Part Eleven: Film Festivals

My first film festival was the 2004 St. Louis Intenational Film Festival, where I just attended one film (Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education), and my last film festival of the decade was the 2009 SLIFF, where I attended seven films (which includes, coincidentally, Lone Scherfig's An Education). In total, this decade I attended nine film festivals - five SLIFFs and four True/False Film Festivals - and I would say that all nine of those experiences definitely had a pretty heavy impact on the film education I've received this decade.

Not only did I get to see movies from all over the world at those festivals, I also got to attend question-and-answer sessions with a large percentage of the filmmakers, especially at True/False. At the 2006 T/F, filmmaker Kirby Dick was given the True Vision Award in conjunction with a screening of his latest, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which seemed to pretty much take all the frustration I felt about censorship and the MPAA and project it on the screen. That was my first T/F, and it was the first time that I really got the whole festival experience. I volunteered, I stood in queue lines for what seemed like hours, chatting about films with friends and strangers, I went to a party or two - I spent pretty much the whole weekend in downtown Columbia, falling in love with both the city and documentaries.

My friend Ben also started attending T/F the same time I did, and for the 2008 festival, he submitted a short film about our other friend Ben and his squirrel obsession (my hand makes a cameo) to the Gimme Truth competition. "Squirrellywood" won third place. There are other moments and memories that could probably fill volumes in relation to my film festival experiences, but this one tops the more personal moments, and the screenings of Man on Wire (which I'll detail more in an upcoming post) and This Film Is Not Yet Rated are the tops for actual movie-watching experiences.

While every T/F I attended encompassed a tiring but awesome marathon of movie-going and other fun, the screenings I attended at SLIFF usually tended to not be so chaotic, as that festival lasts a week and a half, so the films I wanted to see tended to be more spread-out on the schedule. For the 2009 SLIFF, however, I found some of that frenzied pace, especially in the closing night films, as I went from the screening of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus at the Tivoli across town to a screening of The Beaches of Agnes at Plaza Frontenac. Not only do film festivals seem to create a love of film for me, they also seem to be points of inspiration for my writing. I wrote most of my essays for the entire decade under the influence project during down-time before and between film screenings at SLIFF.

Nothing really compares to the buzz of seeing a great film - and film festivals tend to combine several buzzes. At their most simplistic, that's why I love film festivals. I put my winter coat on for the first time a couple weeks ago, and in the pocket I found a "Q" ticket from this year's T/F - I instantly smiled, recalling all the great times I've had at film festivals this decade.