Festival Critics Praise Films Nobody Else Watches

The Chicago International Film Festival's recent standouts — Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, A Bit of Light and Love is the Monster — arrived with the critical consensus already assembled. These are the films that matter this year, the ones worth your attention, the ones that will carry weight into distribution deals and funding conversations in rooms you will never enter. The festival has become a machine for identifying and canonizing a particular kind of suffering.

This is not a neutral curatorial choice. Over the past decade, CIFF and its peer festivals have developed an unmistakable aesthetic preference: intimate narrative films about redemption and endurance, almost always featuring characters from the Global South or diaspora communities, almost always structured around the revelation of quiet resilience in the face of historical or economic violence. The films are often extraordinary. The problem is not their quality. The problem is that this preference has hardened into a formula, and formulas travel.

Filmmakers in Lagos, Beirut. Manila now know what wins at Berlin, what plays at Cannes, what gets distribution at CIFF. Funding bodies in their regions fund accordingly. Producers green-light stories that fit the festival rubric. The circuit no longer selects for what communities need to tell themselves. It selects for what European and North American audiences want to feel when they watch stories about other people's difficulties. Local cinema begins to optimize for external validation rather than internal conversation.

This is not cynicism on the filmmakers' part. It is rational response to material incentive. A film that plays CIFF gets seen by distributors. A film that wins CIFF gets seen by everyone else. The festival's taste has become everyone's taste because the festival controls the funnel. Critical praise for three standout narratives obscures the larger pattern: a self-perpetuating system that has learned to mistake curation for discovery and taste for judgment.

The question is not whether these films deserve attention. It is whether the festival circuit's selection bias has become invisible enough to mistake itself for the shape of cinema itself. When critics celebrate intimate narratives of redemption from the Global South without asking why those stories are the ones that get funded, distributed. Canonized. While films made for local audiences, in local languages, for local purposes, remain unseen in the festival conversation. We have stopped doing criticism. We have started running a brand.