What FilmStack is really building on here.

or why cinema matters now more than ever

film is the true vehicle that can take one anywhere.

When I was 7 I had the revelation that I would act in movies. It was this “knowledge” that kept me alive when all else spoke to the contrary. When I finally said this vision out loud at 18, I was often met with the same squinty-eyed confusion as those who speak a foreign language, “You must not be from around here, huh? Cause if you were, why would you ever want to leave?” Other times, I was met with “You’re so brave” which was laced with a kind of jealous awe that comes from knowing you could never do something yourself. Or let me put it to you this way as shown by a quote from one of my favorite books, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison:

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight.

I’m just some punk kid from the hill country of Middle Tennessee who was given the incomparable gift of dreaming. And nowhere on God’s green earth did I feel or do I feel more at home, more alive, more hopeful, nowhere did my small world feel more full of possibility than when I was watching a movie.

I know I’m not alone in this feeling.

It’s why FilmStack exists.

And it’s why it has become such a thriving community full of ideas, collaboration, and critique or as

Swabreen Bakr

effectively describes it:

a growing community of…people who are creating and developing new ways of making and engaging with film, the business of filmmaking, exhibition, and distribution.

Yesterday

Ted Hope

released a post in which he states his picks for the 20 Defining Aspects Of The State Of The Cinema Industries, End of June, 2025.

Two points he made immediately stood out to me:

1. We are in Cinema’s Fourth Great Disruption — and it is Utter Chaos.

   It shouldn’t really be a surprise that things are such a mess here in cinemaland. We see how sowing chaos is the plan across the land, but let’s examine our field, shall we? First there was sound. Then there was television, and color no less. Home entertainment changed the business even more. Now though it is a perfect storm of multiple forces. We have initially thought the rise of the Global Streaming Platforms was an equal disruption, but as they enter a second phase, we are hit with AI, the Distraction Industry, the Era Of Abundance, Wall Street’s dominance, and total disintermediation. Not to mention a horrible global geo-political situation, economic recession, and national polarization. We need a plan for all that.

2. AI inevitability brings jitters, confusion, and hesitation.

   The genie is way out of the bottle. Have you heard a common sense approach on how our industry should deal with it? If you have, please share it with the rest of us! We recognize AI will become a part of our tool kit, but we also recognize it will put many out of a job. We recognize our work has already trained it and we’ve seen nothing for it. We recognize the large companies see the business opportunity of separating us from the riches our work generates, yet we don’t know how to change that. But we are sort of in a holding patter now, seemingly burying our heads in the sand. Is that really what we should be doing now?

I followed up reading Ted’s post with the always brilliant

Sinéad Bovell

’s The Great Cognitive Divide:

Students who leaned on AI remembered less and felt less connected to their work. Some didn’t even want to take ownership of large sections of “their” essays. Many couldn’t quote what they had “written” days later. The more the machine did, the less the brain did. The researchers called it cognitive debt: the mind’s muscle shrinks when we stop asking it to carry weight.

We are exchanging our cognitive capacity for time.

The written abundance [stemming from the invention of the printing press] demanded complexity, created intellectual friction, and rewarded those who could handle it. But generative AI does far more than store, copy, or calculate. It simulates reasoning. For routine tasks — the bland essay, the generic memo, the safe policy draft — it is already better than the median human. And it will only get better.

So the question becomes: how do we create cognitive friction for the age of supercomputers?

These two pieces paired together immediately reminded me of

Dario Llinares

and his criminally underrated post, Should Cinemas Embrace Film Education?

The key point is this: there was a commitment to genuine integration between cinematic experience and education.

The auditorium…remained the physical and conceptual centre of both educational and social life…This advocacy of collective spectatorship gave the experience a kind of cultural gravity. Around that centre, our engagement with realism, formalism, auteur theory, genre, semiotics, psychoanalysis - all the theoretical frameworks we were absorbing - felt anchored.

Cinemas should take the lead in creating a new generation of viewers who don’t just treat films as passive “content,” but who understand the historical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of cinema. This isn’t a nostalgic plea - it’s a pragmatic vision. - Dario Llinares

And Dario’s “pragmatic vision” stems from the exact same perspective as

Sophie

’s pitch to turn theaters into cultural gyms.

Now let me explain to you why this is so necessary for not just us in film but the world at large.

Cinema as the visceral entry point to a new world

Cinema is a (my personal favorite) way of seeing the world.

Where AI distorts reality for the sake of company profits, filmmakers distort reality for the sake of getting you to see the world differently. And as our present reality seems to be distorting itself further and further with every passing day to the point we have lost our grip on it, we need this kind of artistic craftmanship from filmmakers to show the world this is not all it can be.

The cinematic arts are the perfect vessel to lead the way in envisioning a better future and to help us anchor our present to perhaps gain back enough sanity to start thinking for ourselves again.

Cinema is the effortlessly beautiful marriage between art and technology. It has always used technology as a tool for artistic expression (if you need me to spell it out for you I’m referring to the motion picture camera), so why then did we, in the film world, become so fearful that we might replaced by an “advanced technology” when we should be the one’s helping lead the charge on how to utilize it best? And for the record, I’m not saying for it to make our movies because that’s contrary to what art is but it can still offer us the tools to perhaps be more economically behind the scenes so that the art and those involved in making it flourish. Which can then allow us to imagine new worlds in which Big Tech and its offspring do not in fact run things.

Better tools give us leverage, but art is defined by its humanity. It wants a human signature, a point of view that machines can't replicate. In the future, art becomes even more personal, more participatory, more defined by its human lore — not just individual masterpieces but aesthetic frameworks in novel mediums. -

Anu Atluru

Just like folks from my hometown, the failing of this current system stems from a failure to dream. To be brave enough to take a chance on something you’ve never done before or that has never been done before. To allow the space for innovation and breakthrough to become the status quo not to control an outcome for the sake of projected profit or the sake of “progress” but for the future of human life.

Money has trumped cinema’s ability to reach it’s full capacity. As an artist, this is incredibly exciting to me because it means there’s still so much more to explore with this artform. This is why the NonDē Film Movement we’ve started is so necessary. This is why building new infrastructure to sustain the art and the artist and uplift the audience is so vital.

This is why more and more people seem to be jumping onboard each and every day.

It's about creating context for people to connect and experience things together. Coffee shops, bookstores, town squares, libraries, theaters — many so-called "third spaces" where community happens.

Community work is relational labor that AI can’t replicate. Genuine connection requires voluntary bonds and physical presence. We feel fulfilled when we earn our connection to people. We're going back to old times when your value was tied not just to your “useful” skills but to your integrated role in the community. -

Anu Atluru

, The 5 Jobs (of the Future)

Where can I go to feel more human? will be the crying call of a great many whether they know it or not (or it already is i suppose hence this place) -

Alex Bhat

So yes, we need theatrical experience now more than ever to “anchor” us once again to one another and to the human condition. But we also need to create films that are first and foremost transformational works of art for people to experience and so pairing Dario’s brilliant film education plan with Amanda’s equally brilliant concept of the cinema of “more” creates the kind of expansive innovation this world desperately needs.

Sure, we need to create systems that sustain the artists, but we also need to put the focus on creating cinema that reaches for more than it currently does. Cinema that has personal vision, a unique voice or perspective, cinema that has something to say, cinema as art. -

Amanda Sweikow

Here’s a condensed listing of what more means:

So what do I mean by more?

1. Cinema that reaches for more trusts its audience. They often embrace ambiguity. These films don’t over-explain, they leave space for the viewer to interpret, to decide for themselves. Sometimes that shows up in the ending, sometimes in the details along the way.

2. Another thing about cinema that reaches for more: it uses everything at its disposal to serve the film’s message. It’s not just about camera angles or lens choices, it’s also sound, production design, color, pacing, tone, performance. All of it matters.

3. Cinema that reaches for more also pushes the technical side of filmmaking, trying out new techniques or fresh ways of doing things…It’s also about tackling topics that society usually avoids or hides, challenging the status quo.

4. The more is always done in service to the work as a whole.

This is the kind of cinema we desperately need right now.

- Amanda Sweikow

It is my firm belief despite everything working against us, the crisis of seriousness, the commodification of celebrity, the black hole of streaming content and data… cinema still has the chance to be the “knowledge” (a visceral education on the humanity) needed to counteract our inability to think and to bring us back our collective sanity, because it is like all great works of art: a transcendental, singular experience and not just content to be consumed or commodified. Cinema showed us how art and technology could be a beautiful union and it has been what brings me back from the brink again and again by showing me a way forward or at least reminded me that I am still here.

And I know I’m not alone in this.

Myths, [like movies]…were meant to help you confront the world. To engage with them primarily for their escapist value was to fundamentally mistake their purpose.

Tolkien believed that to strip this kind of story of its darker elements was to sever it from its purpose. Without the darkness there could be no light, and without genuine trial there could be no transformation. - Evan Amato, Why Tolkien hated Disney

So maybe we’ve done enough brainstorming and intellectualizing and imagining a new film world on here…maybe, just maybe, now is the time to really get to work.