Politics & Power Quote by Yahoo Serious

There is a weary punchline buried in Yahoo Serious's worry: a nation's screen identity can be erased without a censor, just a spreadsheet. He frames the loss of "film culture" not as a slow drift in taste but as a blunt, almost transactional takeover - Americans "bought up all the cinema chains" and the gatekeeping moved from local curators to corporate owners with different incentives. The phrasing "kind of worry" and "a little bit" is telling; it's the soft language of someone describing a hard outcome, as if understatement makes the accusation more polite, or more defensible.

The intent is protective and accusatory at once. Serious is defending the idea that a film culture isn't only the films themselves; it's the exhibition ecosystem that decides what gets seen, reviewed, discussed, and financed. If Australian films can't get screens, they can't become events. They can't fail publicly, can't find audiences, can't train the next generation by example. The subtext is that "choice" in a marketplace is often curated upstream by ownership.

Context matters: Australia has long wrestled with cultural import dominance, especially from the U.S., and film has always been a high-stakes front in that struggle because it shapes accents, landscapes, and national self-image. Serious, a filmmaker whose own moment was tied to a distinctly Australian comic sensibility, is mourning a period when the pipeline from local production to local audience got choked - not by disinterest, but by distribution power.