Mapping Six Decades of Screenings Across Assam and Beyond

For a film club born in 1962 along the banks of the Brahmaputra, geography has always shaped what we watch and how we gather. The state of Assam stretches from the foothills of the eastern Himalaya to the floodplains of the south, and our screenings have followed that same long arc, from steamy town halls in Dibrugarh to open-air courtyards in Silchar. When we sat down to ask ourselves what a sixty-year archive actually looks like, the answer turned out to be a map.

Paper ledgers held the titles, the dates, the filmmakers. What they could not show was the journey: the bus rides, the ferry crossings, the small-town theatres that no longer stand. A digital map, layered with every venue we have ever programmed a film in, became the most honest way to display that journey. It turns a list of screenings into a living topography of cultural effort.

The project began with a simple question: if a young filmmaker in Tinsukia wanted to retrace the circuit, could they? For years the answer was no. Scattered notebooks, the memories of retired projectionists, and a few grainy photographs in our office on Hem Baruah Road could not reconstruct the full route. Now, anyone with a phone can zoom in on the village school where we once showed Pather Panchali on a hand-cranked projector.

There is a second reason behind the work, and it is more philosophical. Film culture is often described in the language of festivals, but the real engine of a regional cinema movement is the everyday screening, the village gathering, the student union room. A map honours that grassroots texture. It makes visible what city-based criticism tends to forget.

A riverine state and a roving programme

Assam is shaped by the Brahmaputra, and so is our programming calendar. The river makes some districts accessible only by boat for parts of the year, which means a screening in Majuli or Dhubri becomes an act of logistical planning as much as cultural outreach. Our digital map records these constraints honestly. The pins on flood-affected islands cluster around the dry months, and you can read the monsoon calendar in the gaps.

The map also tracks the kind of spaces we have used. Some are permanent: the District Library halls, university auditoria, the Jyoti Chitraban Film and Television Institute. Others were improvised: the veranda of a tea garden manager's bungalow, a schoolroom rearranged for an afternoon, the courtyard of a naamghar after the evening aarti. We have classified each venue in the map's metadata so that the difference between a 300-seat cinema and a 30-seat community room is preserved.

Australia offers a useful parallel here. Screen Australia's regional programmes have long recognised that touring cinema to places like Broome, Mildura, or the Tasmanian south coast requires the same kind of creative accommodation. The classification work done by the Australian Classification Board also shapes what can be shown to family audiences in regional halls, a constraint familiar to our own voluntary screening committees. A map of regional screenings, anywhere in the world, has to record both the venue and the conditions attached to it.

From ledgers to coordinates

Our archive began as a single register maintained by the founding secretary, who logged every programme by hand until the late 1970s. When we started converting those entries into geographic coordinates, we relied on retired members to walk us through the addresses. Old names were matched with new postcodes. Theatres that had been renamed or converted to warehouses still appeared in our memory, even when commercial mapping platforms showed only a pin in an empty lot.

The technical work is modest. We use an open-source mapping layer with custom fields, and each pin links back to the original programme record, the poster, and, where available, photographs of the event. The goal was not to produce a polished tool but something that members could edit and extend. The club has always been a volunteer organisation, and the map reflects that ethic. It is open, revisable, and lightly maintained.

The result is a research aid as much as a celebration. Students writing about Assamese cinema of the 1980s can now ask which districts saw a particular documentary in its first year of release. Diaspora members in places like Toronto or London can follow the trail their grandparents' generation might have travelled when they ran the mobile projection unit. The map turns a club archive into a piece of public scholarship.

Reading regional cinema habits

Once the data was in place, certain patterns became visible. The northeast districts show a steady rhythm of monthly screenings through the 1990s, while the Barak Valley had a different cadence, more clustered around university festivals. Guwahati, predictably, hosts the densest cluster, but the map also reveals the surprising number of screenings held in tea garden clubs and labour union halls, a reminder that working-class audiences were central to our early decades.

These readings matter because they complicate the standard story of regional cinema as a capital-city affair. The same observation has been made in Australian scholarship about the touring circuits of the 1970s, when the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit and various state agencies took films to regional halls. When researchers at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne have studied those touring records, they have reached conclusions not unlike ours: that the geography of cinema is shaped as much by transport routes and labour patterns as by artistic movements.

The map therefore doubles as an argument. It shows that film culture in Assam has always been polycentric, sustained by small audiences in small towns who showed up in the evening after a day in the field. The data confirms what our older members have always said: the real audience for Assamese cinema lives in the mofussil, not in the metropolitan press.

Venues that deserve to be remembered

Some of the most moving conversations in our recent meetings have been about the venues themselves. The Rangghar in Sivasagar, where we projected an early Bishnu Prasad Rabha documentary, is a memory now more than a screen. The open-air show we held in Dibrugarh's Chowkidinghee during Bihu in 1987 exists only in a few photographs. The mobile van unit that served the chars along the Brahmaputra is recalled by name but not by record.

By pinning each of these spaces on a map, we make a small promise that they will not be erased. The map does not pretend that a demolished theatre can be screened in again, but it does preserve the fact that a screening happened there. In this sense it functions like a war memorial or a heritage walk, a form of civic cartography applied to cultural memory.

Australian readers will recognise the impulse. The New South Wales Heritage Register protects the surviving footprint of country town picture palaces in places like Forbes and Maitland. The renewed interest in regional venues such as the Burrinja in Upwey or the Star Theatre in Pakenham shows that local halls carry their own film histories. A map is one way of holding onto that, even when the buildings change.

A tool for new audiences

The most practical reason for building the map is simpler than any of these arguments. New members, students, and visiting filmmakers need to know where we are active. A prospective volunteer in Nagaon who wants to help at our next screening is far more likely to find the venue if it appears on a familiar interface. The map lowers the friction of participation, which matters for an organisation that depends entirely on volunteer goodwill.

It also makes our programming legible to partners. When the National Film Archive of India or a visiting festival curator asks which districts our travelling programme reached last year, we can answer with a screenshot rather than a paragraph. That kind of clarity matters in funding conversations and in conversations with broadcasters such as SBS, whose On Demand platform serves multicultural audiences across Australia and has long worked with regional language films. Showing the geographic reach of our work is now a single click away.

The map is also quietly educational. Schoolteachers in places like Jorhat and Karimganj have begun using it to teach local history, asking students to find the theatre where their grandparents watched a particular film. The exercise has produced small oral history projects attached to each pin, an unexpected dividend that we are now trying to support more formally.

What the archive is teaching us

Three years into the project, the map is changing how we plan. We can see which districts have gone quiet in the last decade and target them for revival screenings. We can identify routes that worked well for the mobile unit and propose them again for a new generation of travelling programmers. The data is shaping our future, not just memorialising our past.

There have been surprises. A pin in Lumding led us to a surviving 16mm print that a former projectionist had kept in his veranda cupboard. A cluster of pins in Goalpara turned out to correspond to a women's self-help group that had been hosting monthly screenings since 2003, completely off our radar. The map has functioned as a discovery tool, prompting us to add rather than only to record.

We see this work as ongoing. New pins appear each season, and old ones are revisited when a member writes in with a correction or a photograph. The archive remains what the club has always been, a conversation among people who care about cinema, now extended across a wider surface and made available to anyone curious enough to look.

Notes for anyone starting their own map

Anyone interested in regional cinema mapping can borrow from our approach without copying it.

• Start with the venue rather than the title, since spaces outlive films in collective memory.
• Record the conditions of each screening, including audience size and any classification restrictions applied by local authorities.
• Use open-source mapping tools so the archive can be edited by future volunteers.
• Pair each pin with at least one piece of original material, such as a poster, programme note, or photograph.
• Invite local communities to add their own pins rather than relying solely on the central club.
• Treat corrections as contributions, not as errors, and build the workflow around revision.
• Keep the interface simple enough that a first-time visitor can find a venue in under a minute.

If you live in a town with its own small cinema history, whether that is Castlemaine in Victoria, Berry in New South Wales, or somewhere closer to home in the Brahmaputra valley, the same exercise will reward the effort. The map we have built is not a finished monument but an open invitation. Drop in, look around, and if you spot a venue we have missed, send us the details.

We meet every second Saturday at the club rooms near Dighalipukhuri, and the map is always open on the projector table. Bring a memory, bring a photograph, or simply bring a question about a film you once saw in a town you cannot quite place. The coordinates are waiting, and so are we.