Bangladeshi video editor Rakib Rana has colourised a few scenes from the Satyajit Ray classic Pather Panchali (1955). Rana used footage from The Criterion Collection’s 2015 restoration of the black-and-white film.
Shot by Subrata Mitra, Pather Panchali is the first in a trilogy revolving around the experiences of Apu, a boy from a poor family in rural Bengal.
User-generated colourised versions of black-and-white footage have recently seen an uptick worldwide.
In February, Russian YouTuber Denis Shiryaev released a colour version of the 1896 Lumiere brothers’ film The Arrival of a Train. He has since gone on to retouch black-and-white documentary footage from cities like Paris, England, Amsterdam and San Francisco.
Also read:
Watch: The Lumiere brothers’ ‘The Arrival of a Train’ – restored and colourised
Whose train is it anyway? A debate rages over ‘upscaled’ version of the Lumiere brothers’ film
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