New Delhi: Megastar Amitabh Bachchan will be conferred with the prestigious 2021 FIAF Award by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).
Hollywood filmmakers and previous recipients of the FIAF Award- Martin Scorcese and Christopher Nolan will present the award to Bachchan during a virtual showcase scheduled to take place on March 19.
The veteran 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 film heritage.
“I am greatly honoured to receive the FIAF Award for the year 2021, for a cause that I am deeply committed to. We must strengthen the idea that film archiving is as essential as filmmaking, and I do hope that we are able to garner further support for this most essential cause from my colleagues in the film industry and the government, to enable us to realise our dream for building a centre that will preserve and showcase our magnificent film heritage,” said Bachchan.
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.
The FIAF is a worldwide organisation, comprising of film archives and museums from across the world.
Created in 2001, the FIAF Award has been presented to the following personalities so far: 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), and Christopher Nolan (2017), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2018), Jean-Luc Godard (2019), and Walter Salles (2020).
