A 40-year-old lost Malayalam cinematic gem, John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan, has been meticulously restored in 4K by the Film Heritage Foundation and is now set to grace the prestigious Cannes Classics section
Key Points
- The 1986 Malayalam film Amma Ariyan, directed by John Abraham, has been restored in 4K by the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation.
- The restored version of Amma Ariyan is set to premiere on May 16 in the Cannes Classics section of this year’s Cannes film festival, being the only Indian feature film featured.
- The film’s restoration was a global effort, with the Film Heritage Foundation locating the only two surviving 35mm prints at the National Film Archives of India in Pune.
- Crew members, including lead actor Joy Mathew, editor Bina Paul, and cinematographer Venu ISC, will attend the Cannes screening, reflecting on the film’s significant impact on their careers.
A 40-year-old classic Malayalam film was believed to be lost, except for a poor-quality print on YouTube. But now, the good people at the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) have rescued the film for the present and future generations of film lovers.
On May 16, the 4K restored version of Amma Ariyan (1986), the final work of the late iconoclastic filmmaker from Kerala, John Abraham, will premiere in the Cannes Classics section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Other films selected in this section include The Stranger (1946) by Orson Welles, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Tom Cruise’s hit film Top Gun (1986), which will be shown in the open-air theatre on the beach.
Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) is the only Indian feature film playing at Cannes this year.
Cannes Premiere and Crew’s Nostalgia
Among the guests who will attend the screening of Amma Ariyan are Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of the Film Heritage Foundation and three of the film’s crew members, lead actor Joy Mathew, editor and former artistic director of the International Film Festival of Kerala Bina Paul, and cinematographer Venu ISC.
For Paul and Venu, revisiting the film will be like washing themselves with a huge wave of nostalgia.
“It was a career-defining moment for me,” Paul said about working with Abraham.
At the time of the release of Amma Ariyan, she was only 25 and a recent graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India. “I worked with one of the most brilliant minds in cinema. And not only in cinema, John was a writer, political commentator, and a thinker.”
Venu added: “The film happened because of his leadership. He led the pack. You need an icon to spread an idea. He was very good at motivating and organising people.”
“The film had a huge impact on me when I was student at FTII,” Dungarpur said. “When you realise the material is scarce, you have to do something to save it, restore it, and make it accessible to the common man. That’s always been my focus.”
FHF’s Restoration Legacy and Global Search
This is the fifth consecutive year that the Cannes Classics section has programmed films restored by the Film Heritage Foundation. The other films are Thamp (in 2022), Ishanou (in 2023), Manthan (in 2024), and Aranyer Din Ratri and Gehenu Lamai (both shown in 2025).
The Film Heritage Foundation’s other restorations works include Do Bigha Zameen, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Sholay.
Amma Ariyan was restored after a global search for the film’s print conducted by the International Federation of Film Archives, Dungarpur said. Finally, the Film Heritage Foundation found the only two surviving prints of the film at the National Film Archives of India in Pune.
There were two 35mm prints, one subtitled and one without. The sound in the second print was badly damaged. There were no original camera negative and the prints showed significant deterioration. Eventually, the restoration was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna) and Digital Film Restore Pvt Ltd.
The Film’s Narrative and Critical Acclaim
Amma Ariyan, often referred to as an experimental film, follows a group of young men in Kerala who travel long distance after the death of a fellow Naxalite. Their goal is to reach their late friend’s village to inform his mother about his death.
The Cannes Classics section selects films based on the restoration work, but also on the accessibility of the film, Dungarpur added.
He pointed out to a quote by Gerald Duchaussoy, who heads the Classics section: ‘Amma Aryan is definitely one of the best films we have received this year. I was blown away by the intensity which spread throughout the film, the camera movements, the black and white imagery and the political atmosphere. I felt I was watching a 16mm-feature from South America from the 60s or the 70s.’
“It definitely feels like a film made in Cuba,” Dungarpur added.
John Abraham’s Vision and the Odessa Collective
Abraham, also a graduate of FTII, was deeply influenced by his teacher and the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Years later, he established the Odessa Collective in Kerala, which produced Amma Ariyan.
“It was at a time when John was very disgusted with the whole film situation,” Paul said. “He had made three films that had been critically acclaimed, yet he was not getting money to make another film. I think he met this group of people who said, ‘Let’s do a film, but let’s do it differently.’
“The defining thing about the collective was, not only did they collect money from people, but the way the film was shot,” Paul recalled.
“It was a group of people who traveled together through and shot the film. Finally, they distributed it themselves. It is one of the most widely seen films in Kerala, without ever having a formal distribution. I was young with idealism. The film offered me of a kind of cinema that responded to that idealism — the belief that you can change the world through cinema.”
Challenges and Creative Choices in Filmmaking
Fresh out of the film school, in her youthful arrogance, Paul thought she knew everything about editing. “What John did was to help me understand that there are no rules of editing. Everything, the so-called rules, could be broken.”
Venu recalled that Abraham and the Odessa Collective made use of a scheme run by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation. “If you deposited Rs 1 lakh, they would give you all the facilities,” he said. “So they somehow collected a lakh and started shooting. They got the camera, basic equipment and raw stock.”
Then Abraham faced a challenge. Venu and his team began to shoot in colour with a 16 mm camera. “But the camera didn’t support hand-held shooting,” Venu added. “Only the 35 mm supported hand-held shooting, but then it shot in black and white. And we couldn’t afford 35 mm colour.
“I think it was a wise choice to go with 35 mm in black and white, but after we finalised everything, John told me that he had never shot anything in colour. Sadly, he passed away a year after Amma Ariyan was completed.”
