Madras Film Screening Club

Madras Film Screening Club The official page of Madras Film Screening Club. We screen films on the first and third Sundays of e

Madras Film Screening Club is a film society for cinephiles in the Chennai area. Formed in 2016, we screen films on the first Sunday of every month ranging from old masters to current season films, from the award-winning world success to the niche and first-time work.

Thankful to so many people who joined us last evening. Some great insightful conversations with people wanting to go bac...
03/05/2026

Thankful to so many people who joined us last evening. Some great insightful conversations with people wanting to go back to watching the rest of the episodes and learning more about our constitution.

That really was all we wanted to do, when .equals.project reached out to do something around the "Dalit history month" initially. Create a space for discussions through the medium of cinema. Thankful to The Equals Project for helping us facilitate this.

It was heartwarming to see so many people coming in despite this not being our regular screening, just in the hope of learning something when going back and we hope we were able to do that ❤️

Thanks to .equals.project for reaching us with this idea and helping us facilitate this

Go follow them on insta. They are doing some wonderful work In making the constitution accessible to the general public.

Shoutout to the amazing team behind yesterday's screening .clown_prince_ Gopal

02/05/2026

We usually say "the rest is history" to skip the uncomfortable parts. But the part we skip is usually the most important. Episode 5 of Samvidhaan (The Making of the Constitution) dives into the untold tension and the high-stakes debates that shaped our foundation.

This is the story of the bomb that didn’t go off, the crisis that was avoided through sheer will and intellect.

We are proud to be joining hands with "The Equals Project" for this session.

Join us for today’s screening.

🎟 Spot Registrations Available!

📍 ING Art House (Flyerz Studio), Kottivakkam
📅 Today (May 2nd), 4:30 PM

Sharing a glimpse from Episode 5 of Samvidhan.This episode moves into some of the toughest debates in the Assembly.What ...
01/05/2026

Sharing a glimpse from Episode 5 of Samvidhan.
This episode moves into some of the toughest debates in the Assembly.

What stands out is that none of these are easy questions. They’re argued, pushed back on, and left with tensions still in place.

And when you will watch it tomorrow, it’s hard not to notice how many of these questions are still around us.

That’s what we’re trying to open up with this screening.

Not just to watch how the Constitution was created, but to open up a discussion, hear perspectives, question our own assumptions, and see where we stand on them today.

And with .equals.project you get to understand the historical context surrounding these debates.

If you’ve been on the fence, this is exactly the kind of conversation you don’t usually get space for.
Come be part of it.

01/05/2026

Sharing a small glimpse from Episode 1 of Samvidhan.

This episode takes us to the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly in 1946, when even the idea of India wasn’t fully agreed upon.

What’s striking is how early these positions are laid out, Sardar Vallabhai Patel resisting the idea of dividing the country on religious lines, Jinnah pushing for it, and no real agreement in sight.

Nothing feels settled. Everything is still being worked through.

That’s why we’re screening this episode. It sets up the questions, and when you watch Episode 5 after, you see how those same questions return around rights, minorities, and representation. More on that in the following post.

Watching them together makes a big difference.
Tomorrow, 4:30 PM. Come by

Thanks to for helping us put this put this together ❤️

It’s hard to explain what watching Samvidhan feels like, so we reach for a few reference points.In Culloden, directed by...
29/04/2026

It’s hard to explain what watching Samvidhan feels like, so we reach for a few reference points.

In Culloden, directed by Peter Watkins, the 1746 battle is reconstructed as if a news crew were present. Often cited as one of the earliest modern docudramas, it collapses the distance between viewer and event.

In The Civil War, a landmark American series, letters, diaries, and speeches are read out over images, letting the voices of those who lived through it carry the story. It changed how historical documentaries were made.

The World at War, narrated by Laurence Olivier, is often regarded as one of the definitive accounts of World War II.

And Bharat Ek Khoj, directed by Shyam Benegal and based on Nehru’s Discovery of India, brought centuries of Indian history into people’s homes

Samvidhan carries all of this, and then takes away the comfort of thinking this was ever fully settled.

If you go back to the Assembly debates, or even to what B. R. Ambedkar was saying, you don’t find agreement, you find anxiety, disagreement, compromise.

And somewhere in that process, you realise how much of what feels settled today was once uncertain, contested, and unresolved.

We’re doing this screening in collaboration with .equals.project, whose work has been about bringing constitutional thinking out of academic and legal spaces and into public conversations like this.

That’s the experience we’re hoping to build together, not just to watch, but to reflect.

Cinema isn’t just what you shoot, it’s everything that shapes you before it.As Vetrimaaran says, what you carry within e...
27/04/2026

Cinema isn’t just what you shoot, it’s everything that shapes you before it.
As Vetrimaaran says, what you carry within eventually shows up in your films.

Before the first frame… you’re already becoming a filmmaker.

Samvidhan came out of Shyam Benegal’s time in Parliament as a Rajya Sabha MP, and a realisation that most of us live wit...
23/04/2026

Samvidhan came out of Shyam Benegal’s time in Parliament as a Rajya Sabha MP, and a realisation that most of us live within the Constitution without ever seeing how it was actually argued into existence.

What he set out to do was not explain it, but to stage it, using real debates, speeches, and records from the Constituent Assembly.

He saw it not as a series, but as a 10-hour film, because this story couldn’t be contained in anything shorter. We are screening two hours out of this that will hopefully pique your interest to explore the rest of the episodes and learn more about our consitituition.

In his attempt to reenact the Constituent Assembly debates, near-exact replica of the Central Hall of Parliament was planned bu wasn’t allowed to replicate it fully by Parliament authorities.

So they altered the furniture just enough to get around it, and shot the series there.

Learn more about the making and about the work that behind drafting the constitution with us and .equals.project On May 2, 4:30pm

There’s often a sense of distance between people and the Constitution, something we live with, but don’t always fully en...
21/04/2026

There’s often a sense of distance between people and the Constitution, something we live with, but don’t always fully engage with.

Something we admire from afar, often feeling it’s too complex to truly understand, even as it shapes our everyday lives.

Samvidhan, a monumental series by Shyam Benegal, attempts to bridge that gap, bringing these ideas into a space where they can be experienced and thought through together.

We’re screening two episodes (Ep 1 & 5) next week —
from the beginnings of imagining a new nation,
to debates around rights, minorities, and representation.

Doing this in collaboration with .equals.project adds another dimension to the discussion, bringing in their work around constitutional understanding, and grounding these conversations with deeper context.

Watching them together changes how you see it.

Join us on May 2, 4:30pm at .arthouse

Limted seats. Ticket link in bio

19/04/2026

Sharing few moments from our last screening of 😄

Always nice to see how these discussions open up after the film

Thinking along similar lines for the next one… but slightly different this time

Something that looks at how certain decisions that shaped the country were actually made, feels oddly relevant with everything happening around us now

Also collaborating with .equals.project for this

We will be sharing the link by evening

07/04/2026

Watching the ending of (1964) today feels different.

Not because it explains anything. But because it doesn’t.

It shows how quickly things can move beyond control.
How logic can carry something too far.

Especially in moments like we find ourselves in right now

We turn to films like this to make sense of what’s around us.

But what happens when even that starts to feel insufficient?

Thank you to everyone who joined us on Saturday for the screening of Philip Ridley's "The Reflecting Skin"It wasn’t an e...
23/03/2026

Thank you to everyone who joined us on Saturday for the screening of Philip Ridley's "The Reflecting Skin"

It wasn’t an easy film, it unsettled a lot of us, but what made the evening special was the conversation that followed. So many different perspectives, interpretations, and honest reactions.

Really nice to see people sit with something new, and then stay back to talk it through together.

That’s always been the idea for us not just to watch a film, but to experience it together and carry it forward through conversation.

Grateful for evenings like this ❤️

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