World Poll 2018 – Introduction

It’s our favourite time of year when the World Poll rolls around, and the 2018 edition is no exception. There is something intensely gratifying in getting such a wide-reaching snapshot of the year in film. Our relationships with the moving image is so varied, and our contributors typify that breadth of experience. From my own experience, 2018 was year where physically getting myself to a cinema proved increasingly difficult: gone are the days of a sitting down to long stretches in the cinema, watching films back to back to back. So on a personal level, just diving into the experiences of those contributors who have spent time at Cannes or Karlovy Vary or Ritrovato or the Berlinale is giving me both a stack of titles I must seek out, and serious, overwhelming life envy.

There’s some wonderful pieces of writing in here to enjoy along with the lists, and sharing in the moments in people’s film year which resonated with them is one of the great pleasures of the World Poll. Look to Jason Wierzba’s wonderful shout-out to the Monograph screening in Alberta, Canada as one great example, or Adrian Danks’ discussion of his film travels, from Bologna to Bendigo and the treasures he found there. One of the other great things about the contributions we receive is the way people think about their year, and organise their experiences. Just compare, for example, Samantha Broadhead’s excellent horror list with Tara Lomax’s equally tremendous superhero franchise assessment, and then line them up against Fernando Chaves Espinach’s analysis of the year in Central American Cinema. How wonderful to have the breadth and depth of world cinema represented across the poll so expertly. Titles as diverse as Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018), The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, 2018), Killing Eve (Phoebe-Waller Bridge, 2018) and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr., and Rodney Rothman, 2018) just show how wide we cast our screen net, and that this breadth is so gloriously on display across the World Poll is something for which we can all be proud.

So, you know the drill. Dive in where you wish – work through them sequentially or pick and choose at will. People track their viewing in all sorts of ways, so if you’re operating a spreadsheet or a diary, start noting down the films that leap out at you; if you have a Letterboxd account, start adding titles to your watchlist. Watch out for the trends and the obscurities – both are equally valuable. I would like to give enormous thanks to our trusty interns who helped proof-read and format all of these – over 160 – entries. So thanks to Lachlan Wyness, Jarryd Brand, Maudie Osborne and Trang Pham for their tireless work and enormous assistance with this huge project. And we should all raise a glass for the work undertaken by our webmaster Bradley Dixon who has had to get this whole thing up and ready for your reading pleasure. Thanks so much Bradley. Finally of course to all our contributors who make the World Poll possible, thank you all. We’ll be discussing the World Poll in the February edition of the Senses of Cinema Podcast, so look out for that – and if you haven’t yet subscribed or are interested in being a Patron of Senses of Cinema, head over to sensesofcinema.podbean.com, click on the icon on the left and all you need to know is right there for you.

Thanks again to all who contributed and assisted with this massive project, and welcome to the Senses of Cinema World Poll for 2018!

Mark Freeman

THE ENTRIES