There are not enough words to describe how Covid-19 impacted the film industry. As a cinematic major student and film-lover, it’s painful to be unable to see any film on the big screen. The worse thing is I watched the worst movie, Tenet, from Christopher Nolan as my first return to the cinema when theaters first opened again after the virus broke out. That’s wasting time. Fortunately, the last movie I watched is Les Misérables before the theater closed. When I finished the movie and walked out the theater, I felt nothing but happy. However, today I’m not going to compare these two movies and discuss their good and bad. Besides I want to express my upset because I can’t attend to theater, they are the openings to how I watched movie during the pandemic.
Since we can’t get in the theater, the Internet is the best destination for film enthusiasts in the digital era. As a student living in the US it is patheticallyhard to attend the professional Europan film festivals—even those which are open to students, such as the Cannes and Venice Film festivals. So, if there is no DVD and web source leaked on the internet, it’s almost impossible to watch some movies exhibited in the festival. Only audiences in the festival can know the whole face of the movie. Thus, the internet saved me. When I was surfing the net and through word-of-mouth, I found some online film festivals.
First, I want to introduce the BAMPFA. The full name is Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. This is the event hosted by the Berkeley art museum, California. The event started in 2008. It’s celebrating 9 years already. The director Lawrence Rinder changed to Julie Rodrigues Widholm until 2020. The event is trying to gather talented artists around the world to a museum that has a wider platform. Their different perspectives generate the difference and diversity. At the same time, the BAMPFA paid attention to the engagement of social activities and put them in the exhibition to let more people see the different sides of the common (University of California 2015).
On the other hand, the Asian Pop-up Cinema is mainly introducing Asian films. The show started in 2015, six years ago. Its main purpose is spreading Asian mainstream films and subculture. India, Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, and South Korean Movies are all on their website (Choice 2018). Compared to other A class film festivals, such as Shanghai International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and Europe big three Film festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin), these two festivals are more independent and less commercial. Furthermore, BAMPFA doesn’t only have films, it also contains lots of visual exhibitions. I watched the documentary, Lost Course, over BAMPFA. The documentary is talking about the process of a small village that started the democratic system and how it failed under the environment of China. The content suits the tone of BAMPFA: the film about the peasants in China, social activity, and myth of democracy. On the contrary, Asian pop-up Cinema is not that political. There are not too many hot topics we can find and extend. They are not too picky about genre and content. They even tend to choose subculture movies. As a film student, I was concentrating on the image and film technique while I was watching besides the Asian culture.
BAMPFA will choose the movie they like is not their own “privilege”. Lots of the A class are doing the same thing. Oscar this year, even though it’s not a film festival, we still can see lots of nominated films have left tendency. The coming question is, if the film does fit the taste of the festival, does it still have the chance to attend? If not, as audiences we might lose some movies that the theme doesn’t include any political or social expressions, but the images and techniques are amazing and unique. For example, And you birds can sing, Japan, 2018. It doesn’t have gender, race, refugee, immigrate content. The films are by the director repeatedly convey the relationship between two men and one woman, and their mental status. The movie looks plain, but the power inside covers the whole film. I think this the movie audiences shouldn’t miss and should let more to people to know.