one half of a Palm Springs summary

The Palm Springs Shortfest has come and gone, and with it went months of my very own carefully-cultivated stomach bacteria. Yes, I was taken down mid-fest by what I still hold was food poisoning, but which I hear could have been just some bad water. Although the causes may differ, the results were the same. Happily, now that I've returned home I've yogurted my way to a fresh new set of active cultures and once again feel (mostly) human.

This is the dark half of what I hope will be a two-part PS festival review. I am counting on Daniel to provide the brighter half. This will also be the short half, since I made it to exactly one screening (Art Attack, which was awesome, by the way).

What? You didn't even attend your own screening?

Yes, I have to register one complaint with the festival organizers: the policy to release screening dates and times only two weeks before the festival worked against this particular filmmaker's budget and schedule. Needing to make affordable travel plans from the east coast, but being unable to attend the entire festival and thus guarantee attendance at my own show, I had to guess at a reasonable 4-day window and cross my fingers.

Well, when the news came in that our film was showing twice, I was ecstatic. That is, until I scrolled further down and saw that the first screening was a few hours before I was scheduled to land on Wednesday, and the second would be a few hours after I would leave on Sunday. Alas. So once I arrived I asked around about our first show. Steven Vander Meer, the maker of the wonderful film More From Life, had been at the show and said that Tower 37 was well received. He actually joked that this was his third time seeing it, having been at the Humboldt Film Fest back in April as well!

So while I don't have a lot of festival stories to tell, my son Jordy and I did get to watch a few films in the marketplace room (very well-organized though we found it was hard to hold on to a viewing station very long) and we sure got to swim a lot before I fell ill. And I have to note how grateful I was to have Mom show up just in time for me to be bed-ridden. She signed up for a vacation and instead got to take care of both me and Jordy. Sorry, Ka.

I'm going to leave the rest to Daniel. But I have to say, just look at the resemblance between this guy Wagner (from the PS photos pages) and our very own producer! It's uncanny, isn't it?