More than halfway into Celluloid Man, you are introduced to the residents of a sleepy Karnataka village, Heggodu. In a wide angle shot, you see a man cycling down a road with a 16mm tucked behind him. You meet the villagers, among them two farmers, a peon and then the projectionist himself. The villagers share their memories of discovering Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon and Pather Panchali and about how these films made a deep impression on their psyches. None of them understood the language spoken in the films, nor could they read subtitles, yet they connected with the movies through the stories they narrated and the emotions they evoked among the people.

It’s a brilliant story. And for anyone who’s ever considered world cinema to be appealing solely to a high-brow crowd, or who thought that masses preferred a certain kind of “entertainment”, it’s as much an eye-opener as it’s amusing. Cinema cuts across boundaries, class, culture, age, sexes, we’ve been told, and Celluloid Man reminds us that through the little anecdote. The documentary, though, isn’t as much about cinema itself, as it is about a man – PK Nair – who dedicated his life to the movies, performing a service a lot more commendable and note-worthy than that done by generations of filmmakers: he preserved movies.

Nair’s story is narrated in interview format, with the septuagenarian recounting events from his life with remarkable sharpness – his first brush with cinema, what drew him to film restoration, the time spent at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) and National Film Archive of India (NFAI) campuses, etc. Other interviewees – some of Indian cinema’s most respected filmmakers and actors – provide a window into Nair’s painstaking efforts to conserve our film heritage as well as the deplorable state of film preservation in India.

During a beautiful montage that establishes the FTII surroundings, the camera shoots through the trees circling Shantaram Pond (where legendary filmmaker V Shantaram shot his 1934 film, Amrit Manthan) in the FTII campus, while a song from the same film plays in the background. The effect is surreal, not just transporting you to the place but also giving you a sense of its rich history, while paying tribute to a slice of cinema simultaneously.

Both PK Nair and film restoration are entities a large number of us are clueless about, and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur strives to inform the audience about them through his documentary. In the process, Dungarpur traces the journey of Indian cinema itself, smartly weaving footage and music from old classics in his narrative, lending the documentary mood and heft.

To his credit, the director manages to touch on quite a few things during 162 minutes of thoroughly engaging screen time: Nair’s life and his exemplary work (primarily), the pitiable state of preservation in the country, our lustrous cinematic heritage and, rather importantly, provides little nuggets about an industry we seem to know very less about, but the centenary year of which we seem to be celebrating with much gusto.