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Sheikh Rehman is one of Mumbai’s last surviving painters of cinema hoardings, using a detailed grid system to render Bollywood stars and explosions in vivid oils.

Dir: Georg Heinzen, Florian Heinzen-Ziob Germany 2015, 95 mins Cert: U*

Sheikh Rehman is one of Mumbai’s last surviving painters of cinema hoardings, using a detailed grid system to render Bollywood stars and explosions in vivid oils. His work adorns the ‘Alfred Talkies’, an ornate, creaking single-screen picturehouse run by the granddaughter of the original proprietor, where Bombayites take refuge from the heat to watch scratchy old prints of masala movies. The whole endeavour feels doomed, a ‘sinking ship’ as the manager puts it, but this evocative documentary by a father-and-son team is much more than just nostalgic elegy – particularly thanks to the sardonic, chain-smoking Rehman.