 Members of the association are drawn from the film section of the entire press of West Bengal composed of dailies, periodicals and film journals in various languages published from Kolkata.Film correspondents and critics working for any newspaper or periodicals published outside Bengal having their base in Kolkata were also eligible to be members of this association.The association was the first to institute awards in an endeavor to promote and encourage the production of better films, when in 1938, a year after its inception, the 1st Motion Picture Congress was held in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh).