![]() With masses of captivated and quite literally captive audiences, cinema and the cinematic vocabulary would become weaponized as potent new vehicles of propaganda and messaging, shaping the population’s perception of the social, political, and cultural realities. ![]() The attendance in these halls would remain one of the highest anywhere in the world up until the collapse of the USSR. His famous quip to the People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1922 that “of all the arts for us cinema is the most important” would go on to become a policy cornerstone resulting in the proliferation of cinema halls throughout the Soviet Union. Among the first to recognize the power of cinema both as an art form and as a tool of political propaganda was none other than the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Vladimir Lenin. Not long after brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière projected moving pictures on a screen for their fellow Parisians in 1895 cinema became one of the most important and one of the most dominant art forms shaping much of popular culture in the twentieth century. These Bangla stories paint a very intimate portrait of what it means to migrate, to start a new life and create a new home. The project focused on Bengali Muslims who settled in the United Kingdom. The archive includes over 180 life history interviews with first generation migrants living in India, Bangladesh and the United Kingdom. The stories archive when, how and why people moved and their experiences of migration and settlement in new places. Many moved because of war or communal conflict, or because of natural disasters, through marriage or for work. It is estimated that since this time over 20 million people, Muslims and Hindus, have left their homes and moved across national borders to live in a new country, with a small number moving long distance to Europe and the Middle East. Bangla Stories is based on a three-year London School of Economics and University of Cambridge project research project exploring the history and experience of migration from the Bengal delta region in the period after Indian Independence in 1947.
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