just another cinema

A 30th anniversary could have been a retrospective. This one refused to be. just another cinema was designed from the start as something more active than a lookback. The publication does carry history, thirty years of programming, advocacy, and the slow, unglamorous work of keeping a women's film festival alive and relevant in a landscape that was not always ready for it. But the book's real argument is forward-facing. It treats those thirty years as evidence for a position: that women's contributions to film, politics, art, and design are not a niche subcategory waiting to be acknowledged. They are the work. They have always been the work. Every design decision reflects that posture. The cover pulls "#her" from "another," a typographic act that is quiet but deliberate, embedding the book's intent directly into its own title without announcing it. The volume is thin by choice. That lightness is part of the argument. The complexity of women's issues, the breadth of the industries they have shaped and pushed against, resists easy containment. A slim spine does not minimize the subject. It refuses to let the subject be domesticated by a heavy, institutional object. The ticket-shaped bookmark is both functional and cinematic. Pull it to the right and a full Maya Deren quote appears, time revealing something that was always present. The gesture mirrors what the publication as a whole is doing: making visible what has been structurally obscured, not discovered for the first time, but finally fully in frame. A single light blue thread runs through the entire book, from the exposed spine stitching through the contents page, article titles, and section breaks. It is the blue of a projector beam, the halo that appears on screen before an image does. The cinema enters the book. The book becomes the room. And in that room, the conversation is not about what women have been permitted to do in creative and civic life. It is about what they have built regardless. Art Director | Millie Lin [Happ Design] Senior Designer | Fairy Shih Project Manager | Yuhan Wan Printer | Jing Hua Print Shop Paper | Daya Paper Book Photography | Chong Kok