By Naman Ramachandran

The restored version of Indian auteur Girish Kasaravalli's 1977 Kannada debut film “Ghatashraddha” (“The Ritual”) will premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

This restoration, a collaboration between Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), with funding from George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, brings the Indian classic back to international audiences 47 years after its original release.

Based on a novella by U.R. Ananthamurthy, “Ghatashraddha” tells the story of Yamuna, a child widow living in her father’s religious school in South India. After becoming pregnant by a local teacher, she faces ostracism and undergoes a ritual in which her father symbolically breaks an earthen pot, representing her outcast status.