Cinemazi remembers Paul Zils on his birth anniversary
18 Jun 1915
Born on 18 June 1915, Paul Zils found himself in a detention center in India as a prisoner of the British in 1941. Throughout his time in India, he played an integral part in establishing and functioning of film organisations - as a member of Information Films of India which was headed by Ezra Mir, as a founder of Documentary Films of India (1948), and as a patron of the magazine Indian Documentary. Zalzala (1952), based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Char Adhyay was the second of the three films he made with Dev Anand. However, his sustained interest in documentary resulted in films such as The The Ripening Seed (1956), New Life of A Displaced Person (1957), Maa: The Story Of An Unmarried Mother (1957), and The Vanishing Tribe (1963). Unfortunately, most of these films don’t have a surviving copy. He shared a close association with documentary filmmakers Fali Bilimoria and P V Pathy. Bilimoria and Zils together set up the Documentary Unit for which they secured fundings from the UN, USIS, and Shell. He returned to Germany in 1959. Cinemaazi celebrates Zils for his immense contribution to Indian documentary cinema on his birth anniversary.
