Cinema pe Cinema

Vani Subramanian / Long Documentaries / India, United States of America / Marathi & English / 63 minutes / 2024

8th March 2025 | 4:15 PM | C. D. Deshmukh Auditorium

For some of us, India’s single screen cinemas are a glorious architectural and cultural legacy to be celebrated, preserved and cherished. For others, they remain a place still frequented to see the movies. Yet others lament their widespread demise, remembering how within their crumbling edifices, the magic of the movies was first encountered, that thrill of being transported to worlds beyond our imagination experienced, or a lasting connection discovered with what was unfolding on the screen.

However, cinema theatres are much more than just sites of nostalgia and personal memory. In their voluminous and darkened halls, many other stories are constantly playing out. Chronicles of hope and passion as they meet harsh economic realities. Accounts of traditional mores confronting contemporary ideas and narratives. Tales of people across class, caste, gender, religion and age coming together to share the familiar and unfamiliar, joy and tears, song and dance, action and emotion. Anecdotes of how, despite the intimacy of the space and kinship formed while watching a movie together, we remain segregated across aisles of power, culture and difference.

Meandering through theatres and meeting audience members in small towns and big cities across India, Cinema Pe Cinema creates a memoryscape of some women and men whose lives touch, or have been touched by single screen cinemas in India. As they share reminiscences of film-going and reflect on its connections to their lives outside the theatre, we relive larger-than-life movie moments together and even visit cinema halls that can no longer welcome anyone in.

In doing so, Cinema Pe Cinema becomes an act of resistance against forgetting single screen cinema theatres as they shutter down across India. It is an effort to keep the memories of some films alive through traces of their audio and visual ephemera. A shared cinematic space in which diverse audiences speak of single screen theatre-going experiences that often carry forward into multiplex cinemas in these highly polarised times.

More twists in the tale than we may have initially been prepared for. It’s showtime.