‘Cinema Travellers’: Documenting a vanishing art

By Bedika New Delhi, Sep 3 (PTI) Travelling tent cinemas were oncean important part of movie watching experience, particularly invillages, but time and technology have not been kind to theseven-decades old medium and the people behind it. Directors Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’scritically-applauded documentary "Cinema Travellers", set topremiere at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival,is an ode to the now vanishing art. The documentary bowed to glowing reviews at Cannes FilmFestival’s Classics section where it won Special Jury Prize-L’Oeil d’or: Le Prix du documentaire. Shirley says that despite being part of the collectivecommunal experience of movie-watching, travelling cinemas havebeen ignored in our film history. "Travelling cinemas are an important part of history butthey have not got any mention. These people are part of thiscollective communal experience for seven decades. That was thetrigger point for the project. "We knew that the expression is going to change soonfundamentally. The people who are in our film are the keepersof this tradition for seventy years or more. How are they goingto respond of this moment of change? I thought this could be afilm," Shirley told PTI in an interview. Amit says they were interested in the "human experience"of how change affects people. "For us, the story was not the change in technology buthow people respond to it and how we as human beings moveforward in life. The question is how to preserve this andcreate something new, that’s also the spirit of the film. Thestart is very nostalgic but it also looks to the future." Amit is happy that they were able to preserve some part ofthe history of travelling cinemas in their documentary, whichwill also be screened at the New York Film Festival afterToronto. "Culture is a giant thing and we don’t know what it willaccept and what it will discard. We can’t control it. It’sambiguous. What it takes might not be the best that humanityhas to offer but it keeps that. "We as filmmakers have to create things so that what couldhave been lost is preserved in some form. There are many thingsthat are lost in this world but if we can create a uniqueexperience of a distant past it would be great to have that." Amit, who is also working on a book on the subject, saysthe medium is close to extinction as more and more people haveaccess to latest films on their mobiles and desktops. "Lesser and lesser people are coming to these cinemas. Itis a dwindling business in that sense. It’s not able to competewith that technology. It is the larger take away from theirlives." Amit, who is a photographer, says it was a difficult filmto fund but he enjoyed every moment of working on the projectas he thinks there are "very few things in the world that areas enigmatic and rare as cinema." PTI BK SSN SHDBK