Why we keep screening the films Assam once banned

For more than six decades, Gauhati Cine Club has worked to keep cinema alive as a conversation rather than reduce it to entertainment. Within that mission sits a more unusual practice: bringing back into public view films that local authorities once banned within Assam. The screening room is one of the few places where these works can breathe again, where audiences can argue with them rather than only read about them, and where film history can be honestly told.

Screening films that were banned in Assam is not an act of provocation. It is a way of completing the cultural record, of asking what a society wanted to hide, and of letting new viewers decide for themselves. Similar efforts exist in other parts of the world where classification boards once wielded decisive power, and audiences there have grown curious about the films their grandparents were never allowed to see.

A short history of censorship in Assam

Censorship in Assamese cinema did not arrive as a single dramatic moment. It grew through a series of administrative decisions, political shifts, and informal pressures that shaped which films could travel freely and which ones disappeared. From the 1960s onward, several films carrying strong depictions of social tension, separatist sentiment, sexuality, or critiques of entrenched power found themselves stalled by state-level committees.

The pattern followed a logic familiar to anyone who has read about film regulation elsewhere. Scripts that unsettled the political mood of a particular moment, or depicted subjects considered unsuitable for public viewing, were quietly held back. Some were never released; some were shelved after a few screenings. The result was a shadow archive of works that existed mostly in conversation, in private prints, or in partial memory.

The Gauhati Cine Club and its peers across the Northeast saw this shadow archive up close. Members knew which filmmakers were affected, which prints circulated privately, and which titles had effectively been removed from public film culture. From the 1980s onward, the club began consciously screening such films as part of its programming, treating the act of screening itself as a form of cultural recovery.

What survives when a film is taken out of circulation

A film that never reaches a screen does not simply vanish. It leaves traces in interviews, in festival catalogues, in the careers of its makers, in anecdotes, and in the memories of those who saw it once. Yet none of those traces stand in for the film itself, and the difference between reading about a work and watching it shapes what a culture actually knows about its own image.

When we bring a banned film back into a screening, several things change. Other filmmakers can study its craft. Students can see how its makers responded to a moment of pressure. Younger viewers, who may have no personal memory of the original controversy, can form their own judgement. The film rejoins the conversation it was meant to be silenced from, with a fresh audience that owes it nothing.

That rejoining is the point of the programme. We treat each screening as a small restoration, not just of the print but of the right of the film to be discussed alongside the films that were freely shown. Curation here is closer to preservation than to mere exhibition, and the audience, sitting in the room, becomes part of that preservation effort.

The case for public screening today

Public screening serves several practical purposes that home streaming or private viewing cannot. A live audience introduces friction: laughter where the film expects solemnity, silence where it expects outrage, questions in the discussion that follows. Those responses belong to the film as much as the images on the screen do, and removing them quietly reduces the work.

There is also an archival argument. The longer a banned film stays out of circulation, the more its materials deteriorate and the fewer people develop the technical skill to handle its prints. Regular screenings create a small community that can pass on knowledge about where the materials sit, how they were processed, and how they should be stored for the next generation.

Public screening offers a counterweight to the editorial shortcuts of modern platforms as well. Algorithms tend to bury films that lack broad engagement data, especially older works with regional relevance. A human-curated screening room insists that some films belong in shared attention regardless of their metrics, and that curatorial conscience still matters in a year when most viewing happens through a single search bar.

How Australia understands banned cinema

Audiences in Australia will recognise some of this history from their own film culture. The Australian Classification Board, sometimes working with the Classification Review Board, has long held the power to label films Refused Classification, a status that makes a title effectively unshowable through ordinary commercial channels. Films such as Cronenberg's Crash, Larry Clark's Ken Park, and several foreign works from the 1990s and early 2000s spent years caught up in classification disputes, and their stories often travelled faster than the films themselves.

Cities such as Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane have built a parallel tradition of festival and club screenings that intentionally showcase contested cinema. The Melbourne International Film Festival, for instance, has programmed works that pushed against classification limits, and small independent venues in suburbs like Fitzroy, Carlton, and Surry Hills have maintained a steady calendar of challenging retrospectives. Australian audiences, including many who queue on cold Sunday afternoons for a packed retrospective, are used to arguing with a film they were once told they should not see.

Some of the more familiar routes a film takes toward restriction in Australia include:

• Explicit depictions of sexual activity that exceed the limits of the R18+ category
• Detailed scenes of violence presented in a way the Board considers exploitative
• Material judged to instruct or promote a particular criminal act
• Content that breaches state-level laws on offensive or hateful expression

The shared vocabulary, between Australian classification language and the language of banned films in Assam, is closer than people imagine. Both speak of a moment when a state decides what an ordinary viewer can encounter, and both leave behind a body of work that an engaged public eventually wants to revisit on its own terms.

Bringing these films into the conversation

Programming is the most delicate part of this work. We approach banned films with care, giving each one a proper introduction, a clean print where we can find one, and time afterwards for the audience to react. We pair them with newer works from the Northeast whenever possible, so that younger filmmakers can place themselves in dialogue with their own history and feel the continuity running beneath regional cinema.

A typical evening in our programme usually brings together several elements:

• A short framing talk explaining the film's original context and the reason for its restriction
• A restored or preserved print sourced from archives, filmmakers, or private collectors
• An open discussion with surviving cast, crew, or family members where they can be present
• A printed programme with essays that situate the film in broader regional cinema history

These elements turn a single screening into a small public event, one that often travels beyond the walls of the clubhouse through local press and word of mouth. Each one reminds us that film culture is built up film by film, screening by screening, and that no work deserves to be forgotten simply because someone at some point decided it should be.

Anyone interested in joining these screenings, supporting the archive, or proposing a title they believe deserves to be seen again can reach us through our club website. We are always looking for prints, for translators, for partners in Australia who programme similar work, and for new audiences willing to spend an evening with a film their predecessors were never allowed to watch.