Inside the Race to Restore John Abraham’s Cannes Classics Film ‘Amma Ariyan’ Before It Was Lost for Good

By Naman Ramachandran

Naman Ramachandran

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When Shivendra Singh Dungarpur‘s Film Heritage Foundation first wanted to restore “Amma Ariyan,” he could not get permission.

The 1986 Malayalam film directed by John Abraham was not the property of a studio or a single estate. It had been made collectively – funded village by village, produced by a movement – and so the rights, such as they were, belonged to the Odessa Collective, the grassroots filmmaking group Abraham had co-founded. Many of its members had scattered. Some had died. Reassembling them took considerable effort.

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