Manthan: The Indian film at Cannes made by half a million farmers

In the mid-1970s, half a million dairy farmers in India's western state of Gujarat contributed two rupees each to make a ground-breaking film. Manthan (The Churning), directed by venerated filmmaker Shyam Benegal, became the country's first crowd-funded film. The 134-minute 1976 film was a fictionalised narrative of the genesis of a dairy cooperative movement that transformed India from a milk-deficient nation to the world's leading milk producer. The story drew inspiration from Verghese Kurien - known as the "Milkman of India" for revolutionising milk production in the country. (India today accounts for nearly a quarter of the global milk production.)

Nearly 50 years after it was made, a pristinely restored Manthan is receiving a red-carpet world premiere this week at the Cannes Film Festival, alongside classics from Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa and Wim Wenders. Restoring the film was a challenge, according to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, award-winning filmmaker, archivist and restorer.All that remained of Manthan was a damaged negative and two faded prints. The negative had been ravaged by fungus, leaving vertical green lines across many sections. The sound negative was entirely destroyed, forcing the restorers to rely on the sound from the sole surviving print.

The restorers salvaged the negative and one of the prints. They borrowed and digitised the sound from the print, and repaired the film. The scanning and digital clean-up were conducted at a Chennai lab under the supervision of a renowned Bologna-based film restoration lab, with both Benegal and his long-time cinematographer Govind Nihalani overseeing the project. The film's sound was fixed and improved at the Bologna lab. Some 17 months later, Manthan was reborn in ultra high definition 4K. Benegal, one of the doyens of Indian cinema, says the film remains very close to his heart.

"It is wonderful to see the film come back to life almost like we made it yesterday. It looks better than the first print," the 89-year-old filmmaker says.Benegal recounts that, egged on by Kurien, he had produced several documentaries on Operation Flood - India's milk revolution - and rural marketing initiatives. When he suggested a feature film to Kurien, saying that documentaries mainly reached those "converted to the cause", Kurien balked. He told Benegal that there were no funds available to make the film, given his refusal to accept money from farmers.

Under the cooperative model, small farmers would bring and sell milk in the mornings and evenings to a network of collection centres in Gujarat. The milk was then transported to dairies for processing into butter and other products.