Sorry, wordpress won’t take that third character in the title. Opening musician was Ada Lea, a mumbly solo acoustic guitarist, who may have been missing some instruments or equipment in transit. Opening short was Distancing by Miko Revereza… talking with family about flying direct to Philippines on a one-way ticket, after the events of No Data Plan, which I tried to watch on the flight to Columbia, but it’s hard watching a slow film about transit, while in transit, while on dramamine. In prep for the move, Revereza makes a show of ripping his discs of Casablanca, Chungking Express, a Chantal Akerman, while film clips play on the soundtrack. When the picture glitches out and the A-G tendencies take over, the sound succumbs to the standard practice of taking ugly electric noise and letting it buzz and fuzz for way too long. After this, I was delighted to discover that our feature had the best sound design of anything we saw this week.

Our final screening so we stayed for the Q&A… Hopinka was not trying to manage equal representation and balance between all genders and types of people, but not not doing that either. He’s being opaque about his intentions on purpose, for instance telling us there’s more to the fable he quotes, but he cut it off on purpose, because this is as much of the story as should be told in regular circumstances. “People think that just because knowledge exists, they have the right to know it.” Fighting back against anthropological history with his storytelling methods, long takes as unprivileged participant, brightly saturated colors. I got exhausted with some shots/scenes, but unlike the rest of today’s movies, I felt like I could live inside it for a while, and never wanted to nap. Instead, the Ben Russell-ish handheld camera made me want to go shoot something while playing with the contrast setting… I thought of Katy and drawers, Jonas Mekas (mentioned a couple times this week, including in this film), Shorts Club, diary films, haiku video. Someone lend me a gimbal.