The film ends when you decide it does — and that decision reveals something about how you watch.
The Case for Staying
The credits are not a coda. They are the last movement — the moment when everything that was invisible while you watched becomes briefly legible: where this thing was made, by how many people, under what conditions, with what borrowed money and what unpaid favours. A long crawl of Ukrainian or Romanian names over a final locked frame is its own kind of argument. It tells you the film was not made easily, and it asks you to register that before you walk back into ordinary life.
There is also the practical matter of what the credits actually contain. Post-credit sequences are rare in the kind of cinema that reaches festival programmes, but not unknown — and the more serious loss is the music. A director who has chosen to close on a specific piece of music, held under a title card or running uninterrupted for ninety seconds, has made an editorial decision you are opting out of by heading for the aisle. You would not leave a concert before the last note faded. The logic is the same.
Beyond that, there is something to be said for the transition itself. The foyer conversation that follows a screening is often the best part of the day, but it requires that you arrive at it in the right state — carried by the film rather than already halfway out of it. Sitting through the credits is a decompression chamber. It keeps you in the room, with the image, with the other people who are also staying, before the noise of opinion rushes in.
What the credits tell you
where the film was made, how it was funded, by how many people
a deliberate editorial choice, not an afterthought
rare in festival cinema but not absent
When the Argument Collapses
None of this survives contact with a festival schedule. If your next film starts in twenty-five minutes across a city, and you have learned through hard experience that the queue forms fifteen minutes before doors, the credits become a luxury you have already spent. Leave. The film will not be diminished by your absence from its final sixty seconds.
The same applies when the credits are genuinely over — when the house lights are up, the sound is off, and the projectionist is clearly waiting. Staying then is not reverence; it is inertia dressed up as principle.
The honest version of this argument is modest: stay when you can, leave when you must, and notice the difference between the two. Most people get it backwards.
