Film criticism, interviews, and repertory notes
Our screening notes only exist because other people let us into their rooms. These are the partners who have hosted our crew, lent us prints, or shared a booth during a repertory run.
Repertory partner
Two 35mm houses that let us sit through reel-by-reel inspection before a Friday opening. They keep the platter running while we take notes.
Restoration access
A colourist's room that opened its doors for two afternoons of transcript work on grain, contrast and archival titles.
Late-night host
They handed us the queue barriers, the snack bar and a spare lamp at 2 a.m. Most of what we know about marathons came from that room.
Festival access
A volunteer-run shorts programme that shares its screening schedule with us each season, along with the messy parts nobody prints in a catalogue.
Technical support
Their engineers walked us through lamp swaps and server cues so our notes on digital screenings stay accurate instead of nostalgic.
Archive partner
They lend prints, flag missing reels and answer the awkward questions about condition that make a screening diary worth reading.
A case study is only worth reading if the person writing it was in the room. Every account on this page comes from a night we worked, threaded, queued or cleaned up after, and we name the choices that went wrong as often as the ones that worked.
The Braamfontein 35mm run was inspected reel by reel before each show because the print had been through a decade of bookings. We describe the splice pops, the changeover timing and the night a reel arrived without its replacement, not as anecdotes but as the actual working conditions.
The Rosebank restoration night turned on a colourist's remarks about grain and contrast, and how those choices shifted what the audience saw in an archival title. We quote the people who made the call, then explain the lift, gamma and gain decisions in plain language.
The Maboneng midnight marathon was decided by queue layout, snack-bar stock and a lamp swap at 1 a.m. We treat door counts, coffee timing and exit plans as part of the programme, because a room that is still standing in line at the second feature is a programming problem too.