB Entertainments, which holds the rights to all six Ray films due for release in Brazil. “It is encouraging that his films are today released in countries where it was not possible to talk about Ray earlier,” she added.
Of course, more than half a century after they were made, Satyajit Ray movies still reign over India‘s soft power dynamics, evident in that the Indian films currently scorching the global theatrical and festival circuit aren’t new releases from Bollywood or Tollywood, but old Ray movies, all restored from near ruins.
The Brazil OTT release will be followed by a theatrical release in the Netherlands in November. A similar release is scheduled in Japan next spring. “Other countries where Ray films were theatrically released in the last year are Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Iceland, and the UAE,” said Bansal, the granddaughter of RD Bansal, a prominent producer of Ray films in Kolkata in the Sixties.
Almost all new cinematic releases of Ray films overseas have taken the familiar route of a film festival screening first, a common market strategy in order to gain the confidence of a fresh audience. The Poland release was preceded by the screening of Ray films at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw in July last year, and in Greece it was the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in October last year.
“We are honored to feature the early works of Satyajit Ray in our VOD catalog. These titles are an important part of the cinematic legacy and yet astonishingly contemporary. These are films that can’t be forgotten—actually, that’s exactly the point: they are meant to be rediscovered again and again,” declared Dorota Witkowska of Polish distributor New Horizons VOD.
The São Paulo International Film Festival, oldest in Brazil, will hold a retrospective of Ray films during October 17-30, when Imovision will release them on VOD. “The festival poster this year is based on a storyboard of Pather Panchali drawn by Ray himself,” beamed Bansal, a Master’s in filmmaking from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K..
There were also screenings of Ray films at festivals in Albania, Georgia, Estonia, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Canada, and Hungary in the last year. Three of his classic films will be screened in November this year at the Cairo International Film Festival. This is the oldest in the Arab world.
While Ray produced most of his early films on meager budgets, RD Bansal, who at the time owned six cinemas in Kolkata, backed the director for six of his next projects and even convinced him to write a script with a superstar in the lead. Ray agreed, which led to Nayak, starring Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore.
In addition to the six Ray films released under the banner of RD Bansal, RDB Entertainments brings eight more restored Ray films, including Aparajito and Jalsaghar produced by Aurora Film Corporation and six others, among which are Devi, Paras Pathar, and Apur Sansar, produced by Chayabani Pictures.
After the demise of RD Bansal in 2010, his organization had chosen to restore the Ray films a year later in a massive process undertaken at the Pixion Studios in Mumbai.
The six Ray films produced by RDB Entertainments are presently locked up in safe custody of the Austrian Film Archive, Vienna. Bansal is now keen to get all six restorations done by her company on 2K resolution for the same to be released in 4K for the audience’s viewing pleasure. Said Bansal, “We are talking to L’Immagine Ritrovata (film restoration lab) in Bologna, Italy.”. They now want to restore the films to 4K; they transfer negatives to Italy.
