Screening Room B

Screening Room B is the small one. Forty seats, a screen that's really a wall painted white, and a door that doesn't quite close so you get a stripe of corridor light down one side for the whole film. Room A gets the premieres and the man from the paper. Room B gets everything else, and I get Room B, because I'm a volunteer and it's my second year and that's how it goes. My job is: check tickets, count heads, introduce the film in one sentence, sit at the back, and afterwards hand out the little cards where people give it a score out of five for the audience award. Then sweep. It's the Thursday of the festival. Six films today. The 11am was a documentary about a lighthouse that four people came to and three of them stayed for. The 1pm was a short programme, six films in an hour, and one of them was about a man and his fridge and I honestly think it might be the best thing I see all year. The 3pm is a feature from Slovenia. I know nothing about it except the title and that the director is here, a woman in her thirties with a rucksack who arrived twenty minutes ago and has been standing in the corridor looking at the door to Room B like it's a dentist's. I count heads. Seven. Seven people. In forty seats. For a film she has presumably spent years of her life on. "Is that everyone?" she says. She's come up beside me. "There might be a couple more. People come in late." "Seven." "Seven's not bad for a Thursday afternoon." She nods like she doesn't believe me. She's right not to. I've said that sentence about a dozen times this week. I do my introduction. I don't do the one sentence, I do three, because I've decided something and the something is that I'm going to make this feel like an event if I have to do it with my bare hands. I say the director's here. I say she's come from Ljubljana. I say it's the film's first screening outside Slovenia, which I know because it says so on the sheet, and the seven people clap, and she goes red.

The film starts. I sit at the back with the stripe of corridor light on my knee. It's slow. I'll be honest. It's a slow film about two sisters on a farm, and for the first twenty minutes I'm thinking about the sweeping and whether the 5pm will be busier. And then about half an hour in there's a scene where the older sister is milking a cow and the younger one comes in and says nothing and just stands there, and the older one keeps milking, and it goes on for what must be two minutes, and somewhere in those two minutes I stop thinking about the sweeping. I don't know how to describe it. Nothing happens. But by the end of the two minutes I know everything about those two women, and when the younger one finally says "he called," I actually feel it in my stomach. Afterwards there's a Q and A. I run it, because there's no one else. Seven people. Five of them ask questions. One woman in the front asks about the milking scene and the director says it was one take and the cow was called Manja and everyone laughs, including the director, who looks, for the first time today, like a person who's happy. I hand out the cards. I collect them. I don't look, because you're not supposed to look. I look. Seven cards. Six fives and a four. She's in the corridor with her rucksack when I come out. "Six fives," I say. "And a four." "Out of seven?" "Out of seven." She stands there. Then she laughs, one big laugh, and says something in Slovenian that I don't understand and don't need to. I've got to sweep. The 5pm's a comedy from Wales and there's already a queue. But I'll tell you: the fridge film's got competition.