MAMI Mumbai Film Festival to skip 2025 edition, to return next year: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
In a post shared on social media, Dungarpur, who is known for his extensive work on film restoration and preservation, asked fans of the festival for their "understanding and support."
This is to inform you that the 2025 edition of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival will not take place as we are in the process of revamping the festival with a dynamic vision and a new team to ensure that the festival returns as a premier showcase for the best of independent, regional and classic cinema from India and around the world. We are working diligently to reschedule the festival and will announce the new dates for the 2026 edition as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding and support, Dungerpur wrote on Instagram.
Filmmaker Tanuja Chandra said it was sad that the festival will not be there this year. "It's a part of the year so many of us have loved.Good wishes for coming back stronger," she added.
The MAMI Mumbai Film Festival is organised by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI).
The festival has been known for bringing the best of contemporary world cinema and talent to the city since 1997.
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Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
Italy honours Film Heritage Foundation Director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur with the prestigious Vittorio Boarini award
This prestigious award recognizes Dungarpur's extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent. Almost 10-15 years ago, when film restoration experts in India first began sounding the alarm that 75% of early Indian cinema had vanished due to neglect, decay, and indifference, the revelation was both staggering and sobering. The loss seemed irreversible. But this month, at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, one of the most tireless champions of India's cinematic legacy received a powerful global endorsement. National Award-winning filmmaker, archivist and Director of Film Heritage Foundation, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur , was conferred with the esteemed Vittorio Boarini Award at a special ceremony recently, during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy by Gian Luca Farinelli, Director of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. This prestigious award recognizes Dungarpur's extraordinary dedication to the cause of film preservation and restoration, and his pivotal role in building a movement to save film heritage across India and the subcontinent. Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Institute of Delhi says," The award is a very prestigious acknowledgement of Shivendra and Teesha's work. When Shivendra stated that 75% of early Indian cinema is lost due to neglect and absence of conservation, it was clear that unless someone started the process, future Indian generations would not have been able to know their heritage.' by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Dementia and Memory Loss Has Been Linked To This Common Thing. Memory Health Learn More Undo Italy has honoured Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and Teesha Cherian of the Film Heritage Foundation. Italy, through Bologna's Cineteca di Bologna and the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, has emerged as a key international partner in India's cinematic salvage mission. Many of the restored Indian classics that have travelled to global film festivals - Ishanou, Aranyer Din Ratri etc have been brought back to life with Italy's technical support and curatorial platform. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur states, "I am deeply honoured to be the recipient of the Vittorio Boarini Award which is a recognition of my work in film preservation under the aegis of Film Heritage Foundation that I founded in 2014. It has been a very challenging undertaking to work towards saving endangered film heritage in our part of the world with limited resources and support over a decade. But I am proud to say that we have built a movement for film preservation not just in India, but in neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal and achieved many milestones in an incredibly short span of time from training film archivists to doing world-class restorations of Indian films to bringing classic cinema back to the big screen and preserving every bit of film heritage we can find. It is wonderful to have this work appreciated and acknowledged and it only reaffirms our commitment to the cause as there is so much more to do.' Shivendra Singh Dungarpur Andrea Anastasio, director of Italian Institute of New Delhi says, "This is enough to understand the value and the relevance of the work the Film Heritage Institute does. After the award ceremony, we could see the restored copy of Aranyer Din Ratri, by Satyajit Ray at the Arlecchino Theatre, a great hall with a fantastic screen . It was a house full screening and it was really amazing to see the crowd of young viewers attending the screening. That's what Bologna is also relevant a year, for ten days the city is flooded with film buffs from all over the world in occasion of 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' (literally The Re-Found Cinema). It's a festival spread all over Bologna, where restored old films from all over the world are screened in the new splendour of 4K in the city's theatre, while every night a giant screening outdoor happens at Piazza Maggiore, exactly where the restored copy of Sholay was screened last 27th June." Dungarpur credits the Cineteca di Bologna as the inspiration behind the establishment of the Film Heritage Foundation, noting its integral role in the foundation's journey over the past fifteen years. Further elaborating on his personal connection to the Cineteca di Bologna and the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival he adds, "I first attended the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival conducted by Cineteca di Bologna in 2010 and it changed my life. I saw the best of world cinema beautifully restored, and entered a whole new world where people were dedicated to saving films for posterity and bringing them back to life again. I went as a filmmaker and cinephile and emerged wearing another hat of a film archivist and have been going back to Bologna every year since then. " The presentation of the Vittorio Boarini Award to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur highlights his significant impact on safeguarding cinematic history and underscores the global importance of film preservation efforts. The Vittorio Boarini Award, instituted in 2022 by the Cinetecadi Bologna as part of its annual Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, is an international recognition honoring individuals or institutions who have made exceptional contributions to the preservation, restoration, promotion or dissemination of cinema as cultural heritage. It is named in tribute to Vittorio Boarini (1938–2021), the visionary founder and first director of the Cineteca di Bologna, whose efforts were instrumental in transforming it into one of the world's foremost film archives. The award celebrates a lifelong commitment to cinema preservation, international advocacy for film heritage, leadership in archive building and programming and work that bridges archival and public access to classic and rare films.
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Indian Express
No MAMI in Mumbai: Why seeking scale and corporate money may be bad for culture and soft power
Though the formal announcement came only earlier this month, the signs that Mumbai may not have its favourite film festival this year were writ large on the significantly scaled-down and visibly short-on-resources MAMI Film Festival 2024. With the title sponsor gone, the festival was austere. It was limited to just two venues and devoid of all the bells and whistles of the grand 2023 edition, which was spread over eight screening locations with the spiffy Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre as its mothership. But despite the budgetary constraints last year, the programme was good, and the logistics were mostly frictionless. The film bros were less angry, and the audience's general level of entitled behaviour was palpably more muted than usual. The MAMI team managed the expectations of the city's media cognoscenti through their social media channels even before the registrations for the much-awaited festival opened. The lobbies were overcrowded, but it was a delight to witness the young volunteers deal with the odd irate millennial or boomer cinephile frustrated with the complex matrix of festival rules and regulations, with quintessential Gen Z vibes. One was able to catch most of the films planned for, despite the fastest-fingers-first online booking platform, queuing outside the venue, followed by more queuing inside the venue. The refrain one picked up at the screening venues, on the sidelines, and social media was that MAMI is among Mumbai's most loved festivals. And, one gathered, through the six days of the festival, that the festival loved the city, too, because it showed up like an old friend. Everyone wondered if the festival would be able to survive the funding crisis. For a city of its size and economic heft, it is a travesty for a popular international film festival to find itself struggling for survival. It should not be an unreasonable public expectation in a creative industry powerhouse like Mumbai to have a decent international film festival. Though the city expresses its desire to be world-class by building all kinds of urban infrastructure, it often forgets to pay attention to its already world-class intangible cultural heritage. This may soon lead to a situation where there are too many roads with fewer places to go. The MAMI film festival, even a decade ago, was small but well organised until well-meaning folks decided it needed scaling up. From a couple of venues and involved participation by the independent and international film community, it became a jamboree that received more financial support and media glare than it could organically sustain in the long run. It would not be out of place to recall how the excellent Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema in Delhi grew and grew before it unfortunately folded up as the art fund behind the reckless growth went bankrupt. For cultural institutions, joining hands with large corporate sponsors with changing values or expectations may not always be a good idea. Bell Canada, for instance, stopped funding the Toronto Film Festival after supporting it for 28 years. State support for cultural institutions, including film festivals, is also declining worldwide. Last year, Korea slashed its support for the Busan film festival by 50 per cent. The paucity of support for film festivals like MAMI indicates a limited understanding of culture's role in growing the overall market and shaping the country's soft power — a concept often invoked in the abstract but rarely backed with the support needed. Going through the programme, watching films, and tuning into the lobby conversations, it was clear that several countries spanning South, Southeast, and West Asia are taking cinema and film culture seriously and trying to catch up with the established hubs like India, China, Japan, Iran, Egypt, etc, by making substantial investments. Between watching films and watching people watching films, one discussed issues related to ailing film festivals like the MAMI with fellow queue mates. Many people said that instead of a big-ticket sponsor, a pool of resources should be created to secure the long-term prospects of the festival. It was felt that Mumbai's film and film-adjacent creative sectors should seriously consider supporting the festival financially. In a city where success is often measured and celebrated in box-office collection numbers, it cannot be very difficult to put together a few crores to host filmmakers and audiences from India and abroad. In an ideal world, corporate sponsorship and state support can make culture more accessible. Still, to remain primarily responsive to public needs and aspirations, the audiences must pay for the culture to the extent possible. Today, more than ever, independent media and cultural institutions are in dire need of public support. A paid membership programme or regular crowdfunding rounds would also help the MAMI leadership gauge how elastic or price-sensitive the demand for the festival is among the audiences. Each such vote and gesture of support works as a tetrapod protecting the festival and other such events and institutions against the unruly ebb and flow of resources. One would like to think that the choice of tetrapods, or wave-breakers, as the 2024 festival's visual identity was not a happenstance. Used to reduce the intensity of approaching waves on seafronts and harbours, and a common sight along the Mumbai shoreline, the tetrapods, in this case, were perhaps emblematic of the measures the festival organisers had to put in place against the receding waves of sponsorship and support. The writer is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platforms
Time of India
21-07-2025
- Time of India
'Cruel irony': Hansal Mehta reacts to cancellation of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2025
The MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2025 has been cancelled. The news was confirmed on the festival's official social media handle on Monday. The decision was taken to revamp the festival with a "dynamic vision" and a "new team" to ensure that it will return as a premier showcase for the best of independent, regional, and classic cinema from India and around the world, said festival director Dungarpur in a statement. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "We are working diligently to reschedule the festival and will announce the new dates for the 2026 edition as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding and support," he added. The move comes as a major hiccup for the festival that has had a fair run since it was founded in 1997. Reacting to the same, filmmaker , whose 'Aligarh' and 'The Buckingham Murders' were earlier premiered at the festival, voiced his discontent. "It's a cruel irony that Mumbai draped in the glitz of being India's financial and cinematic capital cannot keep alive a film festival of its own," the filmmaker wrote on social media. He went on to call out the "self-appointed gatekeepers of cinema" who left the festival for better stages and safer bets, further adding that only a few "passionate believers" took care of it. "And now that fragile flame has been snuffed out. No ceremony. No outrage. Just a slow, silent forgetting. What should have been a cultural cornerstone has been reduced to a footnote - another casualty of apathy dressed as progress," Mehta concluded. Many took to the comment section and echoed similar sentiments. Filmmaker Onir wrote, "Heartbreaking that the industry that produces the largest number of films ... failed to nurture this one space that celebrated cinema as a form of art ... Tired of too many ads? go ad free now beyond box office and stars ., what a loss for the city and a shame for us as an industry." Organised by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), the film festival has emerged as a hub for the world to discover emerging South Asian talent and contemporary cinema. Several leading Bollywood celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Farhan Khan, , and , have been associated with the festival over the years.
