Written by Lubaina Kupasi. Graphic by Ananya Panchal.
At the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, the anticipation for a movie begins hours before anyone enters the theater. Students line up outside the Trustees Theater, rearranging classes, assignments, and sleep for a screening, a panel, or even just a glimpse of someone they’ve only seen on screen. To me, that anticipation feels familiar.
Back home, movies were never just something we watched. They were something we owned, collected, and built our lives around.
My father ran a Hollywood film distribution company, so our home was crowded with DVDs, Blu-rays,and movie merchandise. A film’s release meant premieres, press events, theater visits, and sometimes meeting the people behind the screen. Cinema had a physical presence, and an entire culture existed around it.
That world began changing as streaming gained momentum in the late 2000s and became mainstream throughout the 2010s. Over-the-top platforms made films more accessible, but they also made the rituals surrounding them easier to skip. Our family business felt the shift, as did the way people talked about movies. “Why pay for a ticket when it’ll be streaming soon?” became an increasingly familiar question.
But the SCAD Savannah Film Festival circumvents that question.
For one week, students willingly embrace everything streaming has taught audiences to avoid: long waits, rigid schedules,and the inconvenience of showing up.
Lines stretch for hours. Students trade stories, negotiate schedules,and turn waiting into its own communal ritual. What might seem irrational to an outsider reveals something distinctly anthropological. The festival has its own traditions, social hierarchies,and symbols of belonging.
A ticket becomes social currency. A celebrity encounter becomes a story worth retelling. Even waiting in line turns strangers into temporary members of the same film-loving crowd.
But this culture has contradictions.
Celebrity appearances can overshadow the films themselves. A recognizable Hollywood name can command hours of attention, while an unfamiliar filmmaker struggles to fill a room. In a school built around creative ambition, proximity to fame can sometimes carry more prestige than engagement with the work.
That raises an uncomfortable question: Are we celebrating cinema, or the possibility of becoming part of its industry?
There is also a fine line between enthusiasm and obligation. Missing classes or sacrificing sleep should not become proof of artistic commitment. And if students can justify a 72-hour line outside Trustees Theater as “networking,” perhaps we should question what belonging asks of us.
Still, the festival offers something an algorithm cannot. It pushes students to make choices, exchange opinions,and encounter films they might otherwise ignore. Those unexpected discoveries remind me how much of the moviegoing experience exists beyond the screen itself.
My father still scolds me for watching visually ambitious movies on my laptop. “That’s a big-screen movie,” he insists.
I used to think he was simply nostalgic for the industry he knew. Now I see his argument differently. Streaming has not destroyed cinema, but it has made the culture surrounding it easier to abandon.
At SCAD, that culture remains visible, occasionally messy,and undeniably alive.
The real measure of the festival is not how long students will wait for a famous face. It is whether they will stand in the same line for a filmmaker whose name they have never heard.
Cinema survived the death of the DVD. Whether its culture survives the age of convenience is a story we still have the power to write.
