What is Acquired Cinema?

An attempt to motivate myself to write about what interests me. This includes focusing on films without distribution in North America, film festivals, the politics around and behind film festivals, programming, distribution/exhibition in general, or whatever else might be tangentially related to those topics. I’ll also try to write some thoughts out on what I watch every now and then, partly as a sort of time capsule and also just to be able to talk about films without being restricted to the form of a more standard review.

Why should you subscribe?

Part of the goal is to offer some sort of alternative to most film writing, which I find doesn’t really acknowledge business, economic, or pragmatic factors involved with the industry. I’ve been writing and editing since 2012, and doing film programming since 2015 or so. I find a lot of what I read isn’t reflective of my experiences, or there’s a general sense of people glossing over how the sausage gets made. I want to focus more on those elements, or I’ll try to at least.

I also want to profile films that might actually benefit from being talked about. I have no issue with writing about bigger titles (and you’ll still get some of that here), but it’s less interesting to contribute the nth piece of writing on some film or show that’s been thoroughly talked about. I prefer to discover things and hopefully convince others to seek out things to discover for themselves.