‘Mahabharata’ 8K Restoration Brings Peter Brook’s Epic Back to Venice
Nearly 35 years after its original debut at the Venice Film Festival, Peter Brook’s epic film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is returning to the Lido in a meticulously restored 8K version. The restoration, spearheaded by the late director’s son Simon, marks a new chapter for the groundbreaking 1989 production that brought the ancient Indian epic to global audiences.
“The Mahabharata” holds a unique place in Peter Brook’s storied career. Based on his nine-hour stage production, the film version clocked in at a still-substantial three hours. It featured an international cast performing in English and was shot in a Paris studio. The ambitious project aimed to distill the essence of the vast Hindu epic, exploring themes of war, ethics and power across generations.
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Brook wanted to make a six-hour film initially, but this was deemed unfinanceable, so the decision was taken to shoot concurrently a three-hour film version and a six-hour TV version. For the film adaptation, Brook collaborated with longtime writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne on the screenplay. The cast, of 16 nationalities, included Georges Corraface, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Bruce Myers and Mallika Sarabhai in key roles.
The film was critically acclaimed upon its 1989 release, receiving a lengthy standing ovation at Venice. However, over the years, it faded from circulation. The original 35mm prints vanished, leaving only an old TV transfer.
Simon Brook’s connection to “The Mahabharata” dates back to his teenage years when he accompanied his father on early research trips to India as a photographer. Determined to resurrect the film, Brook embarked on a mission to locate and restore the original materials. The restoration faced numerous hurdles, from untangling complex rights issues to dealing with deteriorating film elements. Brook acquired the rights from his father’s former producer’s estate, then negotiated with banks that held the film library as collateral.
“It was very time-consuming,” Brook tells Variety. “I’m not a lawyer, I’m a filmmaker, so it was quite eye-opening.” The process involved navigating through a maze of contracts, letters and annexes, some of which were created to satisfy completion bond requirements that conflicted with French law at the time of the film’s production.
Locating and accessing the original materials presented another challenge. “The producer hadn’t paid his lab bill, and the lab had gone bankrupt,” Brook explains. This situation required additional negotiations to retrieve the film elements.
The sheer volume of material was staggering. “There were 2,713 reels of 35 millimeter film and mag and all stored in various places to which there were all these additional sound reels that had to be gotten back,” Brook reveals. “And so that all was a fairly time consuming and complex operation, especially as we didn’t have an inventory.” In all, 3,451 reels of negative and sound elements scattered across various laboratories were collated. “We managed to go back to the original camera negative for about 95% of the film,” Brook says.
The technical process proved equally challenging. Brook opted for an 8K scan and restoration, a first for a European heritage film. “We are seeing something that even the DP at the time didn’t see,” Brook explains. “We are seeing exactly what he had in his mind and what the production designer had in her mind.”
William Lubtchansky had served as director of photography, with Nicolas Gaster editing. The production design was handled by Chloe Obolensky, while the music was composed by Toshi Tsuchitori in collaboration with other artists.
The picture restoration utilized cutting-edge technology. The original camera negative was scanned at 8K resolution with 16-bit color depth, resulting in a massive 450 terabytes of data. Industry-standard software like Phoenix and Diamant required modifications to handle the unprecedented file sizes.
Audio restoration presented its own set of challenges. “The audio tape was all stuck together,” Brook says. “One of the things one has to do is bake it in a special kind of oven to be able to take it apart, to unwind it, and then you run it through the machine to digitize it.”
The restoration was carried out by TransPerfect Media France under Brook’s supervision. The team collaborated with a branch of India’s Prasad Corporation in Germany, utilizing a state-of-the-art DFT Polar HQ scanner with a 9.3K monochrome field array sensor.
The result, according to Brook, is transformative. “It’s not in the sharpness, it’s very much in the color depth,” he explains. “It’s as if there’s a kind of luminosity, a glowing life-like feeling that comes out that almost makes the brain think it’s in 3D. It’s very strange.”
Looking ahead, Brook plans to restore the full six-hour version. He’s exploring unconventional distribution models, including event screenings partnered with local theaters. The “Mahabharata” restoration will screen at Venice before a wider release in 2025, coinciding with Peter Brook’s centenary.
The epic has informed Simon Brook’s life philosophy. “The conversations that I witnessed between my father and his collaborators, on the story, on its importance was a very privileged moment and a very important one in my life,” Brook says. “That’s why now all these years later, the ‘Mahabharata’ is probably one of the things that the structured my thought and my idea of dharma [moral duties].”
Peter Brook, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 97, left behind a legacy of theatrical innovation. “The Mahabharata” represented a culmination of his multicultural approach to storytelling.
“The world is in a pretty bad way and the ‘Mahabharata’ speaks to a lot of these questions. It doesn’t bring the answers, but it gives direction and what one should maybe be thinking about. And my father was very much saying, ‘this is the age of Kali Yuga [the dark age in Hindu texts].’ Putin should be reading the Mahabharata,” Brook says.
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