About Indiancine.ma
Indiancine.ma is an annotated online archive of Indian film. It is intended to serve as a shared resource for film scholars and enthusiasts in India and beyond.
The project was initiated by
Pad.ma,(Public Access Digital Media Archive), an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films, that was set up by members of
CAMP, Mumbai
The Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore and
0x2620, Berlin in 2008.
Indiancine.ma was originally set up using Ashish Rajadhyaksha's and Paul Willemen's Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, published in 1999 by the British Film Institute.
The website was built with
pan.do/ra, and launched in February 2013 at
Jaaga in Bangalore, with support from the
Bohen Foundation,
The Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and the
Goethe Institute.
At present, Indiancine.ma has created unique links for more than 60,000 films.
We hope to upload as many as 15,000 titles, with a primary focus on early (i.e. pre-1957) cinema. Even this astonishing target will still be only 30% of all feature films made.
In addition to the general public, Indiancine.ma is being used by several film and cultural studies institutions nationally and globally. Indiancine.ma archives all films, but only films that are out of copyright are available for pubic viewing. Films that are more recent are not available to the public, but can be seen by bona fide research institutions and researchers.
Indiancine.ma is operated in collaboration with a number of organisations and film studies institutions. These include:
- The Media Lab, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
- The Department of Cultural Studies, English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
- SARAI, Delhi
- The Cinema Studies Programme, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
- The Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
- 0x2620, Berlin
- CAMP, Mumbai
Indiancine.ma has been utilised as a backbone structure for several research projects on Indian film, including a project for an 'Annotated Repository on the Art Cinemas of India" being conducted by the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a project on the Left and the early Malayalam cinema being overseen by Prof. Satish Poduval of the English & Foreign University, a repository for precious historical print holdings on the history of Tamil and Telugu cinemas being assembled by Samyuktha P.C. (Chennai) and Dr. S.V. Srinivas (Bangalore), and a project on early Bengali films at the Media Lab, Jadavpur. A general focus at the moment is on out-of-copyright films, currently pre-1954.
Indiancine.ma is still under construction, and is always open to contributions from cinephiles, scholars and students alike. For a quick introduction to using the website, please take a look the Help section. You can see more at https://cinemafoundation.in/#indiancine.ma
Grateful acknowledgments: Aamir Khan Productions, Disney India, Excel Entertainment, Phantom Films, Rajkumar Hirani Films, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra Productions, and Vishesh Films.
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