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ur elders told us of a Lahore that we didn’t realise existed in their times — a city with neon marquees and a very happening night life. They remembered crowds going for midnight screenings and gathering under those colossal, hand‑painted billboards, each one more outrageous than the last. It was a world where the air smelled of fresh enamel and makai, and every new release felt like an occasion rather than just another film.
The story of these billboards began in the earliest days of our film industry, right after the Partition, when Lahore first dared to dream of rivaling its much bigger neighbour, Bombay. There were no fancy printers or slick computer graphics, so naturally, unassuming men armed with wooden palettes took charge. Many of these “poster walas” were illiterate in the formal sense, yet their eyes spoke a language of shadow and light and colours that no textbook could teach. They learned by watching grainy trailers in cramped studio corridors, where the flickering screen offered lessons in composition, gesture and the hypnotic pull of a heroine’s gaze.
Their studios were open‑air workshops in back alleys, often crowded with truck‑art decorators who mixed the paints and traded stencil tips. From those trucks came the riotous florals, peacock plumes, and swooping arabesques that found their way onto every cinema poster.
The influence was unmistakable: where a parked lorry might flash Maa ki Dua, a billboard would thunder Badla Khoon Ka in letters so large they seemed to swim across the plywood. That sensational style — blood-red against lurid green, playful eroticism of the heroine beside comic‑book style violence — was part seduction, part defiance and wholly impossible to ignore.
You could see this artistry stretched across the façades of the now-fading Regal and Capital cinemas, among others. Every evening, cinephiles and lafangay (tramps) alike would pause beneath those vast paintings, guessing plot twists from the tilt of a hero’s eyebrow or the curve of a heroine’s thumka. The audacity of the imagery sometimes backfired: when scenes of thigh‑high slits and dripping blood splashed across neighbourhood streets, many families quietly reconsidered their weekend plans. Mothers warned their children that the cinema was no place for modest eyesand fathers grumbled that such vulgarity had no place in polite society. In chasing attention, the artists risked alienating whole families who might otherwise have formed the backbone of their audiences.
Behind every billboard lay a small economy. Painters employed apprentices to grind pigments in battered tins, carpenters to craft wooden frames and scaffold builders to wind bamboo poles skywards. Chai walas circulated among them, offering steaming cups of tea in clay tumblers, while dhobis patched torn banners under the shade.
In an era when factory work was scarce and formal education rarer still, poster painting offered both livelihood and a unique apprenticeship — skills passed from father to son in the same way that age-old folk tales travelled by word of mouth.
On Eids and other festive occasions, Lahore’s streets transformed into open‑air galleries. In a time before smart phones and omnipresent trailers, these murals kindled curiosity and fuelled communal anticipation. Across cities and borders, painters in Lahore, Karachi and (before the Fall) Dhaka borrowed these truck-art inspired techniques.
Now, as sleek vinyl banners roll off digital presses and CGI floods our screens, the hand-painted billboard seems to be on borrowed time. Yet, there is no need for this tradition to perish in its entirety. Imagine cinemas commissioning hybrid posters: a digital print centrepiece framed by brush‑textured borders or floral patterns. Schools could teach both Photoshop and enamel‑mixing, ensuring that new generations of artists learn the craft from both pixel and pigment. Film festivals might host live-painting demonstrations, turning billboards into performance art that draws crowds as eagerly as any premiere.
Our cinematic heritage demands revival. When you next wander past Regal or any other local, non-elite cinema, look up and remember that every brushstroke once carried a city’s ambition. In those bold colours, you will find the soul of Lahore itself.
Kiva Malick is anacademician and a writer who focuses oneducation, philosophy, music and culture