Films Division Data

Films Division of India was established in 1948 in the newly independent nation. Since then, it has maintained a record of the social, political and cultural imaginations and realities of the country on film. It has promoted a culture of film-making that rests on a particular vision of Indian society and educating the masses. It is an archive spanning more than 8,000 titles, and represents a repository worth researching and studying. This page provides links to two sample films from the archive. Researchers will also find a complete table of the films produced by the archive. While the source PDF data comes from Films Division itself, the workable CSV file has been created by the Bollywood and Beyond team. We have cleaned the data, and it is free to download and use in data manipulations and visualizations for your own research.

Data Sets:

Films Division PDF Catalog

Films Division CSV Data File

Python Code:

Films Division Python Code

Tableau Analytics File:

Tableau Public

Writings:

Mapping India’s Film Division

To cite the database:

Bollywood and Beyond: Analyzing the Indian Film Industry through the Films Division Archival Metadata. Nitin Rao & Sudev Sheth, eds. University of Pennsylvania (2020): https://web.sas.upenn.edu/bollywood-and-beyond/


I am 20 (1967, S.N.S. Sastry)

“Those born on Independence Day in 1947 were selected from different ts of India and interviewed to know their hopes and desires, ambitions, hobbies, fears and frustrations and the result is this unique film.”

 

Wives & Wives (1962, Pramod Pati)

“In the mighty task of building a new India every body in the country has his or her effective role to play. So has the housewife. This iswhat the cartoon depicts with a humorous little story written around a modern bachelor who visits a marriage bureau to select a bride – to be precise a good housewife.”

 

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