A Film Festival Is a Queue, Not a Carpet

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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。

A Film Festival Is a Queue, Not a Carpet

The queue for the 8:30 outdoors at Venice starts before the last vaporetto of the night has stopped running, people asleep against their own suitcases on the Lido pavement, because there's no other way to be sure of a seat for the film the whole island will be arguing about by lunch. Nobody in that queue is wearing anything a photographer would want. That's the actual festival. The carpet is the thirty seconds a festival performs for people who aren't there.

I've been going to these things for fifteen years and the carpet gets shorter and the queue gets longer every time, which nobody reports because a queue doesn't photograph as well as a tuxedo. But the queue is where the festival's real opinion lives. You can tell what a city thinks of a film by how early people start sleeping outside for it, not by how long the applause runs once they're finally in the room — clapping is polite by comparison; a person giving up a night's sleep for a ticket has actually voted.

This week the applause is the story again, four minutes here, four and a half there, and I understand the appeal of a stopwatch as a review — it's a number, numbers are easy — but I've sat in enough of those rooms to tell you the ovation measures the room's relief more often than the film. Everyone stood for months of anticipation finally landing somewhere, for the festival itself working as advertised, for being present at the thing rather than reading about it tomorrow. Sometimes that overlaps with the film being good. It isn't the same measurement.

What I trust instead is the queue the next morning, for the second screening, the one with no photographers and no ovation to inflate, just people who heard something last night and came back to check. That queue doesn't lie because it costs something real — sleep, a missed breakfast, a spot at the front of a different queue for a different film. A festival is a city for ten days, with its own economy of who's willing to suffer for what, and the exchange rate is the only review that's never been written by a publicist.

Venice does this better than most because the island makes the suffering visible — there's nowhere to hide a queue on a strip of sand between a lagoon and the sea, no side street to disappear the people who didn't get in. You see the whole transaction: who came, who waited, who's still there at midnight when the boats have stopped and the only way home is to stay until the next one, and decide the film in front of them is worth it.

That's the festival. Not the thirty seconds on the carpet. The queue that chose to stay.