In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.

Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.

It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.