لالی وُڈ ریسورس

Lollywood Resource is an artist-led research platform that accumulates, traces, and experiments with the film culture of Lahore through interviews, gatherings, films, studio sites, and evolving archival fragments. The platform operates as a space of ongoing inquiry rather than a closed archive, bringing together materials that circulate beyond formal institutional frameworks.

Much of Lollywood’s history exists outside official archives. It continues through informal practices, personal memory, labor processes, and partial records. Lollywood Resource approaches this condition not as a problem to be resolved, but as a working reality—one that allows for accumulation, tracing, and reactivation rather than definitive historical accounts.

Interviews conducted as part of Lollywood Resource function as a primary research method. They generate labor histories and production knowledge through listening, exchange, and long-term engagement with individuals connected to the film industry. These interviews are not used to construct a complete narrative, but to allow multiple and sometimes contradictory experiences to coexist.

Alongside interviews, the platform gathers films from different decades, images of studios and their surroundings, and materials related to production cultures. Lollywood films span several decades and reflect an extensive and shifting film culture shaped by changing social, economic, and infrastructural conditions. Studio spaces—many of which have been lost over time—are approached as sites of production, memory, and transformation rather than as fixed monuments.

The Gatherings are organized as informal research meetings, generating space for exchange, collective memory, and community among individuals connected to Lahore’s film industry. These encounters extend the research beyond documentation, activating shared presence and allowing relationships, conversations, and new forms of knowledge to emerge.

The recent demolition of parts of Bari Studio in Lahore is not the first loss of studio space within Lollywood, but it is the most recent. This ongoing disappearance of physical infrastructure underscores the need to imagine and generate alternative spaces where practices, memories, and relations can continue to exist—both physically and digitally.

Lollywood Resource is not intended to present a definitive history of Lollywood. It remains intentionally partial, evolving, and open-ended. Its value lies in creating conditions for accumulation, reflection, and possibility—allowing film culture to be encountered as something lived, unfinished, and continuously in motion.

Initiated by artist Basir Mahmood, Lollywood Resource forms part of an ongoing, long-term research practice developed through sustained engagement with Lahore’s film industry.