“The cinematic image may be more truthful than words — but what happens when cinema shifts from being a medium for storytelling to a spectacle of itself? From a contemplative experience to a performance?”
We are not here to condemn festivals — but to question the illusion they’ve become: a social ritual dressed in cinematic clothing, often lacking the soul of cinema itself.
At many festivals, cinema is no longer at the heart of the event. It becomes a backdrop for appearances: red carpets, flashing cameras, curated queues, and social chatter that drowns out the stillness of the screen. Films are given second lives — not because of their substance — but because of who attended, who posed beside them, and who posted about them.
Cinema becomes secondary. The spectacle takes center stage.
The problem lies not in celebrating art, but in disguising it under layers of performance — where ideas are buried beneath headlines, where questions of craft are replaced with speculation about awards, and where theaters turn into symbolic battlegrounds. You might sit before a masterpiece and walk away with nothing but a photo in front of its poster.
The festival often resembles a theater of inclusion — a place where you attend to be seen, not to see. You endure screenings of films you’ll never revisit, applaud names more famous than talented, and find your emotions dulled amid symbolic excess. There’s little time for reflection, little space for emotional depth, and even less room for genuine cinematic engagement.
Cinema, at its core, is intimate. It demands your silence, your time, your inner dialogue. It wants to be seen — not filtered through events or obscured by hype. When screenings are crammed back-to-back between two dinners, even a great film might escape your grasp.
Sometimes, distance is more honest than presence. To choose a film and watch it slowly, on your own terms, in your own time — that may be more powerful than ten rushed viewings amid urban noise.
Rejecting festivals isn’t rejecting art. It’s resisting distortion.
It’s a quiet rebellion against reducing cinema to a social function — a protest in favor of art’s essence over ritual, meaning over status.
Cinema was never meant to be a performance. It was meant to be a mirror. And while festivals may polish that mirror for the world to see, they often leave us blind to our own reflection.