This 21-year old from Tiruchengode in Namakkal, Tamil Nadu started a Facebook group that reviews, curates and promotes world cinema — mostly in Tamil — and this page just hit 26K followers within a year. Welcome to the world of World Movies Museum. Started by the extremely young and enthusiastic Siva Sankar, who like any other job-seeking Engineering graduate was looking for a deeper meaning in life, the page is thriving despite being a closed group, "I am not making money out of it," he declares straight up.
At a time when YouTube reviewers and self-styled movie critics are clogging up cyberspace, this group is filled with people who are passionate about alternative cinema. Siva explains how they started out, "Every human being's common interest point is cinema. My initial discussion with friends about movies gradually brought me to a point where I started looking for movies in different languages, not only from India but across the globe," he explains.
Featuring write-ups in Tamil about different movies, World Movies Museum also gives prior information about movies that are waiting to be released. They also conduct discussions about a few handpicked movies that they believe people in the group will enjoy — unlike with other pages, the admins of this page ensure that there is a healthy level of discussion in the group. But that stops short of one thing, "We are against piracy so we make sure that members do not post movie download links," he firmly states.
Though social media and hardcore literature don't always crossover, Siva Sankar says that they have also planned to release a compilation of the best cinema write-ups of the year and have started a group for book lovers. Most people in groups on Facebook don't usually meet in person. So when these guys did actually meet up, it was quite an occasion, "After almost a year, we recently happened to meet everyone under one roof. We are all complete strangers from different parts of the country and I'm happy that my passion had earned me a big family," he gushes.
