Film Heritage Foundation is set to host regular screenings of classics from Indian cinema and beyond every week at Regal Cinema in Mumbai starting next month, the organisation’s director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur announced on Friday.
“I always had a dream that there should be a cinema hall where we can screen films all through the year. Film Heritage Foundation has been doing special events and screenings at the Regal Cinema in Colaba. But now we want to make it absolutely regular,” Dungarpur said in a video shared by the official YouTube channel of Film Heritage Foundation.
“Wherever you are in Mumbai or anywhere in the world and you want to see a film on the screen come to Regal and you can watch the way the films are meant to be seen,” he added.
The initiative will be kicked off with a retrospective on Alfred Hitchcock’s films ahead of the legendary filmmaker’s birthday. “We're not only going to screen the original version of Psycho but also films like Rear Window, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief and Strangers on a Train,” Dungarpur added.
Screenings of films by acclaimed directors like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, Chantal Akerman and Billy Wilder will also take place in the upcoming months.
“It's going to be a first-come-first-serve basis and absolutely free. We want you to come into the theatre and it doesn't matter whether we have four people or 100 people,” Dungarpur further said.
Film Heritage Foundation has been hosting special programmes and retrospectives over the years, celebrating the golden era of cinema and its long-lasting impact. Last year in December, they organised Raj Kapoor 100, a retrospective of ten Raj Kapoor films in 40 cities and 135 cinemas across India.
This year, in February, FHF presented Wim Wenders – King of the Road – The India Tour, a retrospective celebrating the auteur’s five-decade-long career in cinema. Wenders, who visited India for the first time, attended the screenings which took place in Mumbai, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, and Delhi from February 5 to 22.
