a lot of planning

goes into our lives- LOL- travel planning, planning for social events (cultural and getting together with friends)  Last night we started discussing travel plans for 2019.  It's been a few years since we have been to Asia so we are going to focus on that next year. 

I may have mentioned that this year we are headed to Africa for the Great Migration in Kenya and Tanzania and we are also going to go to Europe to see friends and family. (England, Denmark and Amsterdam)

The calendar is a constant companion for this process... our friends are just as busy as we are - travel is common ground for us and many of our friends.  So juggling travel schedules and cultural schedules (theater, concerts etc..) makes planning ahead essential.  But- nothing ever tops the planning that goes into the process of attending the film festival held here in Sarasota each April. 

MovieMaker Magazine named SFF one of the Top 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World. 

TravelPulse named Sarasota Film Festival one of the "5 Festivals You Must See This Year"! 

The program guide is almost a hundred pages long and the schedule is mind boggling... so deciding what to see and when to see it a real challenge and to top it off we sort of kind of try to coordinate with friends MA and Gene on a few films.  

Here is an example of the schedule for a single day - the weekends are of course more packed with options because there are additional venues over the theaters where most of the films are screened but still this is not unlike all the other nine days - it runs from Friday to Sunday of the following week....

Luckily we had a couple of matches with the four of us picking the same film... Phil and I have different schedules but have tickets for ten films together - seems like MA & Gene do all their viewing together... which gives you a built in "panel discussion" after the show LOL,

so what did we all decide on? 

and here is another-  and a third...

We met MA and Gene two years ago at a bar near the festival - and fell into conversation about what we were all seeing and travel (which evolved from a discussion about a film all four of us were seeing on Bhutan- they were going and we had been) - then about wine (the collect LOL) and politics (same) and we haven't stopped talking since----

since we met they have been to Antarctica and China and we have been to Denmark and the Baltics and to Republic of Georgia - we are both headed to Africa this summer at different times and on different trips but you can see - travel alone - without even wine and food and theater and films creates plenty of things to talk about when we are together which is why we usually end up closing the place we have chosen for the meal...LOL

more to follow on the festival as we get into it in roughly two weeks... this was just a taste of it -

and even more

Tuesday we headed over the the Film Fest for two more movies and two more shorts- and for those of you keeping count that is twenty-four short films and eight feature in four days. Heading to a total of 26 short and 11 feature by the end of the festival...

this is how a day of the schedule looks when trying to figure out what you can see and want to see- some things overlap and then you have to look for another showing and sometimes you pick something because it fits between two other things you want to see-  after a few years you work out a system for deciding and also learn the hard way that you need to take a day off during the ten days of the festival so you don't end up in "overload" and just ditch the later films. Generally they play twice but unfortunately for those who can only go a day or two the showings tend to be close - like consecutive days. This means that you do need to save energy for the second half of the festival because some things don't show at all until the second half of the week and on the second weekend...

Our first film last night was 95 and 6 to Go- a lovely film and it was preceded by a really cute short on the same subject - interviewing grandparents about life and their relationships--- 

The next feature started with the wrenching story of a survivor of the Boko Haram kidnapping of 276 school girls in Nigeria and her relationship with her missing best friend Hassana. The short film was in counter point to the feature The University which was so completely first world.  The connecting point was that the "students" at the Singularity University come together to specifically address the problems of the world on all levels - food, housing, water, environment, security, health care etc...

Their projects - with the mission to "positively impact a billion people within ten years" are varied and thoughtful.

so today is our day off - and I will be working on the posts from my Uzbekistan trip before we leave for the theater (live theater tonight) to see The Little Foxes at Asolo

so even when we aren't in the movie theater we are in the theater LOL-  I have films scheduled for two more days- two on Thursday and one on Saturday but we are getting close to the finish line here... just a super busy time of year as we also prepare to head north for the summer and in between TB and I are doing our Disappearing American Road Trip (DART) for 2017 so lots of things on our plate because while I am away Phil will be in St Louis visiting family.  Stay tune much more to follow....