Film Heritage Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for Cinema Projection 2024

CELEBRATING THE UNSUNG HEROES WHO BROUGHT THE MAGIC OF CINEMA TO THE SILVER SCREEN!

For the second consecutive year, Film Heritage Foundation will be presenting its Lifetime Achievement Award for Cinema Projection 2024.

The recipient(s) of the award was honoured at a special ceremony on September 27, 2024 at Regal Cinema, Mumbai.

With the rise of digital projection and the shift away from film on film screenings, the future of single screen cinemas hangs by a thread, film projectors gather dust and are being sold for scrap and film projectionists have been put out to pasture.

The aim of the Film Heritage Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for Cinema Projection is to recognise the immense contribution of projectionists to our film history.

Last year, three projectionists were selected to receive the award that was presented to them at a special ceremony on July 26, 2023 by renowned thespian Naseeruddin Shah. The awardees were Lakhan Lal Yadhav, P. A. Salam and Mohammed Aslam, all of whom had worked for over 50 years as film projectionists.

FHF had called for nominations for an Indian projectionist who has dedicated his life to screening films on celluloid and whose outstanding service to cinema must be recognized. The nominations were vetted by a selection committee who will select the winning candidate.

Nominations were closed on September 15th, 2024.

The recipient of the award are selected by a jury of eminent film personalities.

THE WINNERS

Sukumar Ghosh has spent 48 years working as a projectionist at Basusree Cinema in Bhowanipore, where he began working in 1974. He would operate the Ashcraft Carbon Projector. Till he retired in 2021, Ghosh, now 70 years old, would come to work 365 days of the year, cycling every day for two hours covering a distance of 20 km from Sonarpur to the cinema in Bhowanipore. The projector became an extension of himself. Ghosh said in an article that appeared in the Telegraph in 2019, “I didn’t have to look at the screen. I had to run the film through my fingers or just listen to the projector’s sounds. I would know something was wrong.”

Chand Kumar Mondal has had 45 years of experience as a film projectionist at Priya Cinema in Kolkata. He has seen the years when prints used to be shuttled between cinemas so that three cinemas could run a single print. He has screened Hindi films like Sholay, Don, Naseeb, Dilwale Dulhaniye Le Jayenge, Bengali films like Chokher Bali to the more recent Harry Potter and Avengers films. He has worked with the entire spectrum of projectors from celluloid to digital beginning with Carbon Arc projector to the Philips and Westrex projectors as well as the Zenon Christi Platter Projection System and to normal and four track sound to Dolby and now Atmos.

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