An Honest Review from Busan's Last Projectionist Under 25

Last night, once again, I was fiddling with a film splice in front of the splicer when I got a paper-thin cut on my fingertip. Alone in a screening room no one was watching, I muttered "ah, shit" to myself. 35mm film cuts you more easily than you'd think. Nobody ever tells you that.

These days, you can count on one hand the theaters in Busan that still run film projectors by hand. Digital screenings became the norm ages ago, and people like me—loading a 35mm print onto a reel and setting the loop every night—are practically an endangered species. To be exact, as far as I know, I'm the only projectionist under 25 in Busan. I'm still not sure whether that's a boast or a cry for help.

Things Nobody Warns You About

When I was learning film projection, I picked up a lot on the technical side. Reel changeover timing, how to read cue marks, lamp replacement. But there were things nobody ever mentioned.

• A single reel is heavier than you'd expect. A feature film comes split across multiple reels, and each one is roughly the size of a large stockpot. Haul them up the narrow projection booth stairs and your forearms will be throbbing the next day. On the bright side, no gym membership needed.
• The projection booth is hot. The heat coming off the projector lamp is no joke, and mixed with Busan's summer humidity, it's basically a sauna. It's nice in winter. Only in winter.
• It's loud. The mechanical clatter of the film running is pretty harsh, and inside the booth, the projector noise is often louder than the movie's soundtrack. I've developed the odd habit of guessing dialogue not by listening but by the position of the subtitles.

What Happens When You Insist on Analog in a Digital World

People say it's "cool." When I tell them I do film projection, their eyes light up and they call it romantic. Here's the reality. With digital screenings, you load a file onto a server and hit play. I show up two hours before showtime to check the print's condition, inspect the splices, load the reels, set the loop size, adjust the focus, and tweak the masking. During the screening, I watch for cue marks and swap reels, moving back and forth between two projectors.

Once, I missed a reel changeover by about half a second and a flash of white light burst across the screen. From the audience's perspective, it was probably just a blip, but up in the booth, my heart genuinely stopped. Fortunately, nobody complained. They were probably looking at their phones.

The pay, honestly, isn't great. With digital projection, a single part-timer can manage several screens at once, but film projection requires one person per screen. I know it's not economically efficient. That's why the number of theaters that can keep doing this keeps shrinking.

So Why Do It

This is the question I get asked the most. Sometimes I ask myself, too. Especially when I'm cleaning up the projection booth at 11 p.m. and film dust gets up my nose.

But a film-projected image really is different. This isn't some sentimental story. The grain unique to film, the texture that comes from light passing through celluloid, the gate weave that makes each frame tremble ever so slightly—digital simply cannot reproduce these things. Sometimes, after a screening, I go down to the empty auditorium and rewind the last reel while looking at the screen, and I feel this quiet sense of pride. I made that image happen. Not by pressing a button, but by running it with my own hands.

And Busan itself helps. When Busan International Film Festival season rolls around, demand for film screenings surges, and I get the chance to screen restored prints of old Korean films. During that stretch, at least, this work feels less like an endangered profession and more like something that actually matters. Once the season ends, it's back to normal, though.

There's a ramyeon place near the projection booth that I hit up after screenings. Sitting there alone late at night, eating noodles and going over whether the screening went well—that's the most peaceful part of my day. Was there a scratch on the film that the audience noticed? Was the focus slightly off, or was I imagining it? I chew on those questions along with the noodles.

If I'm being honest, here's where I land. This job is not romantic, it doesn't pay well, and the future isn't bright. My hands get cut by film, I'm drenched in sweat in the summer, and people don't even know projectionists still exist. And yet, when the projector starts running, I love that sound. That dull rhythm of the reel completing one revolution every seventeen seconds. That's what keeps me here. At least for now.