Three cheers for Cinemawala

Kaushik Ganguly’s Cinemawala produced by Shree Venkatesh Films is in the news again. In the first ever awards to Bengali films and film personalities from the West Bengal Film Journalists’ Association, Cinemawala bagged the Best Film Award, the Best Director Award (in memory of Hiralal Sen), the Best Actor Award (jointly) that went to Paran Bandopadhyay, the Best Promising Actor (Female) for Sohini Sarkar, and the technical awards for Best Editor (Subhajit Singha), and Best Sound Design (Anirban Sengupta). Earlier, it has been honoured with the prestigious Unesco-Fellini Award at the International Film Festival of India, 2015. Cinemawala has been selected by New York Indian Film Festival, 2016; Hidden Gems Film Festival, Calgary,2016; Chennai International Film Festival, Pune International Film Festival, Indian Panorama Film Festival, Delhi, and Bangalore International Film Festivals.
The film is a tribute not only to the fast-disappearing single screen theatres in West Bengal, which are succumbing to multiplex screenings where viewing is clubbed with consumerism, but is also a journey back to an entirely different culture of viewing. These days when digital cinema is fast outpacing and virtually killing the last bastions of single screens, Ganguly’s tribute, quite ironically, comes in the technique and language of digital cinema. The film was premiered at a multi-screen outlet inside a big shopping mall that has perhaps, the maximum footfalls in the southern parts of the city. 
When asked what motivated him to make this film which he knew might raise questions of conflict of interest and ideology, Ganguly said, “Even after embracing digital cinema completely, memories of the nitty-gritty of working on celluloid — from shooting to receiving the final print — remain etched in my mind. Today, all cinema hall owners are selling their projectors away as junk. Single screen theatres are closing down one by one. I can’t help thinking about those innumerable workers who had mastered the craftsmanship of celluloid but are left unemployed now. And also about those numerous projectors that remain piled up, unused, like a heap of debris. The tragedy of celluloid burdens my heart. That’s why I made Cinemawala.”
It is not just about single screen exhibition outlets. It is about a dying culture of viewing as an exclusively entertaining experience for everyone who belong to that era and for whom, multiplex viewing is something one needs to warm up to. As children, we remember dressing up to our teeth in our best clothes, powdering our faces till they turned chalky, and then waiting with friends in serpentine queues from ten in the morning for a ticket to the three pm show to watch V Shantaram’s Toofan Aur Diya that ran to a full house for months at Bombay’s Plaza Theatre. The long waiting was generously dotted with a paper platefuls of steaming hot bhajias peppered with fried green chillies and a powdered chutney of garlic for just two annas a plate. Wafers had to wait till the interval. The ticket price was one rupee and four annas for an upper stall seat!
Plaza is still there but it is a multiplex theatre now. 
The ticket counters are not crowded anymore because most of us prefer to book tickets online and reach the multiplex a few minutes before the show. Hundreds and thousands of projectors are lying by the wayside, waiting to be thrown or sold away as junk while the grey-haired, doddering old projection operators are finding it difficult to keep pace with the changing technology. 
Ganguly succeeds in bringing alive, slices of this nostalgia, which are heavily tinged with memories of a lost childhood through the story of Pranabendu Das who is a retired film exhibitor from a small town in West Bengal. He owns Kamalini, a movie theatre named after his separated wife. With the advance-ment of technology and the arrival of the digital medium, this man was compelled to let go of his theatre, which projected films only on celluloid. Prakash is unperturbed by his father, Pranab’s condition. He is an opportunist, who would never give morality a chance while making himself an established businessman. The film is also layered with the story of a father-son relationship gone sour because the father and the son cannot or will not see eye-to-eye on this one issue — turning Kamalini into a multiplex theatre equipped with modern facilities to screen digitally shot films through digitised technology.  
The title cards at the end of Cinemawala inform us that of the 700 single screen theatres in the state, only 250 remain. Why? The film is silent on this million-dollar question. Cinemawala laments the tragic story of a rigid single-screen owner who refuses change on the one hand while on the other, Ganguly as a filmmaker, uses the very infrastructural changes, which the old man resists, to narrate the story. 
Cinemawala is a touching digitally filmed statement, filled with the pain of nostalgia, the angst of loss, the fading away of a close social world when filmmaking was an intimate experience with feelings of comradeship and camaraderie. It is an atomised world today where technique and technicians are distanced from each other, working in mental cubicles with almost mechanical precision. 
Cinemawala is a work of art where powerful storytelling rubs shoulders with the finer nuances of skilled and imaginative technique polished over with brilliant acting. It will go down in the archives of Indian cinema as a moving social comment on change, which is inevitable but is nonetheless tinged with the pain of loss.