Karma has a sincere desire”.
Cement is 26 years old this year, lives in Shunde, Guangdong, and claims to be a failed movie fan. The ticket stub shows that Shunde and Hong Kong share half of the places where he watches movies every day. In Shunde, the movie theater he often goes to is on the third floor of a separate building. People watching movies have a stronger social nature, and conversations are common when watching movies. For this reason, he often leaves in the middle of the movie. field.
Before the outbreak, he set out from Shunde and took a three-hour bus to Hong Kong at least once a month. Get off at Yau Tsim Mong, where there is a Broadway Studios, he is a member. Arriving in the morning usually, Yau Tsim Mong has not yet woken up. On the 900-meter road leading to the cinema, he most often encounters middle-aged porters and elderly people, as well as the densely distributed 24-hour convenience stores. He will watch movies on Broadway for a whole day, at most five games a day, and then take the last bus back to Shunde at 19:30.
The last time he watched a movie, he took the early morning bus to Guangzhou. It was Saturday, January 18th. The movie “Sweet Potatoes and Rice” was not scheduled in Shunde’s theater. The nearest theater with a row was in Guangzhou, and only one theater was screened, starting at 10 o’clock in the morning.
He didn’t expect that after this, for nearly 200 days, he never entered the theater again.
This is a period of time when all people who love movies feel at a loss. At the beginning of July, a Beijing movie fan S went to Wangjing to eat cold noodles, took a look at the movie theater he frequented, and reached out to touch the front desk, a thick layer of ash.
Later, she took the ticket stubs she had saved over the years and went to the corresponding movie theater to take a video as a souvenir. She went to the China Film Archive, the theater’s gate was closed, and only vegetation protruded out of the wall; she went to the Zhongguancun store of Mega Happy Studios, and found that the studio’s sign had been demolished; most of the theaters kept the promotional materials for the Lunar New Year files, the lively red mask. After getting ash, she felt that time had frozen, stagnating in the beaming atmosphere, “very complicated and sad.”
In MOMA Broadway Studios, S saw “I’m waiting for you at the end of time” written on the wall in the lobby. Later she learned that it was promotional material for a movie of the same name. But at the time, she felt that this sentence was really “bad”, “Like it was said, the cinema is closed for no end. You don’t know when you can come back, where I am, where is it waiting for me.”
3
Mr Liu often misses the winter of 2002. That winter, the movie “Hero” was released, and the theater was crowded with people. The staff of them had been busy in the theater for half a month without going out. That was her first year in the industry, and soon, SARS came. In 2019, she resigned from that theater and started to operate that theater in Shunyi District, Beijing. The next year, the new crown epidemic hit, and she felt that “history is always surprisingly similar.”
In the first two months, Liu always felt that lying at home was to contribute to the epidemic. But the longer she lay down, the heavier the burden, she was both anxious and