Shivendra Singh Dungarpur Biography 
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a film producer and director, best known for restoring old Indian classics. Established Dungarpur Films in 2001, Shivendra has also produced and directed about 500 commercials, apart from documentaries and short films. He founded Film Heritage Foundation in 2014, through which he aims at preserving old movies, apart from restoring them. Since young he had a hobby as an archivist and collector, which prompted him to do a significant contribution to preserving Indian cinema. Preservation and restoration of India’s cinematic heritage was a natural progression of events in his life.
He was born in Patna in 1969 into a royal family. Usha Rani, Maharani of Dumraon was his maternal grandmother. His ancestors belong to Dungarpur, Rajasthan. Raj Singh Dungarpur, former cricketer and president of Board of Control for Cricket in India was his uncle. It was Usha Rani who introduced him to the world of cinema. She and her husband gave him opportunity to see old Hindi classics like Pakeezah to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. He also developed a hobby of make notes about films that I saw, including details of the cast and crew.
He came to Mumbai in the late 1980s and worked as an assistant to ace film maker Gulzar for a while, before he enrolled at FTII Pune. He studied film direction and script writing and completed graduation in 1994. He started his production house Dungarpur Films in 2001, and mainly focused on ads in the initial days. Slowly his production firm expanded to making short films and documentaries. In 2012, he made his first documentary - Celluloid Man, on the life and works of P. K. Nair, which won many awards, and shown at more than 50 international film festivals.
Martin Scorsese – the man who archived and restored over 600 films of Indian cinema became his main inspiration to initiate such a process in India. He founded Film Heritage Foundation in 2014. Uday Shankar's Kalpana (1948) was his first attempt, in association with Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation, before he founded Film Heritage Foundation.
Published: N/A
Updated: March 20, 2016
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