Festivalia #2

The wanderings continue. From the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific and onto Tahiti, in French Polynesia, suspended, crystalline, in the middle of the world.

We missed planes and got stuck in wrong countries. We screened our film and sweated in the heat, we bonded over booze and late night swims with filmmakers from around Oceania. We sang tropical karaoke at the Mayor's residence and talked shop with distributors and broadcasters from Fiji, French Polynesia, Samoa. We listened to the continual sound of music and sound drifting through air thick with hibiscus. We watched incredible stories from communities linked by the threat of environmental collapse and met and adored filmmakers with unquenchable desires to connect and unquenchable thirsts for drinking, dancing and talking. We ate bucketloads of the impossibly delicious poisson cru. We petted sting rays that swirled through the water and drove insanely fast with locals who thought they were driving slow. All of it, all of it, was too good to be true. 

A door opens when your film is accepted into a festival and you get to mill around with audiences with no expectation and no relationship, and when they appreciate it, even love it, it is an indescribably beautiful thing. Best to drink it in, drink it dry, because this has to be the good stuff of life, the stuff to remind you to keep beating your head against the many different walls. Surely it is also film's entire reason for being; To have it seen. To have it affect people or get under their skin or rankle them or seduce them. To have it passed from the darkness of production to the light of the darkened screening room. As a myopic filmmaker, a stressed out workaholic, you have to breathe deep and be aware of the intense good fortune of experiencing these things, these days, these night. Breathe in thanks. Breathe.