In the mid-1970s, five hundred thousand dairymen in the western Indian state of Gujarat each gave two rupees to produce a groundbreaking movie. About Director Shyam Benegal Manthan (The Churning) became India’s maiden crowd-funded film.

In 1976 this fictionalized movie about how milk scarcity drove India into becoming the top milk-producing country was 133mins long mentioning Verghese Kurien—who had also done so much work to change India’s milk sector into a competitive one so that we now have a quarter share (25%) which means our nation has gone from relying on others’ dairy products as it once did when we imported powdered milk- but that was before he arrived here!

Manthan’s only remaining evidence was an impaired film strip and two ancient printouts. It was covered in mold blotches, following which the image lines ran vertically throughout most of it. Except for a single printout from which they borrowed sound, the soundtrack on the celluloid is completely ruined.