On the specific pleasure of foreign language film festivals and what they provide that streaming cannot.

I've been attending the local foreign language film festival for eight years. It's a ten-day event with about forty films from countries that are not well represented in American distribution. It screens one film that I've been waiting to see for years, and nine films I've never heard of.

The ratio matters. The nine films I've never heard of are what the festival is for. They come with no reputation, no critical consensus, no algorithm placing them in front of me because I watched something similar. They arrive as unknowns.

This year I saw a Nigerian film about urban migration that I cannot find a single review of in English. I saw a Georgian documentary about a man who has kept a record of every snowfall in his mountain village for forty years. I saw a Chilean film about sisters that was the best film I saw all year.

None of these are on any streaming platform. None of them will win awards that create broader visibility. They exist, they are extraordinary, and seeing them requires the kind of infrastructural commitment that film festivals provide and streaming platforms structurally cannot.