True/False Day 1 – Friday
Okay, well technically it started yesterday, but I got here today and tonight was the opening night film – so it’s Day 1 in my book. Ah…the travel day. Wake up at 4 in the morning so you can drive yourself to the airport, park your car in a parking lot, but it’s SO foggy that you don’t remember seeing what lot you parked in. Get on a shuttle that takes you to another shuttle that takes you to the terminal so you can hopefully make your plane…and so on. I could go on, I’m in that kind of mood. But I’ll get to the meat of the matter, it is the mid-west after all (sorry, bad meat joke).
I love regional film festivals.
After the madness that is Sundance and the bitterness that lives in LA screenings, going to the mid-west for a film festival is a breath of fresh air. (Oh, maybe it’s actual fresh air going to my head?) In a way it almost doesn’t matter what the opening night film is. The audience is there because they want to be there. Sure there’s a few press people and some industry and of course, filmmakers, but for the most part, following the kickoff concert with bands Ellie Come Home, the Dandelion Junk Queens, Jerusalem & the Starbaskets and Baby Dee plus a party with appetizers from four local restaurants dubbed “Reality Bites,†the 1200 seat Missouri Theatre filled with real filmgoing members of Columbia, MO and its surrounding areas. The place was packed and the audience could not have been more excited or more into the film, cheering and applauding all through the doc. Ward Serrill’s The Heart of the Game is a love letter to women’s high school basketball. Distilled down from 7 years and 200 hours of footage the 100-minute film explores a Seattle high school women’s basketball team through both the players and their unorthodox but completely endearing coach Bill Resler. Wanna see it? Miramax is doing a theatrical starting in June in Seattle, New York and Los Angeles.
Tomorrow there are screenings, panels and parties starting at 10:00 in the morning. T/F is only a weekend festival running February 23 – February 26 it is packed with plenty to see and do. Plus, everyone’s staying in the same hotel. I should have brought a dry erase board for my dorm room door…I mean room door.
