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The film society movement in India has a glorious history, but it had gone into a slumber for quite some time before the DVD revolution happened, making it possible for film societies in far-flung areas to get films for screenings easily. It is the film society movement through which many cine lovers got their first taste of cinema from other languages.

I know for myself. It was in 1993 that I first got to watch a Mani Rathnam film – Roja, the original Tamil version and not the dubbed Hindi version that became a rage a few months later – at a festival of films in various Indian languages (I think the Indian Panorama package) organized by the Assam Cine Art Society in Guwahati. In those days when DVDs had not yet invented, and video cassettes at the local library only gave access to Hindi and English films, such festivals were the only window to world and regional cinema for people like us, apart from, of course, the Sunday daytime screenings of award-winning regional language films on Doordarshan.

Then, it dried up – the flow of films to film societies, as fund crunched film societies increasingly found it difficult to organize transportation of 35 mm prints to smaller cities, unless there was government help. Until the DVDs arrived. Now, in fact, most of the packages that are made available to film societies by various sources come in the DVD format. Now, a film society located in a remote town too can aspire to organize a film festival very easily, getting hold of DVDs from a legitimate source.

All this goes back to 50 years. When the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI), the apex organization of all film societies, got established. FFSI, its current general secretary Sudhir Nandgaonkar (many of us know him as the director of MAMI and 3rd Eye film festivals in Mumbai) tells us, will enter its 50th year on December 13, 2009. FFSI had started 50 years ago at the initiative of activists like Chidananda Dasgupta (Aparna Sen’s father), Vijaya Mulay (Akka to all those who know her, the indefatigable octogenarian lady, who also happens to be the mother of Suhasini Mulay), with guidance from Satyajit Ray. It was headquartered in Kolkata then. Now, under the leadership of Shyam Benegal, the current FFSI president, it will celebrate 50 years of its existence.

As part of the historic golden jubilee celebrations, FFSI has initiated a project to compile the history of the film society movement in India. An editorial board headed by HN Narahari Rao, closely associated with the Bangalore International Film Festival, has been appointed by FFSI’s central executive committee, and FFSI has circulated a folder about the book to all member film societies appealing to everyone to contribute material like rare photographs, souvenirs, articles, etc., to the book. FFSI has also appealed to all film societies to try and trace & identify activists who were part of the film society movement in its years of infancy, like Dasgupta and Mulay were.

Very rightly, Nandgaonkar tells us that the journey of 50 years would not have been possible without the selfless dedication of film society activists without any financial expectations. “The binding glue for so many of us located in different parts of the country has been the desire to propagate cinema as an art form,” he says.

In the initial years, activists like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mrinal Sen, Basu Chatterji, Amol Palekar, Girish Kasarvalli and others changed the idiom of cinema when they turned filmmakers. Later, film society activists initiated international film festivals in various part of the country to expand the movement. Hats off to all those known and unknown film society activists who persevered to take good cinema to people, simply because they personally loved the art of moving images.