Context stays attached
Every piece carries its venue, format and time of day. A 35mm screening in Rosebank reads differently from a DCP run at midnight in Maboneng, and the writing says so instead of smoothing it out.
Film criticism, interviews, and repertory notes
Plenty of places write about film. Fewer keep the room in the frame. Here is what separates a viewing diary written from inside a booth from coverage assembled after the fact.
Every piece carries its venue, format and time of day. A 35mm screening in Rosebank reads differently from a DCP run at midnight in Maboneng, and the writing says so instead of smoothing it out.
Projectionists, festival volunteers and film-school graduates do the writing. That means splice pops, changeover timing and queue logistics get described by someone who was standing there, not paraphrased from a press kit.
A repertory season becomes a seasonal guide. A Q&A becomes an annotated transcript. A short-film programme becomes curated notes with running times. The original screening keeps its grain on the page.
A reel with a damaged splice, a DCP that arrived without subtitles, a midnight crowd that stayed through the credits. Each one becomes something you can read, and each form keeps the room it came from.
Three weekends in a booth, a repertory season watched front to back, a festival day logged hour by hour. Venue, format and time of day stay in the text, because they change how a film lands.
Directors and colourists talking through decisions, edited for length and clarity. Technical passages on lift, gamma and gain sit next to plain talk about budget and a festival deadline.
A repertory run mapped out before it opens: which prints are circulating, which nights carry a Q&A, and where a changeover is likely to slip. Useful if you plan your month around screenings.
Curated notes for local shorts blocks, with running times and projection formats listed. Enough detail to know what you are walking into, and which film is on 16mm rather than a file.
For readers following Gauteng cinema from Rosebank or Maboneng without making the trip. One screening, one observation, written the same week rather than filed away.
Audience behaviour, door counts, snack-bar economics and the exit plan for a 4 a.m. finish. The unglamorous part of programming, recorded while it is still fresh.
Recent adaptation in practice: booth notes from a Braamfontein 35mm run and a Rosebank grading session on local shorts.
A few terms get used loosely when people talk about turning a screening into writing, so it is worth setting the edges before you read further. These are the working definitions the journal actually runs on.
When we adapt a screening, we are not scoring the film. We are carrying the conditions of that specific night onto the page: the venue, the projection format, the hour, how the room reacted. A review can be written from a laptop. An adaptation cannot.
A 35mm print with a repaired splice and a DCP that arrived without subtitles are not interchangeable. We name the format, the reel or file condition, and the changeover or playback decisions, because those details change what the audience actually saw and heard.
Interview pieces come from recorded sessions with directors, colourists and programmers. We cut for length and remove filler, but we do not rewrite answers into cleaner opinions. Where a quote is paraphrased rather than verbatim, it is marked as such.
A repertory season guide reflects the programme as it was scheduled at the time of writing. Running times, print sources and screening slots can shift after publication, and we note when a listing has since changed rather than quietly updating it.
Observations about queues, latecomers, phone screens or snack-bar queues are written as what happened in the room, not as instructions for how people should behave. If a night went badly, we say so plainly and leave it there.
Every adaptation names the people who made it possible: the projectionist who threaded the print, the colourist who sat for the transcript, the volunteer who counted the queue. If a contributor asked to stay unnamed, we say that instead of leaving a gap.