110 min | NR | December 2, 2022 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
A nine-year-old in rural Gujarat sneaks into a small-town theater and falls in love with the beam of light coming out of the projection booth. He trades his lunch for access to the machine. What he is really chasing is already dying.
Samay is a boy from a Brahmin family that sells tea on a railway platform in rural Gujarat. His father considers cinema beneath them and permits exactly one trip to the theater. That single screening rewires the boy. Samay becomes obsessed with the projector, the reels, and the column of light that turns chemicals into faces. Pan Nalin frames this as an autobiographical reckoning, and the film is about the precise moment film stock gives way to digital and an entire craft disappears without ceremony.
Bhavin Rabari plays Samay with a watchfulness that anchors every scene. He studies the projection beam the way other children study toys, and Rabari lets the calculation show behind the boy’s eyes. Bhavesh Shrimali plays Fazal, the projectionist who trades film access for home-cooked meals, and he gives the man a weary generosity that never tips into sentiment. Richa Meena plays Ba, the mother whose lunchbox feasts become Samay’s currency, and her cooking sequences carry their own grammar of devotion. Dipen Raval plays Bapuji, the father, with a rigidity that reads as fear rather than cruelty.
Nalin writes and directs from his own childhood, and his strongest instinct is optical. The cinematography treats light as a physical substance, refracting it through bottle glass, prisms, and the gaps in the projection booth wall. Nalin shoots the mechanics of the projector in close detail, the sprockets and the threading and the splices, so the machine becomes a character. The score by Cyril Morin swells where a more disciplined film would stay quiet. The editing builds a rhyme between Ba’s kitchen and Fazal’s booth, both rooms where raw material gets transformed by heat and patience.
This is a film that loves cinema and knows that loving it is not enough to save it. Samay’s education in light arrives exactly as the medium that produced it is hauled away to be melted down. Nalin refuses to pretend the change is reversible. He builds the whole story around a boy learning a trade that will not exist by the time he masters it, and he finds grace in the obsolescence instead of mourning it.