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 on June 27, 2025, 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.
The Vittorio Boarini Award, instituted in 2022 by the Cineteca di 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.
SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR
FILMMAKER, ARCHIVIST AND DIRECTOR, FILM HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
“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.”
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