This timeline attempts to track moving image practice in Bangladesh from the late 1920s to the present, following a line that runs through early East Bengal cinema, the parallel and independent film movements, and into today's gallery- and festival-based artists' moving image. It is a map, not a survey. We have chosen entries that help explain how the contemporary work came to look and feel the way it does, which means some figures and films are here and others, equally worth knowing, might not be and the path is not a clear one shifting between the beginnings of film, to independent and political film and onwards into the structures and works that have started to carry film into the visual arts space

A warning about the gaps. Much of this history is poorly archived. Prints are lost, dates are uncertain, and a great deal of the critical writing exists only in Bangla and has never been indexed in English and this research started in English. So this is intended as the beginning of a conversation to understand what is here and what is missing.