When the World Stopped Rolling: What the Pandemic Taught Me About Cinema and Stillness

I still remember the phone call.

We were in the middle of a shoot — the kind of day where everything finally starts aligning: the light, the rhythm, the performances. And then the message came from the Centre Cinématographique: “You have to stop.”

No further explanations. Just a quiet order that felt like the end of something larger than the film itself.

That night, the country went into lockdown. The streets emptied. The world, it seemed, had pressed pause.

At first, it was disbelief.

You spend years chasing momentum — juggling projects, schedules, ideas — and suddenly, everything collapses into silence. The trucks are parked, the cameras stored away, the call sheets irrelevant.

For the first time in my professional life, I had no idea when or if we would roll again.

But once the initial chaos faded, another kind of silence emerged. Not the absence of work — but the presence of stillness. The kind of quiet that forces you to listen, to confront yourself, to ask the questions you’ve avoided for years.

The pandemic stripped away the noise of production.

Without the rush of sets, deadlines, and endless logistics, I began to rediscover other parts of myself — the writer, the observer, the thinker who had been buried under the machinery of filmmaking.

I found myself writing more. Watching old films not for reference, but for comfort. Reading poetry. Sketching ideas that had no purpose other than to exist. For the first time, creativity wasn’t about delivering something. It was about breathing again.

The industry, too, was forced into introspection.

Suddenly, we all had to ask: what is essential? What is cinema when the cameras stop rolling?

Streaming platforms flourished, but the communal experience of watching films together — that sacred darkness — vanished overnight. And in that void, many of us realized how fragile and irreplaceable it truly was.

When the world slowly reopened, the return to set felt different.

I was grateful, yes — but also more aware of the cost of constant motion. The pandemic had taught me the value of pause, of taking the time to see, to think, to feel before acting.

I no longer wanted to run just to keep up. I wanted to create from a place of presence.

In a strange way, that forced stillness gave me back my voice.

It reminded me that cinema isn’t just about movement — it’s about meaning. About what happens between two cuts, between two silences.

The world stopped rolling, but maybe it was precisely in that pause that I learned how to see again.

Sometimes, we need the camera to stop — to remember why we started filming in the first place.

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