The aim of this study is to examine the investigative journalist Uğur Pişmanlık’s book Cumhuriyetten Günümüze Tarsus’ta Sinema (Cinema in Tarsus from the Republican Era to the Present, 2020). With his study based on various methods ranging from scanning newspaper archives to collecting written and visual documents, from oral history studies to mapping, Pişmanlık explores the cinema history of Tarsus district of Mersin. On the one hand, his study shows that cinema venues are at the centre of social and cultural life in small cities of Anatolia, and that it is a legitimate reason especially for women to socialize and to go out. On the other hand, it also shows how some problems of national historiography can be overcome by local cinema history studies. Although the book of Pişmanlık, and some similar studies are away from academic writing, they provide an opportunity to make a connection between the past, the present and the future as examples of historiography from below.