It was mere days before tickets would go on sale for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival when the event was cancelled due to the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Not long after, all theaters in New York City closed. After a year of horror, the festival has returned, not just with widely accessible at-home screenings but many in-person screenings as well. Even better, for those lucky enough to get tickets to the in-person events, they were all free! The festival opened with multiple simultaneous screenings of Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights across all five boroughs as a tribute to New York City. Yet, it was the second night that featured what I felt was the perfect film to play as New York City’s movie theaters and film festivals begin to slowly return. Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show is a moving tribute not just to the art of movies, but the experience of watching movies in a theater as well.
Last Film Show takes place in 2010, with nine-year-old Samay living in Chalala, in Gujarat, India, a place where the most successful residents have learned English and gotten out of Chalala. Samay’s abusive father, a tea-seller by the local train station, is taking him to the movies. His father hates the movies as he considers them a corrupting influence, but this one is a religious film, so it’s okay. One screening later, Samay wants nothing more than to make films, much to his father’s anger. Samay sneaks out to the movies to escape his home life, but is banned from the local cinema for sneaking in without a ticket. However, Fazal, the projectionist, agrees to let him sit in the projection booth and watch the films in exchange for the meals Samay’s mother packs for him. The more Samay befriends Fazal, the more he learns about 35mm film projection, and soon he and his friends try to replicate the magic of what Samay sees at the movies using the limited means available to them.
While stories about kids becoming inspired to make movies are nothing new, the premise of this film is easily unlike many, if any, other such films I’ve seen. However, while the topic of 35mm film projection may be niche, the story presented here certainly isn’t. Even those who aren’t film enthusiasts are likely to be won over by the antics of Samay and his friends. In fact, I don’t want to spoil some of the film’s best scenes and biggest laughs, but let’s just say the film went in some directions I definitely did not expect.
I’ve certainly seen a lot of love letters to the art of cinema, but I don’t think I’ve seen any as endearing to me as Last Film Show. Lead actor Bhavin Rabari gives a spectacular performance as Samay, alternating between stoic fascination and expressive wonderment as he learns to love the movies. Some of my favorite scenes involved him acting out and parodying the films Fazal plays, often with the projectionist involved. Inspired by the films he watches, Samay soon demonstrates a knack for storytelling and an interest in visual flair. It’s Samay’s little scenes in this film that really affected me, like as when he tells tales with matchbox art and separated film frames, or when he looks out the window of the train through a green bottle he found. (Fittingly for a movie about movies, the film as a whole is shot beautifully.) In one of my favorite scenes in the film, Samay and his friends ride bikes with colored strips of film leader over their eyes, tinting the world around them.
The film’s bittersweet ending contains a powerful and devastating statement about those who consider art as disposable, and the final moments of this film nearly moved this cinephile to tears. Since many, if not most of the films at Tribeca are world premieres, it’s always a gamble on what you’re going to see. Not every film ends up being a winner after all, and some really aren’t. Yet, the real reason to go to festivals like Tribeca is the chance that you may see something magical before anyone else, something that you want to tell everyone you know about in the hopes that they may one day see it. Last Film Show is one of those films. It’s a movie about the power of movies, especially the power of the experience of viewing and enjoying them, something that resonates particularly hard in the troubled times in which I write this. The film has already sold in a number of countries, and I hope it eventually gets distributed in the United States as well.
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| Meeting director Pan Nalin |
