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…

In current days of countless cinema-screens and streaming services, it’s bizarre to imagine a world where film was nothing more than a fairground attraction – a piece of entertaining trickery. As we know, cinema progressed from the 19th century and into the 20th to become one of the largest cultural industries of all time. But in some places, movies are still projected among magicians and ferris wheels. The new documentary from Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya (winner of the Golden Eye Special Mention prize at Cannes in 2016) tells the stories of travelling projectionists in India’s Maharashtra region, struggling to make ends meet.

The Cinema Travellers follows three practitioners: Bapu, Mohammed, and Prakrash. Bapu and Mohammed both own separate “travelling…

IN INDIA, A ROAD SHOW OF CELLULOID LOVE
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The Cinema Travellers, a wonderful documentary directed, produced, and edited by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, captures the magic of movies throughout its entirely too-brief 96 minutes—but there is one moment that stands out. Early on, Mohammed, who runs a traveling cinema, is having trouble with the projector his team uses. It's too low, and the image doesn’t hit the screen properly. Then someone uses glue on part of it when he shouldn’t. Then the print they’re going to show is late.

Finally things start running smoothly, and the viewing audience gets lost in the cinematic experience. Abraham and Madheshiya show the audience's delight through still photos (Madheshiya is responsible for The…

We are so used to having easy access to film whether it be via Video on demand, DVDs or at the local multiplex, that often we forget that to many across the globe, the pleasures of enjoying a film is considered a luxury. It is hard to imagine that magic and awe audiences felt seeing moving images for the first time back in the early days of cinema. However, The Cinema Travellers is the closest we get capturing that sense of wonder.

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The Cinema Travellers
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Bee Garner
2 days ago

We are so used to having easy access to film whether it be via Video on demand, DVDs or at the local multiplex, that often…

A gut reaction, just finishing it, which could go higher or lower, but want to get down some thoughts before reading any more about it ...

1) Perfect that this is playing DocEdge alongside CALIFORNIA TYPEWRITER, an elegaic double-feature about the mortality of analog and the loss as we move to digital, albeit in entirely different registers and modes of expression, this being far more observational and not resting on talking-heads interviews.

2) There's a belief that there's a purity of sorts in not including things like "voice-over", "title cards", or "contextualizing information". But maybe not? The only thing I've read about this film - just now after seeing it - is that it was shot over eight years, and…