The oldest surviving Assamese film was shot in a bamboo studio because no film industry existed yet — then it was lost for decades and rediscovered in someone's garage
In 1935, a man named Jyotiprasad Agarwala wanted to make Assam's first film. There was no film industry there to work with — no studio, no crew, nothing. So he built his own studio out of bamboo mats and banana stumps on his family's tea estate, and basically did every job himself: writer, director, editor, composer, set designer, the works, because there was genuinely nobody else trained to do it.
The film, Joymoti, told the story of a 17th-century Ahom princess tortured for refusing to betray her husband's hiding place — one of the first Indian films built around a politically assertive woman as the actual center of the story, not a supporting character.
It flopped commercially and mostly disappeared for decades. Then in the early 1970s, Agarwala's brother was cleaning out his garage and found seven surviving reels sitting there. A more complete print later turned up in a studio in Lahore, having apparently traveled there before Partition, and got tracked down and recovered in Bombay in the 1990s.
It's a genuinely wild production and preservation story, and We wrote it up in more detail here (including what happened to the film's lead actress, which is its own complicated chapter):
https://talkiesdb.com/stories/he-built-a-studio-out-of-bamboo-and-banana-stumps-to-make-this-film