Manthan: The Indian film at Cannes made by half a million farmers

                       Smitha Patel played the role of an "untouchable" village woman in Manthan

In the mid-1970s, half a million dairy farmers in India's western state of Gujarat contributed two rupees each to make a ground-breaking film.

Manthan (The Churning), directed by venerated filmmaker Sham Bengal, became the country's first crowd-funded film.

The 134-minute 1976 film was a fictionalized narrative of the genesis of a dairy cooperative movement that transformed India from a milk-deficient nation to the world's leading milk producer. The story drew inspiration from Varghese Kurten - known as the "Milkman of India" for revolutionizing milk production in the country. (India today accounts for nearly a quarter of the global milk production.)

Nearly 50 years after it was made, a pristinely restored Manthan is receiving a red-carpet world premiere this week at the Cannes Film Festival, alongside classics from Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa and Wim Wenders. Restoring the film was a challenge, according to Shailendra Singh Dungarpur, award-winning filmmaker, archivist and restorer.

               Girish Karnak (left) plays a veterinary doctor who meets a private dairy owner played by Amish Pure (right)

All that remained of Manthan was a damaged negative and two faded prints. The negative had been ravaged by fungus, leaving vertical green lines across many sections. The sound negative was entirely destroyed, forcing the restorers to rely on the sound from the sole surviving print.

The restorers salvaged the negative and one of the prints. They borrowed and digitized the sound from the print, and repaired the film. The scanning and digital clean-up were conducted at a Chennai lab under the supervision of a renowned Bologna-based film restoration lab, with both Bengal and his long-time cinematographer Gavin NIH Alani overseeing the project. The film's sound was fixed and improved at the Bologna lab.

Some 17 months later, Manthan was reborn in ultra high definition 4K. Bengal, one of the doyens of Indian cinema, says the film remains very close to his heart.