Film Day!

Today has definitely been a day for film! I spent much of the day today at River Run, where we are in full swing before April's festival. Finalizing lists and helping to make arrangements for various events leading up to the festival, one can really feel the tension in the place at this point in time. Everyone is running around, talking fast and making lists! Documents are being passed from palm, to palm, and palm again. Arrangements are being finalized for festival guests to arrive, and soon, a few hundred people will sign up to volunteer with the festival and their schedules will have to be made. Among all this chaos, I acknowledge that my dance film was shown today in Utah, at Weber University for the ACDFA Dance For Camera Showcase! Though I could not be there in body, I was definitely there in spirit! I'm so proud of our little film!

This evening, I attended a road show for River Run in Kernersville. The River Run road shows are to show previews of various films, answer questions anyone might have and promote the festival in areas where it is likely patronage will come from. The event was truly lovely. It was held at a venue called, The Factory, which is exactly what it sounds like: A converted factory building with many feet of space for offices, shops and open meeting and party spaces. The floors are old, textured wood and the walls are cinder block and brick. The windows are large, with smaller square panes dividing them into symmetric parts. It seems a perfect, raw space in which to show films. The features reel shows trailers of various films from many different countries. There are film in Spanish, French, German, and English, of course. They range in genres from drama, to dark comedy, to documentary and so on. I am eager to see every single one of them! The shorts reel is the same. There are many more animated films in the shorts program than in the features program, and they look amazing. Each and every one looks so different from the one before it, and the colors are so beautiful in all of them! As for other genres of films in the shorts program, one documentary in particular caught my attention. There is a man who has spent his entire life collecting vinyl records. He has the largest record collection in the world, over a million! The sad thing is that he ran a store based on this collection, that closed in 2008. He claims that the world has its ears closed. And that no one cares about music anymore. His theory is that it will take maybe 20 years for people to wake up and understand what they are missing because of replacing vinyl with digital media. His hope was that he would be able to help preserve music for future generations, but that notion looks nearly impossible, now that his amazing archive, full of discontinued and unreleased music is doing nothing but collecting dust.

~Cara