Badnam basti

According to the synopsis published in 1972 in The Other Cinema by Indian distributor Film Niryat, BADNAM BASTI tells the story of “the loneliness of a peasant ex-criminal and his confrontation with a girl who, despite his desires, he could not possess.” Most of the films mentioned in the catalog were shown at Arsenal the same year and prints of them remained in the archive. Decades later, that 35mm print of BADNAM BASTI turned out to be unique.

Not mentioned are the film’s central themes, including human trafficking and homosexuality, which would explain the Central Board of Film Censors’ “Adults Only” rating for the initial, now lost 132-minute cut. The only surviving elements are the edit of the 35mm print in Arsenal’s archive (83 min.) and an incomplete but longer picture and sound negative from the NFDC – National Film Archive of India. We will present the world premiere of the digital restoration with a sequence contained exclusively in the sound negative. Funding for the digital restoration was provided by the Cultural Preservation Program of the Federal Foreign Office.

Sreya Chatterjee holds a BA in Mass Communication and Videography from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Film Editing from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. After a decade of working as an editor and director, she obtained an MA in Conservation and Restoration from the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Berlin, where she is currently a scientific researcher and pursuing a doctoral degree in collaboration with Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg.

Shai Heredia is a filmmaker, curator, and founding director of Experimenta, the moving image art bienniale of India. She has curated film programs and exhibitions around the world. Heredia co-directed I Am Micro (2012) and An Old Dog’s Diary (2015), which have been exhibited at prestigious film festivals and art venues internationally. She has contributed to journals such as The Moving Image Review and Art Journal and was the co-editor of the Loud Mess issue of NANG magazine. Her latest book One Film at a Time is published by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. Heredia is currently the co-curator of Berlinale Forum Expanded. She is based in Bangalore, India where she teaches in the Graduate Program in Contemporary Art Practice at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.

Markus Ruff was born in Stuttgart in 1977 and currently lives and works in Berlin. He studied Visual Communication and Art and Media at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and spent one year at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires (2009/10). Since 2011, he has been section head of archival projects at Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, leading film digitization and restoration projects as well as workshops in the field of film archiving and preservation.