'Cinema Travellers': Documenting a vanishing art

Travelling tent cinemas were once an important part of movie watching experience, particularly in villages, but time and technology have not been kind to the seven-decades old medium and the people behind it.
Directors Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya's critically-applauded documentary "Cinema Travellers", set to premiere at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, is an ode to the now vanishing art.
The documentary bowed to glowing reviews at Cannes Film Festival'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 collective communal experience of movie-watching, travelling cinemas have been ignored in our film history.

"Travelling cinemas are an important part of history but they have not got any mention. These people are part of this collective communal experience for seven decades. That was the trigger point for the project.
"We knew that the expression is going to change soon fundamentally. The people who are in our film are the keepers of this tradition for seventy years or more. How are they going to respond of this moment of change? I thought this could be a film," 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 but how people respond to it and how we as human beings move forward in life. The question is how to preserve this and create something new, that's also the spirit of the film. The start is very nostalgic but it also looks to the future."
Amit is happy that they were able to preserve some part of the history of travelling cinemas in their documentary, which will also be screened at the New York Film Festival after Toronto.
"Culture is a giant thing and we don't know what it will accept and what it will discard. We can't control it. It's ambiguous. What it takes might not be the best that humanity has to offer but it keeps that.

"We as filmmakers have to create things so that what could have been lost is preserved in some form. There are many things that are lost in this world but if we can create a unique experience of a distant past it would be great to have that."
Amit, who is also working on a book on the subject, says the medium is close to extinction as more and more people have access to latest films on their mobiles and desktops.
"Lesser and lesser people are coming to these cinemas. It is a dwindling business in that sense. It's not able to compete with that technology. It is the larger take away from their lives."

Amit, who is a photographer, says it was a difficult film to fund but he enjoyed every moment of working on the project as he thinks there are "very few things in the world that are as enigmatic and rare as cinema.