SFF NOTES: The Cinema Travellers (2016, Dirs. Shirley Abraham, Amit Madheshiya)

The effects of technology on our lives can sometimes feel like an imperceptible advance. Small changes in our everyday tools gradually change our habits. It is only after many years that we turn, look back, and wonder how we did without our mobile phones, our iPods, or now our phone/iPod hybrids. We rarely take actual stock. We are too caught up in the improvements to consider what is lost.

Sometimes it takes another world to give us eyes into our own. Filmed over five years, The Cinema Travellers, tracks the dying days of India’s travelling cinemas. Their rag-tag tents, circus barking ticket sellers and tank-solid projectors all packed up onto the trays of trucks, carting flickering joy to audiences in rural Maharashtra. Directors Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya (whose 2010 photo exhibition was the film’s gestation) capture the rapid evolution of cinema exhibition from the historied mechanics of film reels and steel cogs to the clinical bits and bytes of tightly packed digital projectors, and along with it, the dwindling audiences who themselves have ever more ready personal access.

There’s a clear love of the tactile process on the part of the directors; the manner in which they document the firing up of the behemoth projectors has an aching nostalgia but they never dodge the economic pragmatism of the switch to digital. It is one thing to delight in a stack of film reels arriving tied in a hessian sack, it is a whole other thing to be fretting its timely arrival when you’ve a tentful of antsy (in one instance very antsy) audience members screaming for refunds – not that fiddling around with DCP codes is any less stressful.

The most touching expression of this interplay between nostalgia and progress comes not from the cinema operators but from a lifelong projector repairman, Prakash. Holed up in his shop, surrounded by decades of defunct machinery, he provides an amusingly philosophical link between the past, the present and the future. Abraham and Madheshiya know they’re onto a good thing with Prakash, and they give a lot of their movie over to his intrinsically optimistic appraisal of his situation (he’s still inventing projectors amongst other, hedge-betting ideas) and the cinema landscape in general.

Still, no matter the delivery system, it is the shared experience that makes The Cinema Travellers the beauty that it is. The delight on the faces of the audience as the Bollywood dramas roll are entrancing. It is little wonder that the photographs in Madheshiya’s exhibition won awards. And yet it is passing. This is the more painful aspect of the technological advancement, the loss of community. The isolation of the small screen revolution is something the film only touches on as the tents are packed away for the last time but it is saddening.

In this, India has caught up with the rest of us. Such a shame.

★★★☆

The Cinema Travellers screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.