Another whole year has come and gone and we now can celebrate the orgy of films that is the Maine International Film Festival.  Before actually attending any films there are few household obligations and social activities that need to be performed.  I’ll skip my litany of chores, but will tell you that the festival-goers were gathering at our buddy’s Tony’s house mid-afternoon for pre-festival potluck. 

While the good food was being consumed, the strategies for seeing which films when is shared.  Developing these strategies is an interesting thought process that someone should study.  For instance, we tend to see many of the same films as does our friend Pat.  However, it is almost a given that except for those films that show only once, she will choose to see a particular film at a different time than we do.  Over the course of 11 MIFFs, this has seemed rather uncanny in how frequently his has happened.   Of course, the benefit of this happening is that–assuming one senses a similarity in sensibilities with another festival-goer–one can mine the opinion of someone else to learn about films to see or avoid.  Most of us come up with a tentative schedule of what we plan to see  for most of–if not the entire festival.  This gets jettisoned as soon as someone reports that something off our list is a “must see” or something that is on our list is “the kind of film that friends don’t friends see without an emphatic warning.”

We then joined the Graves (the originators of this literary venture) for our annual pre-festival meal at the BreadBox restaurant.  The meal kick-off is a Chocolate Martini.  This is, of course, a tasty libation with a pretty powerful drinking proof.  This seems to eventually catch up with me over the evening–then again maybe it was the chores?  Maybe I should declare a moratorium on lawn mowing?  Anyway, we enjoyed an outstanding meal with eager anticipatory festival conversation.  Then it was off to Railroad Square for our first movie.

We had chosen to see John Connolly: Of Blood and Lost Things.  This Irish television profile of this Irish writer of Maine-set crime fiction was only being shown once.  The film does provide good background on the writer and his choice of subject matter.  It is a bit laconic in its pacing with a number of bits of ironic humor.  However, the real treat of choosing this film was the Q & A session with the writer.   He was very entertaining in being somewhat abashed as the subject of a film and explaining how he had ended up coming to Maine.  For a writer who explores how evil is endemic to man’s nature and the nasty ways that evil may lead to lives being cut short, Connolly is an amazingly delightful individual.  I would definitely recommend going to a reading, a lecture, or a book signing by him.  The film–made for Irish TV–is probably not terribly likely to find many opportunities to be shown in the United States.  However, I can see our Maine Public Broadcasting Network adding this to their roster of special programming for pledge periods.  So it could have annual or semi-annual appearances over the next few years.

Our second film was Pachamama–a film about a young boy of indigenous Andean tribal background and his life in Bolivia.   This slice-of-life film plays like a documentary with the camera just recording what is going on around it.   However, this is a film for which someone crafted a script and recruited actors.  We see vignettes from Kunturi’s life and the family and village that surround him.  The problem is that we never quite feel that we have gotten to know Kunturi–the camera never got very close and it was often difficult to pick Kunturi out from the similarly-attired boys he was with–and the vignettes seem quite disconnected.  The actors seemed to be nonprofessionals and that lack of experience probably did not help.  It is certainly possible that audiences with a better background on the customs of these indigenous peoples could get more out of this film, but this filmgoer as well as several who offered comments afterward seemed to be pretty disoriented and disappointed with the film.  To its credit the film does have some excellent cinematography–including some very artistic sequences–in what its cameras observe, but I wanted much more of thread tying the episodes together.