Sikkim (Film)

• Satyajit Ray: spokesman

Sikkim is a documentary by Satyajit Ray from 1971.

It is the only documentary Rays, who has no personality of Indian art on the topic. The rare recordings in small princely state in the Himalayas were the Chogyal (ruler ), Palden Thondup Namgyal of Sikkim and his then wife, the American Hope Cooke, commissioned. A cousin Ray who was friends with the couple, Ray lured with the promise of a well- paid holiday in the mountains and artistic freedom. In addition to his preferred poetic shots of the landscape and population Ray was forced to provide a portion of the film with sugarcoated statistical information and in particular the Sikkimese against the majority of the Nepalese population highlight. Some criticized scenes had to be removed after he had shown the first cut version of the Chogyal and his wife. After the annexation of Sikkim by India in 1975, the performance of the film in India was prohibited because the government did not approve of a seemingly idealized representation of the feudal state.

The film was long considered lost. There were rumors that Hope Cooke would have deposited a copy in a U.S. university. The British Film Institute there was a version for the first time came in 2002 at the National Film Theatre in London as part of a complete retrospective of films Satyajit Ray's public performance. 2003 gave Richard Attenborough as President of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a copy of the film, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Only in 2010, the Indian government lifted the ban on performance, after only one public performance at the 16th Kolkata Film Festival 2010, the intended daily demonstrations at the instigation of Art & Culture Trust of Sikkim by a court decision under the interim relief were stopped. The official world premiere of the restored version on April 6, 2011 in Gangtok.