When I remember my dreams—which is rare these days—I can’t recollect colours or textures or smells; only residual feelings. Perhaps the cold, sweaty clamp of fear. The gut-flopping thrill of flying through space. The hungry hope of jolting myself awake and hoping that everything I’ve imagined is real. Then there are other bits and pieces I remember when I least expect—a television that won’t turn off; the colour blue, spreading everywhere like an inkblot; a tunnel that stretches forever. Perhaps that’s what draws me to movies—the feeling of being able to explore something that exists as a ‘now-memory’ rather than a past or future. The feeling of riding down a road on a bicycle with no hands steering me ahead. Sun spots in my eyes. CinemaScope vision. In the northwestern Melbourne suburbs where I grew up, one of the last living Blockbusters that I would visit every Tuesday and Wednesday for half-priced rentals in high school dies off like a dinosaur, a nondescript charcoal chicken shop opening in its wake, and I resort to watching movies on my laptop in bed in protest. I remember as a kid the day we got a brand-new VCR at home after moving overseas. How colossal the images all looked on the 4:3 television screen in comparison to my tiny body, and how I marvelled at the power of being able to freeze an image in time, drinking in all the colours, studying every tiny detail trapped in the frame like a butterfly wing under a magnifying glass.

Somewhere on the other side of the world, two twin brothers in North Carolina spent the 80s and 90s also glued to their own VCR, watching and rewatching their favourite movies, taking note of the emotional high that comes from watching a particular kind of film, and committing to recreating—and repackaging—that feeling professionally, in the uncanniest of ways, for all of us in the future.