For Mao’s China, Lenin’s oft-quoted statement “that of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema” is a truism with an unspoken precondition—cinema encounters its audience. This talk focuses on a unique agent of Chinese socialist cinema—mobile film projectionists who brought films to a broad audience in rural China in the 1950s and 1960s. The first half of the talk frames the emergence of mobile film projectionists in a network of interwoven factors, including the economic, the socio-political, and the technological, in order to call attention to the problems and challenges in the Chinese Communist Party’s popularization of cinema. The second half examines the mobile film projectionist’s exhibition practices, including pre-screening promotional activities and “live performance” during the film screening. Through analyzing the overlay of the state’s interest and intrinsic values of professional practices, and last but not least, the importance of agency on the part of film projectionists, the talk complicates the reductionist understanding of Chinese socialist cinema as a tool of state propaganda.