Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The Movies. And Us

Filmmaker Vani Subramanian tells the story of India’s small cinemas through the memories of the people who worked in them and loved them, a story she reveals to be inextricable from the social and political changes of the country over cinema’s first century.

As all over the world, single venue cinemas are slowly dying off across India, one of the largest, most multilingual and vibrant cinema centres of the world. Once the proud homes for the entertainment and enlightenment of the masses, who would flock to the arrival of new films, they are now too often empty.

Who owned and ran these places? Who frequented them, and what did the thrills and transportations of cinema mean to these audiences? Cinema Pe Cinema is a precise history of an independent India as reflected in its cinema halls between Mumbai and Calicut. Filmmaker Vani Subramanian finds people from Mumbai, Calicut, Goa, Delhi and more, who still remember a film culture inseparable from the shared experience of the cinema-going. As community spaces, cinemas are also political battlegrounds, as we’re reminded of by scenes documenting anti-Muslim fear-mongering at a screening of The Kashmir Files (2022), countered by the crowds celebrating Shahrukh Khan as a very Muslim All-Indian hero in Pathaan (2023). 

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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