Film Society of Ravenshaw, is an independent society run and managed by students, including former students, of the university. FSR holds a screening, Friday, every week, and organises workshops on film-making and film appreciation. FSR is committed to Cinema as art and a social force within a community, and more importantly, within the framework of an University. It aspires to work towards this through regular film screenings, a culture of reading sessions, seminars, research, and scholarship that we plan to inculcate within the student community. Its ideological framework is rooted in the progressive stride of the Film Societies movement, which started with the Calcutta Film Society in post-independent India by the likes of Satyajit Ray and his contemporaries, mapping out an alternative discourse for Cinema beyond the mainstream in public space. It envisions an egalitarian eco-system of education, where Cinema is treated as a multi-disciplinary subject with other disciplines of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, where it provides a bridge to approach social realities, economic histories, cultural pasts and present of a society.

The beginnings of FSR may be traced to a film class which was opened in Ravenshaw College in 1952. Regular film shows were organised mostly for fund raising for social causes. For example, in December 1969, the social service guild screened a charity film to enhance it’s fund to meet the educational expenses of needy students. The local cine community often approached the college to screen newly released films. in 1972, the Film Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, had approached the then Principal of the College Prof. M. K. Rout regarding the production of a documentary film on the life of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Permission was taken from the Principal for a few shots of Ravenshaw College for the documentary. (Source: Nivedita Mohanty, Ravenshaw College: Orissa’s Temple of Learning, 1868 – 2006; p. 239)