Amitabh Bachchan to be honoured with FIAF Award

Megastar Amitabh Bachchan will be honoured with an award by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).

The actor will be the first Indian cinema personality to be bestowed with the FIAF Award for his dedication and contribution to the preservation of the world’s film heritage.

Hollywood filmmakers and previous recipients of the FIAF Award — Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan — will present the award to Bachchan during a virtual showcase scheduled to take place on March 19.

“This year FIAF celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its annual Award. To mark this momentous occasion, there could be no better recipient than one of the world's greatest movie stars, and one who has understood, embraced, and publicised the cause of film preservation for years,” Frederic Maire, President of FIAF, said in a statement.

“By presenting our prestigious FIAF Award to Amitabh Bachchan, we want to show the world how rich and diverse, but also how fragile, this unique film heritage is, and we want to publicly thank Bachchan for his role as a high-profile advocate for the rescue of this heritage, in India and beyond,” he added.

FIAF is a worldwide organization of film archives and museums from across the world, at a virtual showcase scheduled to take place on March 19, 2021. Icons of world cinema and filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan will bestow the award on Big B at the event.

The 78-year-old Bollywood icon's name was nominated by the FIAF affiliate Film Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation founded by filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, dedicated to the preservation, restoration, documentation, exhibition, and study of India's film heritage.

"We have been fortunate enough to enjoy the unstinting support of our ambassador Amitabh Bachchan, who has championed the cause of saving our film heritage, and constructively wielded his influence to amplify the cause on a war footing in our part of the world. This is the reason we nominated him for the award, and he was unanimously voted by all FIAF members," he said.

Filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan, who have been previous recipients, will give the award to Big B for his dedication and contribution to the preservation of and access to the world's film heritage for the benefit of present and future generations, at a virtual presentation.

Reacting to the global recognition, Amitabh Bachchan stated, “I am greatly honoured to receive the FIAF Award for the year 2021 for a cause that I am deeply committed to. It was when I became the ambassador of Film Heritage Foundation in 2015, that I realised the extent of the neglect and colossal loss of our precious film heritage and how we continue to lose more of our legacy every day. Recognising the urgency of the situation, I have been working closely with Film Heritage Foundation since its inception to do everything in our power to save our films and to build a movement for film preservation in our part of the world.”

Previous recipients of the award include Martin Scorsese (2001), Manoel de Oliveira (2002), Ingmar Bergman (2003), Geraldine Chaplin (2004), Mike Leigh (2005), Hou Hsiao-hsien (2006), Peter Bogdanovich (2007), Nelson Pereira dos Santos (2008), Rithy Panh (2009), Liv Ullmann (2010), Kyoko Kagawa (2011), Agnès Varda (2013), Jan Švankmajer (2014), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (2015), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2016), Christopher Nolan (2017), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2018), Jean-Luc Godard (2019), and Walter Salles (2020).