Tamaki Matsuoka is not your regular cinephile. Dressed in a bright parrot-green saree and equipped with her trusty Olympus camera on hand, which she says is her constant companion to take pictures for her blog, the film-loving Japanese citizen is in the city to catch movies at heritage theatres—a ritual she has cultivated and has been following since 1975. “I’ve been to India more than 50 times now,” she smiles. 

It was in college that Matsuoka started learning Hindi. When she joined the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (OUFS) in 1967, the professor brought two newspapers and asked them to choose which language to study—one was a Hindi newspaper, and the other was an Urdu one. Matsuoka gravitated towards Hindi because it looked easier, and the rest, as they say, is history.