Film Festival

The fine arts society that I'm a board member and webmaster for oversees the running of three weeks of music summer school programming, two weeks of drama offerings in July and a week of Animation & Film in May. The FilmFest was this week. We attended both nights as a family. That meant yet another nutty Thursday that had us scrambling from Aikido through dinner in the van straight on to an evening event, but it was worth it.

The nearest movie theatre to our little town is 90 minutes away. We make the trek about once a year ... for first run showings of film versions of books we can't wait for the DVD version of. Narnia, Harry Potter, Golden Compass. But otherwise we are movie-theatre bereft.

Except during the first week of May. The community hall adopts a popcorn machine, the chairs are all unstacked and placed in rows, a large screen is brought in and a projector rented. And we make space in our harried week for two evenings of great animated films. We had just finished reading Persepolis and were thrilled to see that. And we saw some absolutely amazing animated shorts. It was so much fun to have two professional animators there to host the evening of shorts, talking about the techniques and artistic influences of the various film-makers.