A quick summary note: This was a great festival which reminded me that film is art in its purest form if done right. If done well it is poetry, light, music, and art. In other words, it’s a moving painting that breathes and talks aloud.
My highlights:
One particular short film from Spain: “Dejar A Marcos”, was particularly heartbreakingly good.
Another short film: “Chicken Heads”, a Middle Eastern themed film was really well done and interesting in the choices it created.
The best short film ever (Oscar nominated): “The New Tenants” by Joachim Back was probably the best short film I have seen in years. It featured an aging yet brilliant Vincent D’Onofrio, a crazed Kevin Corrigan, and many other greats. Darkness, comedy, irony love, blood; it was missing nothing.
http://www.climaterefugees.com/
This documentary in essence is a film that changes how we look at the world as whole and I think every single person on this planet should see it. I have now started looking at everyone as either my brother or a sister or some form of estranged relative. There is too much to say so I will just say go see it. It really changed my life in a few ways.
There were also a few other films that I missed, but that’s life. Often when great films battle with an amazing sandy beach….the sandy beach wins.
Screenwriting stuff:
I did win an “Honorable Mention” in the screenplay competition of the Mexico International Film Festival this year for my original script based on a novella of mine called, “My Happy Afterlife”, which is about a failed LA novelist, and the general whoredom that is Hollywood when it comes to ‘writing’. It was an early draft of my novella which I have since then polished up nicely. I call this script a nice unhealthy mix of Dramedy and Neo Noir. It’s my own stab and jab tribute to misfit writers like myself, beautiful drunks like Bukowski, those that live life fully like Hemmingway, and finally those who lie in the gutter in-between everything (Again, like myself). It’s also a love song of sorts to Mexico, or to my Mexico. It is about all that that I love and find to be so wonderful and so very tragic about it as a whole. I also touch on themes of human rights when it comes to “Illegals”, because to me there is no such thing as an ‘illegal’. All Americans are here from somewhere else, and there is nothing illegal about it. Except for the fact that this land we call America used to be just land for the Native Americans and the Aztecs. So in closing, we (Americans) in essence are the real illegals.
Take that, Arizona. I am also boycotting Arizona, and instead of just doing nothing I am encouraging the world to travel to Mexico. Trust me; it’s quite safe these days.
Now be well, people of the world. I must go and do more creating and living.
carmelo valone 