I sat next to an old woman at the cinema last night and we both cried, then burst into laughter when our bloodshot eyes met. We were watching Past Lives and it was the strangest feeling - if you’ve watched the film you will know, if not I’ll offer my favourite Letterboxd synopsis - ‘You know when a movie is directly made for you to feel ripped apart into 1 million pieces but that feeling alone makes you feel like a complete person An incredibly moving depiction of those intangible forces that pull us together, but sometimes rip us apart.’ It was odd, there was an intangible force there too, between the twenty two year old and the woman with wrinkled hands and laughter lines, utter strangers intertwining for a moment in a way that towed the line between lucidity and absurdity. What could these two have in common except everything?  I wondered if our pain took on a similar shape, if it was the same lines that had cut to the quick, if love felt the same with a dogged heart, if these feelings fade with time or become more acute. Perhaps she basked in my supposed youthful naivety, ‘what do the young know about loss?’ - how right she is, how completely wrong. It reminded me of a piece Steven Spielberg wrote during the pandemic, when cinemas were shuttered and studios fretting over empty seats - explaining why, despite the unparalleled attempts by streaming services to metamorphose the cinematic world into one that winked back at us from glowing rectangles in our palms, movie theatres would never be left vacant. This itself, Spielberg claimed, was owed to the ‘feeling of fellowship with others who have left their homes and are seated with us. In a movie theatre, you watch movies with the significant others in your life, but also in the company of strangers. That’s the magic we experience when we go out to see a movie or a play or a concert or a comedy act. We don’t know who all these people are sitting around us, but when the experience makes us laugh or cry or cheer or contemplate, and then when the lights come up and we leave our seats, the people with whom we head out into the real world don’t feel like complete strangers anymore.’ Art often asks us questions whose answers feel more powerful when fashioned in the company of others, whether unifying or entirely subjective. All art is about people, at the end of the day, in some way or another, so it makes sense that we wander galleries with those we have never and will never know. Albeit, the concept of inyun would have a lot to say on that matter.