Have you seen the Audience Award pipelines, in the Munt?

Apparently it’s just another consensus counter, but the funny thing - that you probably noticed from the first time you were given a tear-able voting ticket - is that the usual opinion scale (from very bad to very good) is here enriched by two additional degrees: “hopeless” at the bottom, “superb” at the top. These tricky edges smooth the idea of a rigid, almost mechanical statistic, but at the same time they derail it towards the slippery realm of subjectivity. That’s probably why I saw several people awkwardly bent over cautiously trying to peek at some titles in the paper confusion of the marginal containers: they were searching for titles to absolutely avoid or ardently love. As you can see, the more the machine becomes human, the more humans are easily convinced.

As the festival is drawing to its end, I went to study the pipelines once again.

The jury will count the votes and classify the documentaries’ appreciation amongst the public. For my part though, I’m more interested in the curve of the taste-line - or the way in which the values express themselves.

As you can see from the photo above, the 7 degrees can be reorganized as follows:
 the winning feeling is GOOD, followed by VERY GOOD and FAIR
 in the middle we find SUPERB
 going down in a perfect descending line, BAD, VERY BAD and HOPELESS

What does it mean? You can answer. You are the public.

Alberto Angelini