The Origins
In August 1971, a group of young engineers interested in cinema got together to launch Suchitra Film Society. The 1970s in Karnataka saw a surge of critical and creative exploration of the arts, imagined and conceived in the Kannada language, with an explosion of new literature, new journalism, new theatre and new cinema.
Suchitra’s interest in cinema and its vital connection with the Bangalore renaissance led it to expand its engagement with the arts to theatre, music, movement arts, literature and languages.
Suchitra is all set to build on its reputation as an important centre of cinema appreciation, arts, media and culture and realise its full potential as a cine academy and cultural centre with an international school of moving image media, a professional theatre and a centre of interpretation of cinema, performing arts, language, literature and media.
The New Vision
Inaugurating the Suchitra Cinema and Cultural Academy at the site on 8th January 1980, Bharat Ratna, Special Oscar Award winner and India's greatest auteur of cinema, Satyajit Ray, had said: "We need art theatres to find an outlet for good films. This is happening here, in Bangalore, for the first time (in India)." Moving forward, Suchitra continues to keep in mind the founding vision: to not only expose the audience to fine cinema and engage them in appreciation of it, but also to enable the makers of cinema and other moving-image media to improve their craft and expression.
The Suchitra Culture
• Open
• Global, but local
• Academic and artistic, but accessible to the community
• Professional, but not commercial
• Private, but public
• Independent, but responsible
• Liberal, but curated
Activities at Suchitra
• Cinema
• Theatre
• Literature
“Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I’d say that film is the sculpting of time.”
– Andrei Tarkovsky