The Print Can Cross an Ocean Faster Than Its Director

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Cinepuuulse is a magazine, a radar and a diary about Asian cinema — Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand — read from Tokyo.

Our mark is 銀幕, ginmaku, the old word for the silver screen; it is the same two characters in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A magazine, because every week one film is worth reading about slowly. A radar, because we count what the region's screens are talking about — box office, festivals, directors, anime, streaming — and show it as it moves. A diary, because a seal is set each day in that day's colour, and the days add up.

We read the local press in its own languages and bring it over in English: the Japanese film sites, the Korean trade papers, the Chinese culture desks, the Vietnamese and Thai entertainment pages. Everything here links back to the people who made it; the images belong to their authors.

Cinepuuulse will keep changing. New sources, new signals, new ways of looking — a little better each week, never finished. If a film here made you want to buy a ticket, that is enough.

Thank you for reading. ありがとうございます。

The Print Can Cross an Ocean Faster Than Its Director

A hard drive the size of a paperback gets wrapped in bubble wrap at a desk near the Lido, handed to a courier, and put on a flight out of Venice while the festival that just premiered it still has two days left to run.

By the time it lands, a different city has already put up the same film's name in a different font. This week that city is Toronto, which opened its own eleven days on the same Wednesday Venice was heading into its last weekend, and for about seventy-two hours a single title exists in two places at once — one hard drive, one plane, two audiences convinced they are seeing the premiere. Nobody in either room is lying. The print simply got there before the conversation about it did.

I used to think a festival was a place. Now I think it's closer to a relay, and the baton is a hard drive wrapped in bubble wrap. Somewhere over the Atlantic this week there is a courier carrying tomorrow's Toronto gala who has not seen the film either, and won't, and doesn't need to — his job ends at the projection booth, where somebody else's job begins at nine the next morning with a test screening nobody outside the building will ever hear about.

It is easy to write the festival season as a single red carpet stretching from the Adriatic to Lake Ontario. It is not that. It is a dozen rooms running on a dozen clocks, each one convinced it is the centre, each one right for exactly the two hours the lights are down. Jecheon wrapped a week ago with its scores still ringing. Ulju hasn't opened yet and is already promising rain. None of these cities are talking to each other. The films are the ones doing the travelling, and they travel light — an ocean, in this case, weighs about as much as a paperback.

I think about that projectionist most of all, thumbing the drive out of its case at nine in the morning, running the test reel to an empty room hours before the ticket holders find their seats, checking that the sound is right for a story that, forty-eight hours ago, ended its life in a different country's dark.