How well I remember receiving the first call to arms from the Mediawave Festival. It was something i couldn’t have managed alone, in that moment, in those days, we didn’t do anything alone. There were many of us gathered in a scrum and we were pointing and exclaiming, our mouths and ears open. We were laughing, and then we wanted to take all of our clothes off and do terrible things to each other and call it love. We read about how your festival wanted no-hamburger movies. We read your call for entries except it was written as a manifesto, the words still trembling when we took them in, and we couldn’t help but feel that cinema mattered again. That our small, lonely, humble cinema, made out of some personal necessity that words too often refused, was part of a larger project. That we were being touched by a distant hand, oh yes, the hand of the east had come to make us holy again, and make our cinema perfect, even if, and especially because, it was so riddled with mistakes. We wanted to jump into your arms and so we jumped into each other’s. Would we ever be so close again? Would cinema ever matter so much?