Tajikistan, Turkmenistan… Filmistan!

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The derelict building is a sprawl of pinkish red concrete. The outer walls are bearded here and there with dry grass. This afternoon, each spear of the long browned grass is trembling soundlessly in the winter’s cold breeze.

Delhi is a city of tombs. This building too is a tomb. But it is not a tomb to some fakir or badshah. It instead eulogises an earlier age of movie watching. The vast edifice of Filmistan cinema evokes an era when there were no limitless Netflix movie options and multiplex audis. It was then a civilisation of the “picture hall” where a citizen would watch a matinee or a night show alongside hundreds of fellow citizens from disparate backgrounds. For three hours, they would laugh, cry, sing and hold their breath in unison. (Though they would stay stubbornly confined to their respective classes—the balcony gentry being privileged with the best view of the screen, the front stall public framing the other end of the spectrum.)

Lying comatose in central Delhi’s Karol Bagh, Filmistan hasn’t screened movies for years. The building itself is grandly cinematic, strutting in the larger-than-life aura of an Eastman blockbuster. A corner of the colossal front façade exhibits ‘Filmistan’ in red. The rest of the façade must have been used to display the movie’s lead poster (the poster’s heroes and villains distracting at least some of the everyday muggles on the facing Rani Jhansi Road).

Filmistan came up during the 1950s, and shut down in the early 2000s, marked later with a brief revival—says author Ziya Us Salam, a walking encyclopaedia on Delhi’s bhoole-bhisre single screens. A yellowing newspaper from the year 1978 devotes a full page to movie listings of the city cinemas, with Filmistan trumpeting the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Muqaddar ka Sikandar: “Every show is full, every day is full!”

This afternoon, two men are sitting motionless on the short flight of stairs to the cinema. The lobby door is locked; a slight opening shows the view within. The blue ceiling inside is bordered in stripes of flaming orange, the dusty floor is littered with broken furniture, the tiled walls are pockmarked with missing tiles.

Some minutes later, on the road outside, a bullock cart tiktoks by the ghostly landmark. See photo.