Cameras in the Paddy Fields A Filmmaking Camp in Nagaon

A small room above a tea stall in Nagaon became the headquarters for something that surprised everyone involved. The Gauhati Cine Club had been running screenings and screenplay salons in the city for decades, but the idea of taking cameras into the rice fields was new. The district has always carried a deep relationship with stories — folk theatre traditions, village satire, the wandering bhaona performers who travel from haat to haat. What it had not carried, until recently, was access to the tools of the moving image. Young people in the surrounding villages had watched enough films on phones and one-room cinema halls to develop strong opinions about what they liked. They simply had no way to make any of their own.

Funding came through a modest grant and a few donated lenses from filmmakers who had studied at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. Volunteers travelled from Guwahati on the early bus, three hours of winding road, to reach the camp site by mid-morning. By the second day, word had spread to neighbouring panchayats and curious teenagers walked in carrying notebooks filled with story ideas scribbled during their morning chores. The structure was loose at first, the kind of plan that lives in a coordinator's head and a few whiteboard sketches. It tightened as the days went on.

What unfolded over twelve days resembled, in spirit, the regional screen programs that Screen Australia has quietly seeded across the New South Wales bush, where young participants in places like Orange or Tamworth are handed entry-level equipment and trusted to find their own rhythms. The principle is the same in Nagaon: give the kit, share a few technical pointers, then step back and listen.

Gathering the Gear and the People

Securing cameras for a project like this is harder than city dwellers often imagine. Battery-powered gear must survive humid monsoons and the brown dust that hangs over unpaved lanes. Smartphones did most of the heavy lifting. A handful of borrowed DSLRs sat alongside clip-on microphones, a cheap sound recorder, and a fistful of SD cards. The club purchased two ring lights from a Guwahati electronics market the week before, more for the participants' morale than for any aesthetic necessity.

Mentors mattered far more than the equipment. A documentary maker from Dibrugarh led the directing workshops. A sound recordist taught boom operation using a broom handle wrapped in foam. The most popular instructor was a young editor from Tezpur who showed the group how to trim a scene, even when the wifi cooperated, which it rarely did. Each mentor stayed for three days, ate with the families hosting them, and learned as much about rural life as they taught about cinema. By the time they left, several had agreed to mentor short films remotely through the club's online forum, a system that runs on a setup not unlike the regional hubs that screen films during the Bondi Flickerfest school programs, just with patchier bandwidth.

A Curriculum Built Without a Textbook

The syllabus emerged from the participants, not from any prescribed training manual. On the first morning, the coordinators asked the group to describe a story they would tell if they had a camera. The answers filled three hours. A boy wanted to film his grandmother weaving a gamosa and explain the meaning hidden in the border. A girl wanted to follow the woman who sells fish from a basket on her head, walking five kilometres before sunrise. Another participant had a darker idea — a short piece about the debt cycle that pushes farmers into suicide.

Those initial pitches shaped every subsequent session. The morning carried technical exercises: framing, the rule of thirds, how to hold a shot steady without a tripod. After lunch, the group broke into teams and worked on scripts drawn from those opening stories. Evenings were reserved for screenings of reference films, much the way regional Australian programs screen works from the Sydney Film Festival's regional tour before asking the cohort to respond with their own shorts. The mentors encouraged arguments about character motivation, plot holes, and the difference between documentary honesty and dramatic licence. Many of those debates stretched late into the night, fuelled by black tea and the kind of fearless opinions that teenagers carry into any room they feel safe in.

What the Young Filmmakers Actually Made

When the final cuts came in, the results were uneven in the best possible way. Some pieces were rough and overlong, the camera occasionally searching for its subject. Others had a clarity that no one expected. One team produced a four-minute portrait of a potter whose family has worked the same clay for six generations, ending with a slow pan up to the monsoon clouds gathering over his workshop. Another group made a sibling comedy about two children trying to outsmart each other during the paddy harvest, a script that landed genuine laughs and earned the participants an invitation to screen at a youth film evening hosted by the cine club back in Guwahati.

Behind the camera, the participants grew quieter and more deliberate. One young woman who barely spoke in the first three days quietly directed a film about her aunt's pottery workshop and refused to let anyone touch the edit. A boy who had arrived late on day two, having helped his father bring the cows home, ended up shooting the most ambitious piece of the camp — a ten-minute drama about a wedding negotiation that nearly fell apart. Watching the rushes, he shrugged and said the idea had come from breakfast conversation, the way real stories usually do.

Practical Anchors for Future Camps

Equipment that travelled well and held up under rough conditions

• Two smartphones with stabiliser apps and spare power banks
• A pair of pre-owned DSLRs with prime lenses, donated by alumni filmmakers
• Clip-on lapel mics for dialogue scenes and a portable recorder for ambient tracks
• A four-unit LED lighting kit that doubled as the group's selfie station

Story seeds that proved strong enough to carry a short film

• A daughter's quiet conversation with her mother while repairing an old fishing net
• The morning ritual of a milkman who crosses three villages before the rest of the village wakes
• A neighbourly dispute over a missing goat, resolved through an improvised village court
• The late-night radio show that still broadcasts Assamese folk songs across the district

Bringing It Back to the Cinema Hall

Rural filmmaking in Assam has always punched above its weight when given the smallest chance. The camp proved once again that the obstacle is not talent or appetite. It is access. The Gauhati Cine Club plans to run a second edition next year, this time stretching across two weeks and inviting mentors from the Melbourne International Film Festival's regional mentor pool for a video exchange. If that partnership takes shape, the participants will see how young Australians in Mildura or Ballarat wrestle with their own questions about isolation, landscape, and whose voices deserve to be filmed. The exchange may turn into the most unexpected part of the whole programme.

Anyone curious about supporting the next camp, joining the club, or simply attending a screening at our Guwahati hall can find the membership form and the events calendar on this site. Drop in on a Saturday afternoon, share a cup of tea, and ask about the rural filmmaking initiative. The conversation is always open, the chairs are always set out, and the next short film is usually waiting on someone's hard drive.