LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN DECADE

Y MOST ACCOUNTS, CINEMA shrank Benjamin Button–style in the 2010s. Movies, once larger than life, became portable, foldable, and smaller than your palm. But history of cinema—and my own, individual cinephilia—progressed in the other, “correct” direction. In 2019, my defining cinematic experiences were on the big screen: the longing-soaked oceans and electronic rhythms of Mati Diop’s washing over me in a theater in Toronto; the lush colors and outsize emotions of Greta Gerwig’s holding me in thrall in a screening room in New York. In 2010, when I was a 14-year-old in a small city in central India, my most thrilling movie experience was watching via a Torrented file on my laptop, obsessively pausing and rewinding and replaying the film to parse what Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue and David Fincher’s frenzied, cross-cutting storytelling had to say about the world around me and the world soon to come.