This is Required Watching. If you've been reading across this site and you're not sure what all of it is pointing toward, this is the piece that explains.
THE THING ITSELF
Required Watching is a film club. Not a YouTube channel that happens to have a community page. Not a newsletter that happens to cover film. A film club - built around the act of watching films together and talking about them seriously, with a specific analytical framework, a specific critical lens, and a specific audience in mind.
The audience: Anya, who is making things and wants to understand the craft. Leo, who has been watching seriously for years and wants a conversation at the level he's thinking. Zara, who was never invited into film culture and should have been. All three of them, in the same conversation, at the same level, about films that the mainstream tradition and the specialist tradition have both systematically underserved.
THE LENS
The CJK lens - Chinese, Japanese, Korean cinema as the primary analytical framework rather than a supplement to the European art cinema tradition. The Polyglot Lens - the credential of approaching these films from the outside, with the linguistic and cultural background of someone who learned to read cultural grammar rather than inheriting it.
The Zara Test - the hard pass/fail gate. If a piece of content doesn't work for someone who felt locked out of film culture, it doesn't ship. Not because we're simplifying. Because if the complexity isn't accessible, the complexity isn't doing its job.
The H4 framework - Hook, Heist, Heart, Hot Take - as the analytical tool for every session, every piece of content, every conversation. The framework that moves from emotional response to craft observation to meaning to position. The framework that turns a poll into a conversation.
WHAT THE FILM CLUB DOES
The film club runs in strands - a specific national cinema, a director's filmography, a formal theme - over a season. Each strand has three to six films. The films build on each other: the second is more legible because of the first, the discussion of the third is richer because of the first two. The strand creates context and the context creates the conversation.
The session structure uses the H4 framework as a conversation format. Each participant comes with their Hook sentence - the specific thing about the film they can't stop thinking about. The discussion opens with Hook sharing, works through the Heist (what formal choices produced those Hooks?), the Heart (what is the film about underneath the technique?), and ends with Hot Takes - the specific, held positions that the discussion has been building toward.
The Hot Take is the point. The specific position that is arguable, that someone in the room will push back on, that requires the analysis to defend. Film club that produces only agreements is not a film club. It's a screening with snacks. The Required Watching session produces the argument.
HOW TO JOIN
The Required Watching community is on Letterboxd first: the shared lists, the group diary, the specific Letterboxd infrastructure that makes the community watching practice legible across the membership. Follow the Required Watching account to access the strand programming and see what the community is currently watching.
The newsletter - Reel Talk - carries the editorial content and the session notes. Each issue is a compressed version of the film club session: the Hook, the Heist, the Heart, the Hot Take on the season's current film. Reading the newsletter is the minimum participation. Joining a session is the full participation.
The Patreon carries the deeper content: the long-form essays, the extended session recordings, the director deep-dives, the conversation at the level the film club is built to produce. The free tier is the entry. The support tier is the inside.
WHY THIS CLUB
Because the film club nobody built for us needed to exist. Because Zara deserves the conversation that Leo has been having for years. Because the CJK cinema tradition is not a supplement to the serious film conversation - it is part of the serious film conversation, and the film culture that hasn't figured that out yet is the film culture with the incomplete picture.
Because the film club that is built for you changes what you can do in a room. The room where the assumptions are different, where the default lens is different, where the vocabulary has been built for the specific cinema you came here to understand - that room changes the conversation. We built the room. Come find us.
Film club that produces only agreements is not a film club.
