This weekend I went to the Cucalorus Film Festival. It was my first "official" film festival EVER and I was really excited to see what it would be like.
I brought my boyfriend along with me and we went down to Jengo's Playhouse Saturday afternoon. I admit, I had done some poor planning after waking up late and spending a lot of time eating french toast at Wagoner Hall. We arrived at the theater only about 2 minutes before showtime and found out that we couldn't get in. I was glad I still had the rest of the weekend to catch a show.
We ended up going back to Jengo's Playhouse that night to see the Pistol Nebula shorts block. We arrived much earlier this time and got in! The theater is tiny, tiny, tiny, but it was really cool to be involved with such an active audience. We ended up sitting in this couch on the floor of the theater that seemed like it might cave in or swallow us.
The night started off with a poetry reading about all of the different films on the schedule. To be honest, I didn't know enough about all of the names to get it entirely, but it was something new and a little silly.
The film starts out in a fantasy-type situation and then transferred to reality where couples were discussing how they met. The hunter and the swan discuss this beautiful story where everything was fantastic and magical - while the other couple remembers meeting each other while throwing up during a party. This contrast between reality and fantasy was extremely funny in this situation, and I think the whole audience would agree because the laughter was pretty loud throughout this film.
The reason I liked this film so much because what it meant to me was that things don't have to be perfect and magical (and usually aren't). The couple that stays together says it best when they ask each other, "does it really matter" how they met each other? Of course, the answer is no. Often, we want these fantastical movie-like productions to happen in real life, but this usually isn't the case. The film not only pointed it out in a poignant way, but also put a funny spin to it.
The next film was Copier, which I also liked. The concept was creative (a copier that can make real duplicates of anything). The daughter is the protagonist, and is struggling with her parents deteriorating (or already broken) relationship. She decides to try to fix this by making a duplicate of her mother. Many people in the audience questioned how this would work out during the Q&A, but I thought that this did not have anything to do with the meaning of the film. It is not possible for her plan to work out, and eventually she finds that some things cannot be fixed, and maybe it is better to just move in with what you have.
Next, we saw Baby, which was the film that I thought about the most after watching. The film is about one girl who is sick with something, who meets a young man downtown and has a quick, mysterious affair with him - only for the night, that is. At the end of the film, we learn that the protagonist is HIV positive. The film ends with the man going home to his girlfriend, and his small daughter. This film said to me that people aren't always who they seem to be on the surface. At the beginning, it seemed as if the woman had everything put together and the man was a little sketchy, but at the end my perspective switched completely.
The Father was a short film that was really confusing to me. Still, I'm not exactly sure what went on in this film. It was cool that as the viewer we had to guess what was going on, but I did not like the style at all because the camera was incredibly shaky, going in and out of focus so much so that I didn't want to even look at the screen.
The Tourist was the last film of the night, and another favorite of mine. It was interesting to see how one guy was driven to (almost) kill somebody. It was a good mix of emotions, humor, and drama. My favorite part of this film was the setting. It really felt like you were in a small-town diner and the music and everything made the entire thing seem more real.
The night ended and I had a real appreciation for what filmmakers are doing all around the world. That night my boyfriend and I both agreed that we had seen films that were much more creative and interesting than anything we could have seen in the commercial theaters (which is pretty disappointing...) It was also just inspiring to know that it is possible to create a really fantastic short film and it is not something that is extremely difficult if you have a good concept.
