Up around 7 a.m., and got ready for the day, since I planned to attend the FilmFest, which began at noon, and ended around 9:30 p.m. We had our usual light breakfast, and then Hubbie accompanied Mother to our house. We did our usual Sunday morning things, and then had an early sandwich lunch.
Before noon, I headed to the college down the road. Mother occupied herself today with a new jigsaw puzzle, and I don't know how Hubbie kept himself busy.
One thing he did was attend the first screening at the FilmFest. This was an eight-minute feature about a grandfather who gives his young grandson a lesson on cattle farming. This film was shown at the museum earlier in the week, so both Mother and I had seen it. I knew Hubbie would enjoy it. He was not charged at the door for watching this one feature.
This hilarious film revolves around a boy being instructed to take a cow's temperature. Since he is a city boy, he starts by trying to put the thermometer in the cow's mouth. Grandpa sends him to the other end, and back there all sorts of things happen.
The film was shot at a youth ranch near our town, where the cattle are friendly, since youngsters tend to them and make pets of them.
Hubbie left afterward, and I stayed to watch seven more short features, including a delightful four-minute one about a guy (who has never had luck with women) asking a woman's one-year-old for her mother's hand in marriage. While he is presenting his case about how much he loves the woman and the child, the woman silently approaches and hears his plea. Naturally, she accepts his proposal.
The plot of the next film, thirteen minutes long, revolves around a man who returns from the Civil War to find his wife murdered. After the sheriff refuses to do anything about it, he sets off to find the killers.
The fourth film is based on the true story of an avid outdoorsman who is striken with Lou Gehrig's disease, and ends by dying at a hunting lodge in a bed once slept in by John Wayne.
The next film was very well done, and featured a black private detective who tracks down missing persons in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sadly, his own daughter was lost in the storm, and he has never found her. Should he continue his search, or resign himself that he will never find her? Very professionally done.
The next two films were nothing but gratuitous violence. I didn't like them, and neither did the FilmFest director. He even chided the filmmakers during the Q&A period, and asked if in the future they might find subject matter that does something other than glorify violence. I guess he hadn't previewed the films beforehand.
All of these films were produced by filmmakers in our state, and featured local actors and locations.
The next screening session, at 2:30 p.m., was a movie-length feature about a 17-year-old African-American boy who had for years been molested by the bishop of the family's church. He was silent, withdrawn, and anti-social at school, but he refused to do anything but defend the bishop. We were warned ahead of time that this was a difficult film, and any of us who were sensitive should leave. I feared that the film might be graphic, but it was not. It was gritty and tragic, but well-handled. Again the actors in this film were excellent, and the filmmaker, also from our state, is very skilled. I'd be surprised if he doesn't rise up in the film world.
After this showing, I came home. Hubbie had put potatoes in the oven, along with a dish of leftover ham and beans, as instructed. And he'd gone to the store to get a package of slaw mix, for which Mother made slaw dressing. We ate early, around 4:30, and then I returned to the college for an hour of international short films.
Among these subtitled films was an eleven-minute one from Germany. A young couple has an infant that they feel they cannot care for, so the husband takes the baby to a facility that has "hatches." These are glass-fronted incubator type areas that reminded me of vending machines. The baby is placed inside, and presently a nurse comes to take the baby for the state to raise or to be placed in foster care. This time, another young man watches while the father goes inside the building to leave the baby, and then he kidnaps the infant. He is gay, and his partner convinces him that they can't keep the baby, because they don't have papers on her...how will they explain the baby to doctors, or to school authorities when she gets bigger? So he takes the baby back to the hatch.
Mother said she remembered there being similar facilities in the northern state where she comes from...they were located in convents, and the nuns would take the out-of-wedlock babies and raise them.
Another unusual film, from India, featured an older man who, since the age of ten, makes a living piecing together cutting floor film to make a single movie that he shows in a cart that he wheels around town. The movie is projected onto a screen inside the cart. The cart has black drapes around it, and kids stick their heads under the drapes and watch the film.
The final film of this series was about a grandmother from Argentina who lost her pregnant daughter in the military dictatorship in 1976-83. Recently, she was able to find the granddaughter through DNA. DNA has helped reunite many families of that era, when 30,000 men, women, and children "disappeared."
After this, I came home to get Mother and Hubbie so we could return to the college for the last two screenings. The first was about a four-piece band from the central part of our state who cut a record in a town a few miles away from our town, and who played an opening song for James Brown in 1967. They were a very popular regional act. One of the four was on hand at the FilmFest.
The last screening was about the making and playing of mountain dulcimers. A couple from California produced this film that traced the instrument from the Southern Appalachian region to the California counterculture of the 1970s and 80s. Several people from a nearby mountain town attended the festival, bringing dulcimers with them. They gave an impromptu concert in the foyer beforehand, which delighted attendees.
It was 9:30 by the time we got home. By then my eyes could attest to the aptness of my ticket title..."Red Eye Pass." I got the absolute most out of it.
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