For some, India’s single screen cinemas are a legacy to be celebrated and preserved. For others, they remain a place to see movies. Still others remember that it was within those crumbling edifices that they first discovered the magic of the movies, and made deep, lasting connections.

Cinema Pe Cinema, a remarkable documentary by Vani Subramanian and Cornell professor emeritus Mary Norman Woods, meanders through theatres in small towns and big cities across India, creating a memoryscape of women and men whose lives have been touched by single screen cinemas. As subjects reminisce about the cinema-going experience and its connections to their lives, the film becomes an act of resistance against forgetting, helping to keep alive both memories of these iconic theatres and the films they showed through traces of their audio, visual, and physical ephemera. With more and more single screen cinema theatres shuttering across India, Cinema Pe Cinema testifies to the importance of the single screen theatre-going experiences during in polarized times and the age of multiplex cinemas.

Filmmaker Vani Subramanian and producer Mary N. Woods, Professor Emerita in the College of Art, Architecture, and Planning, will join for a post-screening conversation.

Free admission! Sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Migrations Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.