Dear Cinema

Dear Cinema,

I’m writing to you from a little stone house covered with vine, where everyday bees come to forage.

When you close your eyes, can you hear their soothing buzzing sound?

Can you see all these colours?

The greens?

The reds?

The yellows?

The purples, the blacks…?

How about the sun through the leaves drawing their veins?

And the wind that almost sounds like the ocean, through the branches of the tall birch trees?

Can you almost touch the folded body of this woman in the middle of the field?

She’s working hard, the earth is way too dry, it’s our fault and she knows it.

She rises, rubs her lower back and leans on her rake.

Can you see how she turns, blinks her eyes a little and how slowly her beautiful wrinkled face lights up with a smile?

Can you raise and resonate the voices of the invisible? Their pain, their folly, their sorrows, their unspoken dreams?

Can you teach us their songs, their riots, their whispers, their silence?

Will you scream if you have to, at the disgusting greed that blindly kills this world?

Can you bring back honesty and kindness where there are only lies and hate

Can you tell the men in suits who commodify the world with such violence that 1+1 does not equal 2, but should equal whatever one can, whatever one wants?

Can you bring together the painters, the workers, the musicians, the peasants, the filmmakers, the unemployed, the brave, the weak, the writers, the housemaids, the exhausted, the nurses, … anyone who actually cares? Can you have them stand together? Can you try?

Can you protect what’s left of poetry in a world that doesn’t seem to care anymore?

Would you? Please…

It matters to all of us, even the ones that don’t realise it.

If you do, we will reinvent ways to make films and to come together to greet you.

If the cocoon of the dark theatre is forbidden, we will screen our films in the streets, in the fields, in the forests…

Anywhere will be fine as long as we are together.

It has to be together again.

Not alone, on a small shiny screen, while swallowing food, answering the phone or wondering if that door bell ringing comes from the film or from our house.

But together in front of a screen big enough for us to be like children again.

Together with our chins up.

Together with our eyes and ears wide open.

Together not expecting anything but ready to shiver, to wander, to question and not have answers, to feel.

No matter the viruses, the absurdity, ignorance and violence of leaders, no matter the money, no matter the contempt, we will make films.

We have to, we do, we will.

Dear Cinema, do you think people know?

Do you think they know you’re theirs and you need them?

Do you think they know how much you need their thoughts, their questions, their presence, their emotions.

Do you think they remember that some films are not entertainment but letters to them. Letters that say:

I care, I love you, I’m angry, I’m lost, I’m strong, I’m weak, I’m you, I’m not you but I want to know you, I’m trying to understand, will you try with me too, I can cope with the unfairness, I’m scared of us, I hope, I don’t believe but I have faith, I’m the world with all its awkwardness, I try, we try, damn we try… can we try together. Will you come? Wherever we screen, or will you stay home alone?

Tendresse Toujours

valerie massadian