Film Festival Blogs

The most memorable moments at film festivals are often encounters with other filmmakers. Making non-fiction movies can be isolating, especially during the post-production phase. To emerge from that to re-discover an international community of like-minded artists can be very re-energizing.

The Toronto Documentary Forum is a high-powered, pressurized event that happens alongside the Hot Docs film festival. A couple hundred commissioning editors and broadcasters from around the world gather for two days of project pitching.

Film festivals can be a rollercoaster of highs and lows.

A premiere can be an ecstatic experience, but there’s a bit of a hangover the next day. Now what? Will the movie get in more festivals or is this it? Is this movie going to sell? Will we make our money back?

My film BLAST!, about a group of physicists who travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic to launch a massive telescope into orbit. One of our main characters is Barth Netterfield, an astrophysics professor at the University of Toronto. His department organized a lovely reception for the movie.

Sometimes filmmaking comes down to arts and crafts.

We rushed to get our BLAST! poster done for the festival. So we wanted to make damn sure it was going to get seen as much as possible.

Missing Hot Docs in Toronto was my one big regret when I was on the festival circuit with my last film, Power Trip. It was 2003 and the SARS scare shut down the Toronto Documentary Forum and kept a lot of filmmakers home. I was already at the San Francisco Film Festival, and decided to cancel the trip to Toronto.

Over halfway through the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the film's subject, the enigmatic writer Harlen Ellison, nods towards the camera and mentions that if this film is seen, if at all, it will most likely be on a television screen. This was met with chuckles in the audience because at the time his face took up almost all of the theater's two story screen.

The sheer number of features, documentaries and shorts, not to mention the conference panels, being shown at SXSW 2008 is more than a little overwhelming. The multi-colored grid for the nine days of this film festival is a periodic table of world premieres and special screenings.

During my brief stint at the Rotterdam Film Festival this week I selected my films without any particular governing principle other than, perhaps, variety: An Iraqi documentary, an Argentine midlife crisis drama, a French sex comedy, a Spanish zombie horror flick, a Greek psycho-mystery, a musical not-quite-biopic, and a contemplative Israeli film of cultural understanding. Did I mention zombies?

On Wednesday I caught the final session of the conference “How to Stimulate Filmsense(s) International Conference on Media Education from an Artistic Perspective " at the 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The film Lynch, a portrait of filmmaker David Lynch, is described in the Rotterdam film festival catalog as “a documentary sketch about a period of two years, made around the production of his last film, Island Empire.” The film also has an air of mystery.

My decision to watch Allen Ginsberg Gives Great Head, a film by X' Ho, a director from Singapore, speaks volumes about having a film’s title begin with the letter "A" so it will appear at the beginning of the alphabetical catalog listing!

The 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam is a 12-day event taking place in fourteen festival locations screening more than 600 films in 26 screening rooms. It is considered to be the Netherlands’ biggest cultural event in terms of paying visitors.

Number of narrative fiction films out of 3,624 submitted that got into the fest: 125
Number of documentary films out of 1,573 submitted that got in: 41
Number of shorts out of 5,107 submitted that got in: 85
Percent likelihood that an indie filmmaker will submit again anyway: 100

Films I've seen: 5
Good films I've seen: 1.5
Hot meals I’ve eaten in five days: 2
Vodka-based cocktails drunk in five days: Lost count sometime in the middle of the Queer Lounge kickoff party
Mg of vitamin C ingested per day: 3,000
Good it's done me: 0
Number of “demi-gods of Canadian metal” I've met: 3
Number of Irish filmmaker/playwrights who make my knees weak: 1