Mapping Cinema Tastes: How Our Film-Viewing Survey Took Shape

For more than six decades, the Gauhati Cine Club has kept a steady rhythm of screenings, script circles and publication projects across Assam. The club's history stretches back to 1962, when a small group of film enthusiasts gathered to study cinema as a serious artistic pursuit. Today, that same curiosity drives how we think about programming. Before booking the next season, we wanted something firmer than instinct. We wanted to know what people in our seats actually feel when the lights go down.

Audiences everywhere have grown harder to read. The Australian cinema market offers a useful parallel. Cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide host festivals that pull large crowds, yet independent venues still report a loyal cinephile base. That tension between festival-scale blockbusters and quiet cinema communities is alive in Guwahati as well, and a proper survey could help us see where our own audience sat on that spectrum.

The decision to design our own questionnaire came from practical experience. Australia's national broadcaster SBS has built a reputation on giving minority-language cinema a chance, and that spirit of measured curation felt relevant to our work. We did not want a generic poll pulled from a template. We wanted questions that recognised the texture of regional viewing habits, including the role of family groups, students from local colleges, and retired members who have attended our screenings since the seventies.

What follows is the story of how we built the survey, who responded, and what the responses revealed about taste, format and expectation. We have shared the rough numbers and the patterns we noticed, including a few that contradicted our assumptions. Whether you run a small film society in your region, a university cinema circle, or simply wonder how cultural organisations listen to their public, the method may be worth borrowing.

Why the screening committee asked for hard data

Programming a season is half art, half negotiation. We negotiate with distributors, with halls, with budgets, and with the unspoken expectations of members who have loyally attended for years. After a couple of recent picks that underperformed, the committee agreed that guessing was no longer good enough. We needed a clearer picture of what people want to watch, in what format, and how often.

Past attendance sheets gave us raw numbers, but they did not tell us why someone chose a particular Saturday slot. They could not distinguish a viewer who came for the director from one who came for the company. A structured questionnaire offered a way to ask those questions directly and to compare answers across age groups, regions and viewing habits.

There was also a generational argument. Younger members arriving through university film societies tend to arrive with strong opinions about streaming availability, subtitles and aspect ratios. Older members often prioritise theatrical experience and the social ritual of attending in person. Without a shared instrument, those two worlds spoke past each other. The survey gave them a common form to fill in.

Designing the survey and reaching our audience

We drafted a 28-question form covering genre preference, format (theatrical, online streaming, DVD, or restored print), language, duration tolerance, and a short section on festival attendance. Distribution happened through three channels: paper slips at our weekly screenings, a Google Form linked from our newsletter, and a printed version mailed to members without internet access.

Method	Reach	Completion rate	Bias risk
Paper slips at screenings	Members attending in person	High	Skews toward regulars
Online form via newsletter	Younger and digitally active members	Moderate	Misses older members
Postal form to members	Long-standing rural and senior members	Lower	Smaller sample but richer detail

The table captures the trade-off that any cultural organisation faces. Each channel captures a different slice of the audience, and skipping any one of them would have left a blind spot. Postal returns came in slowly, but the handwritten comments on several forms proved to be some of the most thoughtful responses we received.

We kept the survey open for eight weeks, which gave part-time attendees time to contribute after their exams or work cycles. We avoided offering prizes, suspecting that incentives would distort the sample toward people with spare time. A small acknowledgment in the next newsletter was the only reward.

What respondents told us about genre and format

Across 412 valid responses, regional language cinema came out on top, with Assamese features and documentaries drawing the strongest stated interest. The second preference was world cinema with subtitles, followed by Indian parallel cinema and classic Hollywood. Commercial Bollywood features sat in fourth place, which surprised several committee members who had assumed they would dominate.

Format choices told a different story. A clear majority still preferred the theatrical experience, even among respondents under thirty. Streaming ranked second, but it came with a strong qualifier: viewers wanted curated selections, not algorithmic suggestions. Restored prints and 35mm screenings drew the smallest share of stated interest, yet the people who selected them attended most frequently. The committed cinephile, we learned, is a narrow but reliable constituency.

Australian audiences will recognise parts of this picture. The Melbourne International Film Festival has long noted that subscribers choose curated programmes over open-ended browsing, and Screen Australia reports point in a similar direction. Our findings echoed that pattern: thoughtful curation beats volume, even in markets where streaming platforms have rewritten the rules of access.

Patterns we noticed across age brackets and regions

The age breakdown was revealing. Members aged 18 to 25 cared most about directors followed on social media and films featured at international festivals. Members aged 26 to 45 often chose based on plot summaries and familiar actors. Members over 45 placed greater weight on critical reviews, festival awards, and recommendations from friends.

Regional variation also appeared. Respondents from Guwahati showed strong interest in national-level screenings, while members from smaller towns preferred work tied to local culture or language. This mattered because we assumed touring prints from Mumbai or Kolkata would appeal uniformly. They did not.

One unexpected finding came from the comments section. Several respondents wrote about missing live music in silent-era screenings and about wanting longer post-film discussions. That feedback led directly to two changes in our current season: shorter films paired with longer conversations, and a guest speaker at every fourth screening.

Takeaways for film societies planning their own surveys

A few lessons stood out once we began analysing the responses in earnest.

• Keep the questionnaire short enough to finish in ten minutes; longer forms drop off sharply.
• Mix multiple distribution channels so you do not hear only from one demographic.
• Leave space for open comments, since those often carry the most actionable suggestions.
• Treat the findings as a starting point for conversation, not as a fixed programme mandate.

For anyone adapting this approach, a few habits made our analysis smoother.

• Code responses by age bracket and region from the start, so cross-tabs are easy later.
• Hold a debrief session with the committee within two weeks of closing the survey.
• Share a summary publicly so respondents feel heard and trust the process next time.
• Compare your local numbers with broader cultural trends, including data from Screen Australia reports, to ground your findings in a wider context.

We are already planning a second round of the survey, expanded to include non-members who attend our open screenings and to ask more about festival habits. Anyone interested in shaping that next questionnaire is warmly invited to write to us. Volunteer note-takers, regional language translators, and people willing to distribute paper slips at community halls would all strengthen the project. Cinema clubs survive because people keep showing up, both on screen and in the seats. Listening carefully to those seats is the least we can offer in return.