"It plays well at festivals"

CIFF's Black Perspectives program identified two films as indelible this year: Liz Here Now and Three Colors: Pan-African. The festival described them neutrally, as significant achievements worthy of attention, which is exactly the problem. Neutral curation is invisible curation—it feels like discovery without actually being distribution.

The question that matters is structural, not aesthetic. A film that moves an audience in Chicago in October means nothing to the director in November if no distributor watched, no production company noticed, no acquisition team for a streaming service saw a path to the next project. Festival selection is a credential that matters only if it translates into something measurable: theatrical booking, financing commitments, international sales that wouldn't have happened without the festival's endorsement.

Liz Here Now and Three Colors: Pan-African may be genuinely accomplished. That accomplishment becomes industry momentum only when CIFF's curatorial choice functions as a signal to the people who control capital. A festival programmer's judgment is worth exactly what the market decides to do with it afterward. Everything else is sentiment masquerading as discovery.

Here is where the logic breaks. CIFF's programming team presumably selected these films believing they represented the future of Black cinema in America. But belief and infrastructure are not the same thing. A festival can create the space for a film to be seen. It cannot create the distribution apparatus that turns seeing into watching, into revenue, into the next filmmaker's budget. The curatorial vision stops at the theater door. What happens next belongs to exhibitors, acquisition departments, and investors who were not in the room when the selection happened.

This is not a failure unique to Black Perspectives or to CIFF. It is the permanent condition of festival programming in a media landscape where visibility and distribution have become almost entirely separate things. The festival becomes a way for institutions to signal values while the actual infrastructure of American cinema remains unchanged. Unless next year's financiers credit their decisions to this year's programming, the indelible films become footnotes in trade publications that no one in the industry reads closely enough to remember.