This gentle, elegiac documentary is about a vanishing way of life: the “touring talkies”, showmen who tour the fairs and festivals of India on lorries with a tent, reels of film and a great big projector showing movies to enraptured crowds. It has been happening for seven decades, but now the celluloid is crumbling, the projection equipment is collapsing, and in any case modern audiences are turning to TV and streaming video.
The film-makers Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya show how the people who still run these old-fashioned cinema tents have a quiet, vocational passion. Some turn to digital equipment, which offers wonderful sound and vision and no great reels of film to cart about as the video file is accessed from the web. But when things go wrong with digital, they go irretrievably and bafflingly wrong, whereas the old film equipment can be fixed with a screwdriver and a kick.
It’s a charming movie, although I wondered if it wasn’t a bit fetishistic about the kit, and incurious about the films and audiences. There are some borderline condescending still images of people in the tent: starry-eyed, open-mouthed. Fine. But I’d like to hear from these people about what they think of the experience and how it is changing.
