film is personal

the time I rewatched a film 10 times most of it within the same month

It’s hard to understand how many times film saved my life.

I’m not a person with many friends; by default, my favorite films became my friends. They did what people could never do for me and that was stay. The stories stayed; they comforted me, and they reminded me that I was not alone.

There is a really specific story that I want to tell you today.

To set the scene, it was the summer before freshman year I was 14 years old. I had just gotten off of a year of relentless torment and bullying that wore me down immensely. I don’t know how many times I cried per day.

It was too many.

I won’t go into details because even today at 17 I still find the events hard to process and I have trauma from what happened to me that still affects me to this day.

That summer was strange, I was excited to go to high school, but I still felt so numb from everything.

Nothing really excited me anymore.

I had the words of all these kids stuck in my head.

I felt like my existence was not good enough for the world.

I was struggling to keep myself together.

Anyways, I was in Hawaii with my family on vacation. I was scrolling my Letterboxd when I noticed on of my mutuals had logged a film 13 times. I looked at the movie it was called “Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir the Movie.” I had seen Miraculous a long time ago and my opinions of it were not favorable.

I decided when I returned home from vacation that I would give the film an honest chance. I did not think I was going to like it.

The day came when I sat my loft bed, holding a stuffed animal watching the movie on Netflix at around 8 or 9 in the morning.

I thought to myself this fixed quite a bit of the issues I had with the show, the animation is pretty, the music is pretty good overall solid film.

Days went on and I had something in my head saying, “watch it again watch it again.”

So, I gave in 9 more times.

You are probably asking yourself, “Ally why would rewatch this movie 10 times?”

It’s not because it’s a masterpiece. I have not rewatched it since for a reason I will explain later, it’s because it showed me something that I had lacked at the time.

Being treated with kindness and love.

That was something that became almost foreign to me at the time and even today I am surprised when people are kind to me.

I think seeing Cat Noir go out of his way to show Ladybug he loved her gave me a reminder that love and kindness could happen for me again. I may feel unlovable, but someday someone will see me and love me as I am.

I mentioned that I have not rewatched the film since then, the reason being is that I want the film to stay in my memories where it belongs. As a comfort to a version of me who believed that she couldn’t be cared for and loved. I fear that rewatching will rehash some of those intense feelings I have worked so hard to not feel again.