Love Is Color Blind

After an encounter in the heart of the Rajasthan desert, the filmmaker recalled the images of a film made by Mani Kaul in 1973, titled "Duvidha". Who is this then, whose face has become part of the persistence of a cinematographic image? Loubna Régragui is above all a film preservationist who also makes films. One needs to put it like that to understand some of the energies that animate "The Nine Lakh Stars", which was the search for acceptable analogue elements of Mani Kaul's high-modernist masterpiece "Duvidha" (1973) whose soul, she thinks, was erased by its digital mastering. Which is an interesting question to ponder apropos of a film that tells the story of a ghost, who incarnates a young bride's absent husband... Is the digital ghost of the analogue? While Kaul passed away a decade ago, there are still some witnesses for Régragui to interview about "Duvidha"'s creation and the particularities of Kaul's art. This makes "The Nine Lakh Stars"s three things at once: a treatise on the ethics of preservation, a pars pro toto portrayal of a historical film giant and a meditation on the various meanings of a key work of world cinema. —Olaf Möller, Curator and Programmer of Cinema Regained for the film's World Premiere selection at IFFR 2022