Last Film Show (2021)

Samay lives with his mother Baa (Richa Meena) and Father Bapuji (Dipen Raval). His parents decide to take him to nearby town Amreli one day to watch a movie. They generally don't like movies, but this is a religious film called "Jai MahaKaali". The movie has actors like Amrita Singh and Shatrughan Sinha.

Samay is mesmerized and notices that the light on the canvas comes from the projection room. Samay has friends Manu (Rahul Koli) and ST (Kishan Parmar). Bapuji is against films as they are a Brahmin cast and movies are against their culture and values. Samay aims for something bigger as his father is only a tea vendor. Samay helps his father sell tea at the village railway station. Samay plays with colored glasses and sees how different colors of glasses can give a completely different hue to the world. Samay collects empty matchboxes from the tracks and spins his own stories by taking cues from the pictures on top of the matchboxes. Samay has to travel to a nearby town Amreli by train to attend school with his friends. Samay starts bunking class to watch movies at the town Galaxy cinema. Samay misses the the train back home and his parents get worried. They find at the police station that he is sleeping in the Amreli railway station. Samay starts breaking into the cinema hall to watch movies without paying for the ticket. He gets thrown out of the cinema and meets Fazal. Samay ends up sharing his lunch with Fazal. Fazal loves Baa's thin Rotis and delicious vegetables. Fazal learns that Samay is sad as he could not watch the movie. Turns out Fazal is a projectionist and takes Samay into the projection room. Nine-year-old Samay (Bhavin Rabari) from Chalala, a village in Saurashtra, Gujarat, India spends an entire summer watching films, from the projection booth of a rundown movie place, by bribing the projectionist - Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali). The deal is simple, a free movie show in exchange for Baa's delicious food. Soon, Samay starts playing with discarded projection reels and he even starts "filming" scenes with his friends as he saw in the movies. He learns the art of cinematography. Fazal teaches him how to splice the projection reels and to work the projectors. Samay wants to capture light and starts experimenting with all the shapes and forms that light can bring alive. Samay tells Mr Dave (Alpesh Tank), his teacher that he wants to make movies. Dave tells Samay to learn English and then run away from Chalala. Using normal equipment and light from the sun, Samay is able to create a simple projector at an abandoned railway station. He has the knack of telling stories. Bapuji is told by railways that his tea stall license will not be renewed, since no trains will be stopping at Chalala going forward. Samay and his friends notice how the reels get to Amreli and steals some of the reels from the railway station directly where they are kept overnight before being distributed. As a result, cinemas all over the region get incomplete movies and there are riots. Problems mount when Bapuji won't pay Samay's school fees as he has been skipping school and the owner of the cinema finds him in the projection room and throws him out. Samay uses scrap metal to build a makeshift projector of his own in the abandoned railway station. The police eventually trace the theft of the reels to Chalala station, and the kids are caught by the police. They are arrested and taken to Juvenile detention. Bapuji eventually bails Samay out. Samay and his friends paint the exterior of the Galaxy theatre for free. The contractor was asking Rs 30, 000 for it and the owner (Paresh Mehta) is mighty pleased. He allows Samay and his friends to watch movies at his cinema for free. One day Bapuji finds how Samay, and his friends have constructed a projector at the abandoned railway station. He is astounded at the skill and ingenuity on display. Fazal is fired after the analog projectors in the cinema are retired and new digital projectors are installed. One needs to know English and Mathematics to operate the new projectors. They find that all the old reels have been sold for scrap. They follow the scrap truck into the city. The scrap factory is a huge warehouse, where scrap is melted and forged into steel ingots, which are then transformed into kitchen utensils. He finds the reels being unloaded in a different section which has thousands of boxes full of reels. The reel is dissolved in boiling water and turned into glass rolls of different colors. These glass rolls are then cut into bangles. The reels, which are stripped of all chemicals and colors are kept in a giant heap at the back of the warehouse. Samay returns home dejected. Samay returns home and starts studying. He helps Fazal get a job with the railways at the Chalala station. Samay is determine to study light. He is determined to study as that's the only way to create movies. Bapuji tells Samay that he can leave to pursue his dreams. Bapuji has recognized Samay's talent and knows that Chalala cannot fulfill his potential. Mr Dave had spoken to Bapuji to help him come to this realization and had seen his talent firsthand. He has organized a place for him to stay in Vadodara with his friend. But he has to leave within 14 minutes as the train will stop halting at Chalala from the next day. Baa packs him a lunch and the family rushes to the station to see off Samay. Samay manages to get on the train as it leaves the station and is sad to leave his family behind.