Het Avontuur

last night...
Tomorrow, I leave for Europe. It will be my first time in another country. First time in a hostel. First time In Competition at the Int'l Film Festival of Rotterdam. My short film, The Adventure, is lucky enough to already be there. I took this photo the day I mailed it overseas.

I have butterflies in my stomach right now. At first I wanted to say, "I had a bunch of butterflies in my stomach", but then I thought mankind must have assigned a proper word for describing a group of butterflies, something akin to a school of fish or a pride of lions, but apparently no such word existed until recently. NABA, the North American Butterfly Association, called on its members a few years ago to solve this crisis and this list of candidates emerged. My favorites are the violent ones like 'an explosion of butterflies', and 'a riot of butterflies'. I also like the completely absurd 'an ascension of butterflies.' Adult butterflies live approximately one month, which is about how long I will be Europe unless the unthinkable happens and someone gives me a job directing Russian candy commercials.

I've never been so excited and anxious about anything. The Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam is yet another feat of Dutch engineering, with more movies screening than one could ever hope to see in a day, let alone twelve. If only they could have engineered a longer day to see them all. I've only given a very cursory glance over the program schedule and I've thus far listed about 40 films and shorts programs I would like to see. I cannot wait to meet whoever writes the synopses to the films on the IFFR website because 90% of them are fantastic, clever, and intriguing. Some films I'm looking forward to are Bela Tarr's The Man From London, Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Limite (what I'm calling the Brazilian Greed...1931, silent, 120min. 3 intertitles), Peter Lorre's only directorial effort, Samuel Beckett's only film starring a corpselike Buster Keaton, a short programme called 'Japanese 8mm Kicks Ass Beautiful', the Swedish ping-pong movie, the in competition shorts, the filmmakers in focus (Robert Breer, Svetlana Proskoerina and Kobayashi Masahiro, all of whom I've never heard of) and basically everything else. I could go on for days. This festival sounds right up my alley. Everything sounds fringe, indie, foreign or experimental. Some sounds a bit too experimental. I think I've counted two films that are reputedly 'imageless'. As in...there is no image. For one of them, the IFFR website doesn't have a production still so I guess it's the real deal.

jan. 21...
So, I'm leaving for the airport in half an hour. To make sure I represent American cinema properly, I took a strip of 35mm film from John Carpenter's The Thing and made a bracelet out of it. I'll take a picture of it and post it here soon. This was a gift from Adam P. via John G. Thank you both. I definitely feel like a more serious filmmaker wearing half a second(13 frames to be exact) of Carpenter's frigid masterpiece around my wrist. The reason I have this was because during a test screening of the movie recently in Atlanta, part of it caught fire and well...they had to amputate a small sliver of it to save a movie in which no one is saved.

I'll arrive at about 830am in Amsterdam on Tuesday, January 22nd. First orders of business: Get to Rotterdam, check in, etc. and see My Blueberry Nights at 2130pm Netherlands time(1530 Atlanta time) at the Lantaren/Venster, where my film will screen two days later.

Wish us luck. Miss you all. I'll rotterblog post pictures with regularity. I'll be back in late February.

mike b.