SSFF – The Third Screening

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
by Jamie Cobb

SO screening 3 went really well. It was a bigger audience then screening 2 and the crowd had more energy than night 2, even before the lights went out. And while we were not interrupted by distracting latecomers this time, there were all new distractions. I was sitting next to stinky, crunchy, sandwich guy with a paper bag that he liked to loudly crinkle for an obscene amount of time. Then there was really loud, shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house with whatever virus he has hacking guy, and lastly there was loud annoying 80’s cell phone ring girl, who let most of the ring play before finally getting it during the quiet ending of the film. Ohhh audience, where do you guys come from?

The Q and A went great. The audience had many questions for Zak, and the more he answered and they liked what they heard, the more they asked. The only really negative feed back/ question that he received was, “why did you make this 9 mins? There’s nothing you can do with a 9 min short.” Which I was kind of taken aback by. I think there is a lot you can do with a 9 min short, a lot more than you could do with the painful “40 min short” we saw they day before anyway.

The best part of the Q and A were 2 older ladies that had to be 65+. When they sat down before the movie I was thinking they are definitely not the IFHY target audience, watch them walk out during IFHY and come back for the film that followed. But it turns out they were only there for IFHY, and one of these older ladies really liked it, I mean REALLY liked it. After all of Zak’s responses she would loudly respond with a positive yes, or ohhh, and when she left before the next film played, she thanked Zak profusely and told him how much she liked it again.

I’m sorry to say that I had never seen Dogme #1 “The Celebration” before, but I thought that it was an amazing film. And it actually gave me a new level of insight into IFHY, so despite the different subject matter, I thought it was the perfect pairing.

So all in all, southside was a great experience for me to see how festivals work, meet some great people, and to see the audience reaction and feedback that Zak received. It was a great trip and I’m sorry to say we have to go back to reality tomorrow.