It's a great thing that I'm poor and was waiting until the last possible minute to buy my Cucalorus pass, because due to a series of lucky circumstances, I'm now attending Virginia Film Festival instead! I'm so excited it's consuming my every passing thought. I made my intended schedule for the event and it's packed so full of films I probably won't even have time to eat or maybe even sleep; it's a dream come true!
Let's get down to it!
1. Intentions
This experience is going to be infinitely invaluable to me not only as a filmmaker, but as a future member of Visions, as well. First and foremost, seeing the work of others in my field is always inspiring and serves to influence a surge of creativity in my own work, which is something I desperately need right now. I'm in one of the worst artistic slumps of my life, and I'm really holding out hope that attending VFF is going to improve that significantly. In terms of my upcoming role in Visions as Registration Coordinator, I'm going to be paying special attention to the way a much larger festival manages to organize their attendees in an orderly fashion. Aside from this, though, I have to admit something: I've never attended a film festival, ever, in my entire life. Terrible, I know, for someone who 1) has lived in "Wilmywood" for 12+ years and 2) is about to be working for an actual film festival. I think VFF is going to be a great first experience for me in that regard; it's not significantly huge so I (hopefully) won't be too incredibly overwhelmed, but it's big enough that I'm probably going to be walking around with my mouth hanging open 90% of the time. Way to look like a tourist, future Ryan.
2. Plan of Action
We're supposed to give ourselves three actionable challenges and I would like to declare here and now that my first is to obtain a fake ID by Thursday so I can attend the social events at VFF. I mean, come on people, 21+ for everything? Really? This is a travesty for my 20-years-and-7-months old-self. I don't even want to drink; I just want to network with drunk people! But I'll survive, I guess :-(
Besides, the real fun is going to be attending the screenings I've lined up for myself. As I briefly mentioned earlier, there are...a lot. Perhaps my second actionable challenge should be to not die from exhaustion this weekend. On Saturday I plan to be attending screenings and panels from 11am-11pm. I won't list my whole schedule on here because it really is A Lot, but the screenings/panels I'm most excited for are Call Me By Your Name, A Fantastic Woman, Stalker, and all the short film blocks.
Honestly, the biggest challenge for myself this weekend is going to be forcing myself to attend a lot of the screenings I'm going to alone. Some of the things I'm most excited to see appear to only interest me out of all the people I know who are going. I know after the first day it'll be a piece of cake figuring out where to go, etc., but there's going to be an adjustment period where I'm permanently terrified and just want to hide in my room for the whole weekend (thanks a lot, social anxiety!) I'm really going to have to step out of my comfort zone and be independent while I'm there, because I don't want to let my fear of doing things alone stop me from seeing some of the coolest things I'll probably have ever seen in my 20 years and 7 months.
Anyway, this is significantly longer than 300 words but I'm so excited I just wanna talk about it forever and all my friends are really sick of me doing just that so I'm glad I was able to express all my feelings here instead. Thank God for blogging!
The upside to VFF is that almost all of the venues are in one area along a "drag" in the middle of campus. So...going it alone should be totally doable if venues are the same as in past years. So excited to hear how it goes. Such a great festival!
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