The 83rd Venice International Film Festival just secured a major piece of Indian cinema history. Dev Benegal’s acclaimed 1994 dark comedy English, August is officially set for a World Premiere in the Venice Classics Competition. The festival runs from August 26 to September 5, 2026. The Film Heritage Foundation formally announced the selection on Friday. This brings the 31-year-old adaptation of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s bestselling novel back to the global stage.
Rahul Bose stars as Agastya Sen. He plays an urban, English-speaking IAS probationer completely out of his depth during a remote provincial posting. Bose will personally attend the screening in Italy. He joins Benegal, producer Anuradha Parikh, sound recordist Vikram Joglekar, and Film Heritage Foundation director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur to present the newly minted 4K cut.
Getting the film to Venice was an absolute logistical nightmare. The original 35mm camera and sound negatives were entirely destroyed years ago due to poor storage conditions at a Chennai laboratory. Benegal first revealed that tragic loss back in 2011. The project only came back to life after archivists uncovered a surviving, clean 35mm release print at the National Film Archive of India in February 2020.
The Film Heritage Foundation eventually took over the rescue operation. They shipped the NFAI print, along with another surviving copy from their own vault, to the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Italy. You can read the technical restoration details outlining how they salvaged the physical media. Meanwhile, Joglekar managed to rebuild the entire audio track. He used original digital audio tapes that Benegal personally kept safe over the decades. The official Venice announcement confirms the film’s placement in the highly competitive Classics bracket.
This marks a serious institutional win for the Film Heritage Foundation. The selection secures their third consecutive year premiering a major restoration at Venice. They previously hit the Lido with Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha in 2024 and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin in 2025. That historic hat-trick achievement cements their presence on the European festival circuit.