Across Asia less and less space is given to any serious writing on cinema in the daily newspapers - while serious film magazines are in trouble and readership declining. Yet cinema is an overriding presence in our lives and we ignore its reach and its influence at our peril. It has to be looked at with seriousness as the most potent form of popular culture, in addition to one of the finest of the seven arts.

Film criticism adopted a particular form fifty years ago. In these fifty years, the manner in which films are seen, by whom they are seen, and where they are seen, have all changed radically. Internet sites where the views of audiences as much as those of film critics, debates on films, their content, their meaning, their effect on the minds of children, adolescents and general audiences, all find space and a voice here.

But although newspapers have a shorter life than internet sites, yet they carry a weight that internet sites do not. At least not at the moment.

It is vital, therefore, that films – not gossip about the stars and starlets, clad or unclad, their private lives and their celebrity status – be looked at as culture carriers and message bearers as much as analysed for their aesthetic and cinematic qualities.

It is accepted that forms of popular expression hold the key to understanding societies. In the films of different eras one can actually see the evolution of societies in the manner of living, behaving, dressing, being. At the same time, they are visual records of the rapidly changing cities and landscapes against which they are set. The place of cinema as a study of social history is thus of lasting importance.

When film criticism emerged a century ago, the critics were writing either about their national cinemas or at most about Hollywood. The cultural and historical backgrounds were common and required no special understanding. In the world as it is today, we are looking at films from cultures that are often totally different. Without some explanation, they remain only partially comprehensible to spectators. The finer points are lost or misunderstood and in the process the appreciation of the film suffers. When the funding for an Asian film comes from western countries the film tends to conform to a western aesthetic and sensibility. At a time when the importance of cultural diversity is being touted by one and all, cultural differences in a film are glossed over, ignored (because the writers themselves don’t understand them) or slighted.

We need now to understand and appreciate the different kinds of filmmaking, not expecting films from all cultures to conform to the definition of cinema laid down long ago by either Hollywood, or by Andre Bazin. In underlining the particularities of the cultures, the historical background and the contemporary realities of the society where the films come from, we as writers could help in bridging differences and removing the notion of the other.

Hence, producers and directors need to give some of this background in their press books to help the writers interpret them for audiences. Newspapers then might be persuaded to look at a film as something beyond cinema, as an interpreter of cultures, sometimes even of one’s own, to help create the understanding so necessary in the divisive world we live in.

We should examine the role of public relations, advertising and marketing in the dissemination and understanding of films. How can the process of film promotion interpret the messages and cultural context of a film for an international audience? If film promoters started to provide this kind of background and insight, could it actually widen the audience of the film?

The link between the media and marketing is an important one in a new thinking on ways of creating both understanding and audiences for another kind of cinema.

The Media Round table will be attended a galaxy of film critics from India and abroad.