« Ephemera 12 | Main | A Sure Sign »

May 10, 2011

Holy crap, Baltimore! 2011 Maryland Film Festival

The picture above, taken at approximately 3 in the morning this past Friday, represents everything I love about the Maryland Film Festival: a concentration of amazing people, all making amazing work and all occupying the same space for three days of films and conversations. If you ever find yourself in the month of May and in need of creative rejuvenation, get yourself to Baltimore.

Everything about it feels geared towards helping filmmakers, from the opening night shorts program (which it was an honor to be a part of this year) to the fact that that just about everything occurs in one space: the beautiful Charles Theater and the tent village erected in the parking lot across the street. You never don't run into anyone; you run into everyone, and it's a beautiful thing, one fostered even more from the offset this year by an opening day symposium run by Joe Swanberg and Craig Zobel, designed to give directors and actors and critics and exhibitors an informally organized venue to talk, voice their opinions, bitch, whine, get over it, exchange ideas and make new friends.

The programming, as heretofore mentioned, was peerless. Indeed, I finally got to see The Good, The Bad And The Ugly on the big screen, and although it ran just a little too late for me to see Pedro Costa's Ne Change Rien, the fact that that film was playing before an audience next door was a comforting one all the same. I did manage to see an hilarious 16mm black-and-white-love-it-or-hate-it sibling relationship comedy called The Color Wheel that seems destined to be the sort of regional hit that starts small and winds up being a cult classic. And I woke up early one morning and caught a program of short films given the label Beyond The Valley Of The WTF that started out great and got improbably better, from the Sirkian incest melodrama The Strange Thing About The Johnsons, to the perversely sweet Mouth Babies, which grounded its surrealistic chiaroscuro with about fifteen frames of hardcore fellatio and a churning, guttural score. Also in that block were the Zellner Bros. classic Sasquatch Birth Journal 2 and two beautiful semi-documentaries, Ceiling-Head Angel and Door Man, both of which are nearly heartbreaking and sincere and yet fit perfectly in amidst the splashes of afterbirth and blood and other bodily fluids that demarcated its programmatic kin. The whole block was a remarkably deft balancing act, the likes of which could be found all throughout the jam-packed time and space of the festival.

And then you fly home and decompress and get back to work with a refreshed understanding of why you got started in the first place.

Posted by David Lowery at May 10, 2011 6:03 AM