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....

we're off...

so yes - we are off to the races - no really it is the ten days of the Sarasota Film Festival and yesterday we saw ten short films and two full length films- and have mixed reviews....

love this years Sea and Be Seen logo series- part shown above -

first we saw the ten short films - and loved more than half of them-

we really loved - RETURN TO SENDER, ILLEGAL MOVE, GRAVEYARD SHIFT and LAST SHOT

the GRAND ILLUSION was really fun...

We both loved the sweet RETURN TO SENDER-

we really hated PIGSKIN - horrid violent movie where a woman tears out her abdomen yuck! and on the scale of up from there- but still in the bottom ranks we agreed we couldn't really see the point of either THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LINE (about a crappy 70s building that is now a graffiti covered ruin) or KLASSE (a holocaust- outsider-immigrant story told in modern dance).  We put SWEET LOVE in the positive reviews because we liked the guy and the film had a number of good laughs.

next we saw GLORY which had a despicable woman lead who thought only of herself and a lovely male lead -playing a railroad lineman - a simple honest man driven crazy by the self centered woman who stole a watch his father had given him... he kept bunnies so of course I was rooting for him the whole movie but he was up against the system and it did not end satisfactorily (clearly not a Hollywood film LOL)

the final film we saw was SARASOTA HALF IN DREAM-  a tedious and pretentious film about the grittier side of SRQ- I liked about 1/3 of it - the vintage footage of tourism films for the area were a hoot... the ten minutes of filming a single abandoned factory was just plain boring regardless of the pedantic voice over telling the "deep thoughts" of the film makers.  This would not play well enough to make the showing at any other film fest but the local one - two thumbs down on this one...

then we had dinner at the Rosemary - another good meal there- 

I am off right now for four more films and will report back later!