After the Credits

The ten minutes between the credits and the street are when festival-going is most itself — this piece makes the case for the immediate, unpolished conversation as a form of criticism and describes what gets lost when you wait until later to say what you thought.

An argument about memory and saturation — why a film seen at a festival is harder to hold onto than the same film seen alone six months later, and what the compression of the festival week does to your ability to carry anything out of it.

The experience of re-encountering a festival film months later — through conversation, a marked-up programme, a half-remembered image — and what survives the journey from the dark room into ordinary life.