★★★★☆
For more than seven decades, throughout rural India, nomadic showmen armed with hulking movie projectors would arrive after every harvest, pitch their big top tents in stony fields and screen films that bathed upturned faces with wonder and lamplight. That era is vanishing fast. “Once audiences dreamt of the ‘touring talkies’ all year and welcomed us like a wish fulfilled,” mourns one struggling showman, “but they stopped coming.”
In this on-demand age, it seems even dirt-poor villagers expect sharp HD images and the latest releases, preferring to stay at home and enjoy the comforts of (illegal) satellite TV. The documentary-maker Shirley Abraham and the photographer Amit Madheshiya lovingly capture what has been lost, along with these last rusting, clanking machines that huff out romantic plumes of oil smoke.
Shot over five years, their observational, gently woven elegy to the last gasp of celluloid feels somewhat overstretched at feature length, yet it contains some of the most magical images you’ll see this year. A finale moment when a damp-eyed showman sells his trusty projector of 35 years for scrap is as emotionally devastating as the fate befalling Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince.
96min