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[June 01, 2009|05:30 pm] |
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So of course my pictures are not yet developed and
printed, so I do not have any to show here. However, I did
receive an email from the actor/filmmaker Chilembwe Mason
with a link to his pictures from Cannes and the Short Film
Corner, and because I am impatient I've decided to go ahead
and take some of his pictures and use them here without
permission. I hope he forgives me.
It is hard to describe the atmosphere at the Short Film
Corner without recalling the last time I was in a room with
hundreds of other filmmakers. The year was 2000 and it was
the closing night party of the NYU First Run Festival. I
don't remember exactly where it was, but it was in some
restaurant on the upper west side, and it followed the
Wasserman Awards ceremony that was held in one of the Lincoln
Center Theaters, maybe Alice Tully Hall. In any case, the
party was open bar and followed not just a two-week festival
full of screenings, get-togethers, and networking, but was
the culmination of four years of college, thousands of hours
of work, and truly unthinkable amounts of money. The result
was a final release in which I saw sides I'd never seen
before of people I'd known for years involving general
drunken mayhem, trouble-making, and disaster.
A mere nine years later, I stepped into the Short Film
Corner in the -1 level of the Cannes Palais de Festivals and
it was like stepping right back into film school. Filmmakers
everywhere, postcards or flyers in hand, talking about their
films in so many different languages that the only universal
was the enthusiasm for the work. From the first minute I
entered, I was bombarded with requests to attend this
mini-screening, or watch that film, that the only logical
response to the barrage was to wait patiently for the next
onslaught, postcard in hand, prepared for the
counter-attack.
In the end the enthusiasm was addictive, and I felt
equally excited for others' films as for my own. I saw so
many wonderful films that mentioning them in a row here would
be like scanning the 2000-film Short Film Corner program book
into Flickr and posting the slideshow. But each day at the
5pm Happy Hour, I looked forward to congratulating others on
their excellent work, or talking with another filmmaker about
their future plans, and how our future plans might somehow
collide. Perhaps most valuable is the realization that I've
never yet made a film without at least one person who wasn't
at that wild First Run party back in 2000, and at the Short
Film Corner closing night party (La Fete du Court) I had the
same feeling, that surrounding me in every direction were
people with whom I would be hopefully sharing the next nine
(or more) years of filmmaking experiences.
Me with filmmaker Kelvin C. Bias.
Happy Hour at the Short Film Corner.
Me with Chilembwe Mason at La Fete du Court.
Photos by Chilembwe Mason 2009. |
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