Battu's Bioscope

A colorful vehicle with an enormous inscription on the hood, Battu´s Bioscope rambles slowly along the sun-scorched Indian roads. That´s Mr. Battu´s mobile cinema – Mr. Battu is the owner of one of 2,000 mobile cinemas in India. Next to Mr. Battu sits Mama, an elderly employee and right hand. There is also a third person, Amit, a young helper. He´s sitting on top of the truck and announces the next show through a loudspeaker: You´ll experience four hours of true happiness in the real world. Our films contain everything that the world´s art produced through millennia. Each of them is composed of five phases: a beginning, effort, hope, breakdown and fulfilment at the end. The bioscope comprises an old Soviet projector, a few white cloth sheets and kilometres of celluloid film. Andrzej Fidyk´s team accompanies them from Calcutta, via fishermen's villages and snake hunters´ settlements and a leprosarium, to the distant Orissa province. Primitive tribes can be found there, whose way of life hasn´t changed for thousands of years. There Mr. Battu´s great dream is to come true. He finally received a permit, after trying for years, to make a film show for these viewers who do not even know that the cinema exists. Mr. Battu´s show is going to be their first contact with civilization.