What does a film experience mean to you? Is it the escapade within a darkened theatre, where hundreds of seats face a screen that transports you into another world for a couple of hours? Or is it something that steps beyond those rows of seats, where the conversation continues long after the credits roll?
Across the city, a growing number of film communities are reimagining what it means to experience a movie together. For Sequel, it begins even before the film does. Founded by 24-year-old Rhea, the community transformed its screenings of Interstellar and Requiem for a Dream into sensory experiences. While the former used projection mapping to immerse viewers in the film’s universe, the latter saw lights shifting along with the film. After the screening, the audiences were handed papers and asked to write down what the film made them feel while the lights shifted from blue to red, creating a spatial distortion resonating with the film.
“We experience and appreciate storytelling together in different ways. It can be through food or an immersive screening with lights. It can be in a café through a discussion where we’re having coffees based on each character in the film,” says Rhea.
The idea, she says, is not merely to add spectacle to cinema, but to “watch films intentionally”. The screenings, she says, “have helped every person coming to appreciate the film a lot more, to appreciate storytelling and cinema as an art, which I think is really missing nowadays.” Sequel is also exploring new avenues, driven by a simple question: “How else can a familiar film be watched or experienced?”
Sometimes the best way to experience a film is to remove everything else around it aside. Senthil, one of the co-founders of Madras Film Screening Club (MFSC), says, “We want to keep it simple. We don’t want to complicate too much. As long as we have a dark room and people have a good space to watch cinema without any distractions, I think that’s the best experience anyone can have.”
Over its decade-long journey, the club has witnessed a shift in who comes to watch and why. “Pre-Covid, post-Covid, we saw a very drastic change in the engagement of the audience,” Senthil says. “They’re looking for new experiences, something that can trigger some thought process in them or a conversation in them.” For MFSC, then, the experience lies in collective reflection — hearing an interpretation one may have missed and finding a space to voice one’s own without being judged unfolds in their post-screening open discussions.
Concurring, Rhea says, “There are so many things I wouldn’t have even understood or appreciated if I didn’t watch it with a group of people or discuss it because the perspectives you hear from people are widespread as they come from different backgrounds.”
Senthil also notes the Spotlight sessions at MFSC bring independent filmmakers for an exclusive face-to-face interaction with their audiences following the screening of their work.
Meanwhile, FC Film Club branches this exclusivity further into the realm of creation. Started by a group of ten aspiring filmmakers as a platform for short and independent filmmakers, the club creates a space that many first-time creators rarely have access to: a big screen, an unfamiliar audience and an immediate, unfiltered response. Harish, a representative of the club, says FC Film Club gives opportunity to independent filmmakers to watch their work on the big screen with an audience, their friends and family.
After filmmakers screen their work, they talk about the work and answer questions from the audience. “When they answer, they gain more experience. When we discuss our film with someone, they tell us about our flaws and strengths,” Harish says. For him, this exchange is precisely what transforms a screening into something more participatory. In one instance, discussions around an animation film even prompted its maker to rethink and change certain portions before it was screened.
Perhaps that is what experiential cinema is coming to mean today: there is no single experience. It can simply be about immersive, interpretative or even introspective experiences.