The future of cinema is a dark room full of strangers

Streaming did not kill the cinema. It reminded us what the cinema is actually for.

For a while the story seemed obvious. Screens got better, sofas got more comfortable, and the whole ritual of leaving the house to watch a film with people you will never meet started to look like a habit from another century. Why go out, the argument went, when everything is already here, on demand, in your hands.

A few years of everything-at-home gave us the answer, and it was not the one the argument expected. Given infinite choice and total convenience, a great many of us discovered that we watch less, remember less, and feel less. The film that plays while you check your phone is barely a film at all. Convenience turned out to be the opposite of attention.

What the room does

A cinema is a machine for attention. It takes away the pause button, the second screen, the option to wander off and make tea, and in return it gives you the one thing the living room cannot: the involuntary company of other people. You are not watching alone. You are watching as part of a temporary, accidental community that will dissolve the moment the lights come up.

You cannot pause it, you cannot skip it, and you cannot do it alone. That is not a limitation. That is the point.

Something happens to a film in that setting that cannot happen anywhere else. A joke lands harder because a hundred people laughed at once. A silence becomes almost physical because it is shared. Fear, grief, joy, all of it is amplified by the simple fact of not being the only one feeling it. The room does not just show the film. It completes it.

Not the past, the point

This is why we are not worried about the future of cinema, only about its complacency. The audience for the dark room is not a dying audience. It is an audience that has tried the alternative and come back with a clearer idea of what it wanted all along. The task now is to give them something worth the trip.

That is the whole ambition of a festival like ours. Not to preserve cinema like a museum piece, but to keep making the case, one full house at a time, that a film is best met by an audience, and that a dark room full of strangers is not a relic. It is the future, and it always was.