We proved that an inclusive movie screening is possible. With CBFC’s new rules, it can be made sustainable

Entertainment — cinema, sport, music, cultural participation — sits at the bottom of an unspoken hierarchy of disability rights, as though joy were a luxury to be pursued after the serious business of inclusion is complete

By S Gokul

In December 2022, in a luxury theatre in Tirunelveli — a town not typically associated with pioneering anything in cinema — a girl named Angel watched her first film. She was a student at the School for the Blind in Palayamkottai. She was 15 and had never been inside a movie theatre.

The film was Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan. A prestige epic, three hours of Chola-era intrigue, battle sequences, A R Rahman’s orchestral swells. Not, on the face of it, the most obvious choice for a screening aimed at visually impaired and hearing-impaired students. But that was rather the point. We were not looking for a “suitable” film. We were looking for the film everyone else was talking about. Inclusion, if it means anything at all, means you get to argue about whether Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was miscast. It does not mean you get a special screening of an educational documentary about road safety.

It took a week to pull it off. A week of working with theatre technicians to create and synchronise an audio description track — a narration of visual elements during the non-dialogue stretches, so that a blind viewer would know that Vandiyadevan was galloping through a forest and not sitting in a council chamber. The theatre owner, Kannan, offered the screening free of charge and gave us a dedicated screen. We arranged wheelchair access. Closed captions went up for the hearing-impaired students. Around 200 students came — some from schools for the blind and the deaf, and others with locomotor disabilities. Their teachers came with them. Most had never set foot in a cinema hall.

When the lights came up after three hours, the hearing-impaired students were signing furiously to each other about the plot. A visually impaired student named Hari Aakash told a reporter that he could usually follow dialogue scenes on television at home, but during silent emotional scenes, he had no idea what was happening on screen. In the theatre, for the first time, he did. Angel asked if we could arrange Ponniyin Selvan: II as well.

I am recounting this not because it was a success — it was, modestly — but because it should not have been remarkable. What made it extraordinary was simply the absence of any system that could have made it ordinary. Every element of that screening depended on improvisation, goodwill, and a theatre owner generous enough to donate his screen and his staff’s time. There was no audio description track for Ponniyin Selvan because no one had made one. There was no obligation on the theatre to provide wheelchair access or captioning. There was no expectation, among the students themselves, that a cinema was a place where they belonged.

This last point is the one I want to dwell on, because it reveals something that the disability rights movement in India — a movement I owe a great deal to and am broadly part of — has not sufficiently reckoned with. We have fought, and rightly so, for accessible classrooms, for reservation in employment, for ramps and Braille signage and screen readers. These are battles of survival and livelihood, and they are far from won. But somewhere in the urgency of securing the basics, we have quietly conceded the domain of leisure. Entertainment — cinema, sport, music, cultural participation — sits at the bottom of an unspoken hierarchy of disability rights, as though joy were a luxury to be pursued after the serious business of inclusion is complete. The consequence is stark: Millions of disabled Indians have never imagined that a movie theatre could be for them. Not because they were told they could not enter — though many were, and are — but because the idea of entering never occurred. You do not demand what you have not been taught to expect.

This is the context in which the CBFC’s new mandate — effective March 15, requiring all films submitted for certification to include audio description and closed captioning — deserves to be understood. The regulation is not merely an administrative update. It is, whether intended or not, a statement that cultural participation is a legal right and not an act of benevolence. Its roots run through the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s accessibility guidelines issued in March 2024, through a determined petition filed by Akshat Baldwa and his colleagues in the Delhi High Court that dragged the film industry and the government toward compliance. These are not the usual bureaucratic genealogies one recites out of obligation. In this case, the lineage matters, because it shows how long the road was from a right on paper to a requirement in practice.

The predictable backlash has arrived on schedule. “Subtitles ruin the viewing experience,” say thousands of outraged commentators on social media, as though the entire population of India has until now been enjoying films in an undisturbed state of cinematic bliss. To which the only honest response is: For 2.68 crore Indians counted as disabled in the 2011 Census — a figure that understates the reality by any serious reckoning, there has been no viewing experience to ruin. The theatre was not theirs. The screen was not speaking to them. What these commentators are actually objecting to is the faint inconvenience of acknowledging that someone else exists in the room. One would think that the average Indian filmgoer, who has spent decades tolerating ringing phones, running commentary, and the gentleman in Row F explaining the plot to his wife, could manage subtitles.

But irony, however satisfying, does not solve the problems ahead. There are several. The cost of producing audio description and closed captioning — estimated at Rs 20 to 40,000 per language — is manageable for major productions but may strain small and regional filmmakers, particularly those operating in languages with limited markets. The quality of audio description matters enormously; a poorly scripted or mistimed narration is not accessibility but a different kind of exclusion, and India does not yet have a robust ecosystem of trained audio describers working across its 20-odd film languages. Theatre infrastructure remains uneven. And then there is the deepest challenge of all: Awareness. The regulation can compel producers to create accessible content. It cannot, by itself, inform the millions of disabled Indians who do not know that this is now their right — that there is a seat in the hall, a track on the screen, a voice in the soundtrack that exists for them.

In Tirunelveli, in 2022, we proved that an inclusive screening was possible. What we could not prove was that it was sustainable, because every element of it was exceptional. I was posted there as a trainee officer; by the time Ponniyin Selvan: Part II was released, I had already been transferred. There was no institutional memory, no standing arrangement, no follow-up screening that I know of. The moment passed. Angel’s first trip to the cinema may also, for all I know, have been her last.

What the CBFC regulation does, if enforced well, is ensure that the next Angel does not need an officer with a personal interest in inclusion, a philanthropic theatre owner, and a week of improvised technical work to watch a film. She needs only a ticket. That is the distance between charity and infrastructure, between a good story and a functioning system. It is not a small distance, and we are not yet across it. But the direction, at least, is right.

The writer is an IAS officer of the 2021 batch, currently serving as Additional Collector, Mayiladuthurai District, Tamil Nadu