The story of India’s unique ‘Milk Revolution’ is going to the Cannes Film Festival

The latest Indian addition to the Cannes Film Festival line-up is a 48-year-old production about the Amul dairy co-operative movement. Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (1976), newly restored by Film Heritage Foundation, will be screened at Cannes (May 14-25) in its Classics section.

Manthan joins Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (selected for the Competition section), Maisam Ali’s In Retreat (showing in the sidebar ACID Cannes programme) and Film and Television Institute of India student Chidanand S Naik’s Sunflowers Were The First Ones To Know (chosen for the competitive La Cinef category). British filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, starring Indian actor Shahana Goswami, will also be at Cannes.

Cannes has previously screened two Film Heritage Foundation projects: Aravindan Govindan’s Thamp (1978) and Aribam Syam Sarma’s Ishanou (1990). “The restoration of a Shyam Benegal film has been on Film Heritage Foundation’s wish list for years as he is one of India’s most venerated filmmakers whose early films were iconic in India’s parallel cinema movement,” the foundation’s director, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, said in a press statement.

Benegal’s fourth feature stars Girish Karnad as the white knight of what came to be known as India’s “White Revolution”. Karnad’s character is modelled on Verghese Kurien, who laid the foundation for Amul in the late 1940s by persuading dairy farmers in Gujarat to form a co-operative.

The film’s...

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