“I have never been to any Cannes festival earlier”, he said, “So, I am very happy to receive an invitation to attend it.”

The Cannes Classics sidebar section, introduced in 2004, is dedicated to heritage films and previously unreleased works on the cinema. It focuses on screening several new or restored prints of classic movies, tributes to foreign cinema and documentaries on cinematography.

In Guide, Dev Anand plays the role of a smooth-talking tour guide who finds himself entangled in the affairs of a woman caught in a loveless, unhappy marriage, which changes his life dramatically. Based on RK Narayan’s novel of the same name, the 1965 classic has Waheeda Rehman giving one of her most outstanding performances on screen, demonstrating her range and depth not only as an actor but as an accomplished classical dancer as well. To present the print in its full glory at Cannes, the re-colourising and restoration of the print will be supervised by Hyderabad’s Goldstone Technologies Ltd.

The names of the other film classics to be shown in this section will be announced officially only a week before the festival. However, from the UK, the British Film Institutes’ National Archives has announced that its film, Dracula (1958), which shot Christopher Lee to instant fame, is in the selection.

India has featured earlier in Cannes’ Classics since its inception. In 2005, the section opened with “50 years of Pather Panchali, with a screening of a print of pristine clarity made specially for Cannes by Dr Dilip Basu of the Ray Academy in Santa Cruz, California (he has painstakingly restored sixteen of Ray’s films to date). In 1956, Pather Panchali Ray’s debut work was given a midnight screening in Cannes, which it is said was poorly attended. But in that audience were Andre Bazin and other leading critics, who then insisted that this remarkable film be given another screening. The film went on to win the festival’s Best Human Documentary Award, making Ray an international name.

The following year, in 2006, Cannes paid tribute to Raj Kapoor (who it named as ‘The Prince of Bollywood’) and screened three of his films, Aag (1948), Barsaat (1949) and Awara (1951). Hallowed names of Indian cinema have found their place in Cannes of yore. Chetan Anand preceded Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali by nearly a decade to win the Grand Prix at Cannes for his film Neecha Nagar (1946). The film, made during the last phase of the freedom movement (1945-46) with all the restrictions the British could enforce, was never released commercially in India. It was perhaps the first-ever recognition of an Indian film in an international film festival.

Now, 62 years later, it is the turn of Chetan Anand’s other two brothers to be honoured in Cannes. The late Vijay Anand gets his well- deserved hurrahs as the director of Guide, while his brother Dev Anand, will be on stage in person to acknowledge applause and acclaim as the film’s producer and star.