Odia Classic ‘Maya Miriga’ To Premiere At Italy’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival Tomorrow

Bhubaneswar: Restored version of Nirad Mohapatra’s lyrical Odia film ‘Maya Miriga’ is set for the world premiere on Thursday (June 27) at Italy’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival.

Latest films restored by Cineteca di Bologna are screened at this annual event.

‘Maya Miriga’ is considered a classic milestone in the history of Indian cinema in general and Odia cinema in particular. It was released in 1984 and went on to win the Best National Film award. It was also part of the Critics Week at the Cannes Festival in 1984.

The film revolves around the gradual and irreversible process of disintegration in a middle-class joint family living in a small town in Odisha. It was shot in Puri with a small crew and a team of non-professional artistes.

Also Read: ‘Maya Miriga’ Screened At BFF; A Masterpiece & One Of Odisha Cinema’s Finest

‘Maya Miriga’ was restored by Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, in association with Digital Film Restore and Prasad Corporation in Chennai, last month. The restoration process took close to three years after Sandeep Mohapatra reached out to the foundation to help him restore his father’s film.

The FHF team traced 12 reels of the 16 mm original film negative to a warehouse at Prasad lab in Chennai in 2021. The manual repairing process took several months. The negatives were then sent to L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna for scanning. After getting access to one of the 35 mm prints of the film from National Film Archive of India (NFAI), which had two such prints, FHF used best scanned portions from it and the original camera negative for restoration. The sound was also taken from the 35 mm print. 

A graduate from Film and Television Institute of India, Mohapatra made numerous documentaries, television series, industrial and educational films across his three-decade career, but Maya Miriga remained his sole fiction feature. “It came twelve years after my graduation from the film institute. The idea too had stayed with me through long years of hibernation… So it all began – n0 written script in hand, a set of amateur artistes and an abandon house at out disposal. The balance which I had ultimately wanted to achieve was between realism and simplicity on the one hand and my preoccupation with a certain cinematic form on the other,” Mohapatra had noted.