“Mahabharata” 8K restoration brings Peter Brooks epic back to Venice

Nearly 35 years after its original debut at the Venice Film Festival, Peter Brooks’ epic adaptation of the Mahabharata returns to the Lido in a meticulously restored 8K version. The restoration, overseen by the late director’s son, Simon, marks a new chapter for the groundbreaking 1989 production that introduced the ancient Indian epic to a global audience.

The Mahabharata holds a special place in Peter Brooks’ illustrious career. Based on his nine-hour stage production, the film version still lasted a remarkable three hours. Shot in a Paris studio and with an international cast performing in English, the ambitious project aimed to extract the essence of the vast Hindu epic and address themes of war, ethics and power across generations.

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Brook originally wanted to make a six-hour film, but this proved unaffordable, so it was decided to shoot a three-hour film version and a six-hour television version in parallel. For the film adaptation, Brook collaborated on the screenplay with his long-time screenwriting partner Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne. The cast of 16 nationalities included Georges Corraface, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Bruce Myers and Mallika Sarabhai in leading roles.

The film was critically acclaimed upon its release in 1989, receiving a long standing ovation in Venice, but over the years it disappeared from circulation. The original 35mm prints disappeared, leaving only an old television broadcast.

Simon Brook’s connection to the Mahabharata dates back to his teenage years, when he accompanied his father as a photographer on his first research trips to India. Determined to revive the film, Brook set out to find the original footage and restore it. The restoration faced numerous hurdles, from resolving complex rights issues to dealing with deteriorating film elements. Brook acquired the rights from the estate of his father’s former producer and then negotiated with banks, who held the film library as collateral.

“It was very time-consuming,” says Brook diversity. “I’m not a lawyer, I’m a filmmaker, so it was quite an eye-opener.” The process involved navigating a maze of contracts, letters and appendices, some of which were created to meet completion guarantee requirements that conflicted with French law at the time the film was produced.

Another challenge was finding and accessing the original footage. “The producer hadn’t paid his lab bill and the lab was bankrupt,” Brook explains. This situation required additional negotiations to get the film elements back.

The sheer volume of material was staggering. “There were 2,713 reels of 35mm film and magazines all stored in different places. Plus there were all these extra reels of sound that had to be retrieved,” reveals Brook. “And it was all quite a time-consuming and complex process, especially because we had no inventory.” In total, 3,451 reels of negatives and sound elements were collected from various labs. “We managed to get about 95% of the film back to the original camera negative,” says Brook.

The technical process proved equally challenging. Brook opted for an 8K scan and restoration, a first for a European film. “We’re seeing something that even the DP didn’t see at the time,” Brook explains. “We’re seeing exactly what he had in mind and what the production designer had in mind.”

William Lubtchansky served as cinematographer, Nicolas Gaster was in charge of editing. Production design was by Chloe Obolensky, while the music was composed by Toshi Tsuchitori in collaboration with other artists.

The image restoration used cutting-edge technology. The original camera negative was scanned at 8K resolution and 16-bit color depth, resulting in a massive 450 terabytes of data. Industry-standard software such as Phoenix and Diamond required modifications to handle the unprecedented file sizes.

Audio restoration brought its own challenges. “The tape was all glued together,” says Brook. “One of the things you have to do is bake it in a special oven so you can take it apart and unwind it. Then you have to run it through the machine to digitize it.”

The restoration was carried out by TransPerfect Media France under Brooks’ supervision. The team worked with a branch of India’s Prasad Corporation in Germany and used a state-of-the-art DFT Polar HQ scanner with a 9.3K monochrome field array sensor.

The result, says Brook, is transformative. “It’s not the sharpness, it’s the depth of color,” he explains. “It’s like there’s a kind of luminosity, a glowing, lifelike feeling that almost makes the brain think it’s in 3D. It’s very strange.”

In the future, Brook plans to restore the full six-hour version. He is exploring unconventional distribution models, including event screenings in collaboration with local cinemas. The Mahabharata restoration will be shown in Venice before going into wider release in 2025, coinciding with Peter Brook’s 100th birthday.

The epic has shaped Simon Brook’s philosophy of life. “The conversations between my father and his colleagues about the story and its meaning that I witnessed were a very privileged and very important moment in my life,” says Brook. “That is why today, all these years later, the ‘Mahabharata’ is probably one of the things that has shaped my thinking and my conception of dharma (moral duties).”

Peter Brook, who died in 2022 at the age of 97, left behind a legacy of theatrical innovation. The Mahabharata represented the culmination of his multicultural approach to storytelling.

“The world is in a pretty bad shape and the Mahabharata answers a lot of those questions. It doesn’t give answers, but it gives direction and gives hints about what you might want to think about. And my father kept saying, ‘This is the age of the Kali Yuga (the Dark Ages in Hindu texts).’ Putin should read the Mahabharata,” Brook says.

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