The Students Gave Out the Truest Prize

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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 Students Gave Out the Truest Prize

Somewhere in a side screening room at Venice, a dozen film students filled out a ballot before the credits had finished rolling, half-asleep after four features in a day, arguing in whispers over which one deserved their stamp. They gave it to a live-action adaptation of Look Back, Fujimoto's manga about two girls who draw — the UNIMED student jury award, handed out quietly while the main jury, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, was still three cinemas away from making up its mind about anything.

Every festival this size runs two economies at once. There's the one you read about — the ten best of Venice list, the opening-night gala, the competition slate everyone photographs on the way in. And there's the one nobody photographs: the parallel juries, student and ecumenical and critics', quietly handing their own small trophies to films the main jury hasn't got to yet, sometimes films the main jury will never see.

I've sat on the edges of enough of these rooms to know the second economy is usually the more honest one. A main jury weighs a delegation's size, a distributor's reach, a director's name recognition, whether the film needs the prize to get released anywhere. A student jury weighs whether the film worked on them, that afternoon, in that seat, with nothing riding on the answer. Look Back is a small, tender thing about the ache of making art next to someone better than you. It didn't need Venice's biggest prize. It needed twelve people who'd stayed awake for it.

The same week, a much smaller festival up in Niigata put out its own call for entries — an animation festival in a port city nobody thinks of as a festival town, building an audience one modest edition at a time, the way Venice itself must have looked from the inside in whatever year it was nobody's idea of a big deal yet. The student jury and the Niigata call are the same story told at two different sizes: the real festival is the one still deciding what it likes, not the one already sure.

The students filed out into the Lido heat still arguing about the ending, ballots forgotten in someone's tote bag, three days ahead of the story everyone else would eventually read.