A Reading Path Down a Rabbit Hole: The Cinema Travelers (Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham)

“There’s a lot of talk about how the big impresarios brought cinema to the people, but there’s very little discussion about how people actually watch movies.”

“We typically think of cinema as this clean, sanitized space where you don’t talk and don’t take a phone call. Here, there was a kind of informality to the audience’s interaction with the screen; people would lie down and smoke and eat and drink and fight.”

“Seventy years ago, in Maharashtra, cinema came first to these fairs, and it’s because there was an audience for it. People were coming in for trade and business, as well as for social interaction and matchmaking.”

“Shirley’s bio, on the other hand, notes that she feared movies as a child – that they were nearly sacrilegious to her. Yet religion, ritual and superstition play a big part in these cinema travellers’ lives….Can you discuss the role of religion in the film?”

“For all these decades the cinemas have built a symbiotic relationship with the religious fairs…Our intention behind including the rituals around equipment was to show how a culture wraps itself around technology.”