DT 500 MAG LONDON DISPATCH cinema culture, Uncategorized

🎙️ Podcast Episode: The Lost Art of Attention: Ashanti Omkar on Cinema, Curiosity and the Stories That Shape Us

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🎙️ Pip: DT 500 MAG LONDON DISPATCH has been asking the kind of questions that don’t resolve in ninety seconds — which is either brave or deeply unfashionable, depending on your algorithm.

Mara: This episode follows one thread: a conversation with broadcaster and film critic Ashanti Omkar about what it means to pay real attention to cinema in an era built to scatter it.

Pip: Let’s start with the lost art of attention itself — what Omkar actually thinks is at stake.

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The Lost Art of Attention: Cinema, Curiosity, and What We Risk Losing

Mara: The post opens with a question about how cinema changes the way people understand reality — not as spectacle, but as philosophy made visible. Omkar’s whole career is built on that premise.

Pip: And her entry point is a film most people remember for slow-motion bullet dodging. The setup is that The Matrix did something most blockbusters don’t even attempt.

Mara: She’s precise about it: “I’d not seen a film prior to this which explored this kind of deep concept.” She connects the film directly to Hindu Advaita Vedanta philosophy — consciousness, identity, perception — not as a footnote but as the reason the film stayed with her.

Pip: So the upshot is that her entire critical framework traces back to a moment of genuine surprise. That matters, because the rest of the piece is essentially about whether audiences are still capable of being surprised.

Mara: The post builds toward the attention problem directly. Omkar names what she calls the “second screen scrolling phenomenon” — audiences physically present but mentally elsewhere. Her concern is specific: “People’s attention is divided between their devices, and it means that the finer details of the films or shows that people work so hard to create are diluted in viewers’ minds.”

Pip: Diluted is the right word. Not destroyed — diluted. Which is almost worse, because it’s invisible.

Mara: She extends that into cultural stakes: “We are perhaps losing nuance in the way we consume and enjoy cinema, and diluting the discourse too.” Stories get reduced to extractable moments rather than experienced as wholes.

Pip: And then there’s the algorithm question, which she refuses to answer cleanly. She says it depends on the kind of person — some follow the feed, others push past it. What this gets the listener is a distinction between access and curiosity. Having more has not made us more adventurous.

Mara: Her answer on criticism follows the same logic. She separates reaction from analysis: “For me, this boils down to analysis and the knowledge of the critic.” Journalism and film critique are different disciplines in her view, and the strongest voices understand both.

Pip: The piece also covers her jury work — BAFTA four consecutive years, Series Mania, Sundance London, Raindance, the Kerala International Film Festival, among others — which is where the pro bono dimension of her career becomes visible. She’s not just watching films; she’s helping decide which ones get seen.

Mara: And on festivals specifically, she argues the value is relational: “Tone is unfortunately lost in digital communication, but this is something that festivals help with, when one gets to look into the white of one’s eyes and communicate with nuance and authenticity.”

Pip: There’s also a passage on representation that pushes past the standard framing — she argues visibility alone isn’t enough and that “micro aggressions surrounding representation” remain largely unacknowledged. Small moments, she suggests, reveal the larger patterns.

Mara: The piece closes on curiosity as a survival instinct. Her line is direct: “Cinema has been my therapy, and it evolves in my mind, as my life journey continues.” And then: “Storytelling is in human DNA, and good cinema brings it to life.”

Pip: The question that drives all of it, she says, is simply: what if. Which is harder to automate than it sounds.

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Mara: The thread running through all of this is attention — what it costs to give it, what gets lost when we don’t.

Pip: And whether the instinct to ask what if survives a culture designed to answer before you’ve finished wondering. More on that next time.