Age-old film centre in Prayagraj to be converted into a museum

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Plans are afoot to convert the age-old film centre located in Prayagraj's Civil Lines area into a museum. The new museum will be one of a kind. It will showcase the rich legacy of the film history of North India. An amount of around Rs 4 crore will be spent on the project, said officials.

The dilapidated centre which was once part of the education extension department, was earlier proposed to be auctioned a few years ago.

The Smart City authorities would be taking the help of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) for making this closed centre a museum.

The centre was established in 1938 to make educational films during British rule and was the only film centre in North India at the time.

Mission manager (technical) of Prayagraj Smart City Limited, Sanjeev Sinha said: "After reading the history of the movie centre, it was found that the projector and sound system here was better than the cinema halls of Mumbai. Projectors were taken from the centre in buses to show films in schools and other places and big stalwarts of the cinema world used to come to the cinema hall to give lectures to the students of cinema."

After converting it as the film museum of North India, it will be the centre of attraction for the tourists as well, he added.

In its hey days, the Centre used to make short films to propagate education and as such it had the best cameras, high-quality trolleys, cranes, and recording equipment of those times.

But since 1990, the process for making educational films was discontinued and all the equipment has been locked up since then.

The Centre had made films on Maithilisharan Gupta, Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Varma, Acharya Mahavir Prasad etc.

Also, films were made on biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, former President Rajendra Prasad, former Vice President Dr Radhakrishnan, former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Madan Mohan Malviya etc.

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