IFFR Festival Day 1

There can be upwards of seven screens running simultaneous press/industry screenings, which is awesome. Two of the screens are in the Cinerama, a multiplex two minutes away from my hotel. It’s particularly nice when my first chosen press screenings of the day are there, which happened two of these first three full days of the festival. The rest of the venues are less than a 10-minute walk from there. Very handy.

Saw four movies on the first day, including the official opening night movie La antena, which is a fun and stylish, Guy Maddin-esque silent(ish) film set in a sci-fi alternate 1950s. Whereas Maddin is increasingly allowing the grain and edits to show, this is more slickly put together, but it shares a similar fondness for absurdity. Rounded out the day with email and food and tried to catch up on festival reports and blogging, and it is sort of impossible to finish all that, so eventually it was to bed, to bed!

I should mention that when I read the paperwork I turned into the hotel to cover my room and expenses, it indicated that I wasn’t supposed to be part of the free breakfast that the hotel offers (do some people pay extra for that?). But I pretended I didn’t read it because the staff never told me not to come to breakfast. So I have been going down every morning and filling up on fried eggs, tiny pastries, coffee and orange juice, sometimes cereal with yogurt, and then I make tiny little meat and cheese sandwiches that I bag and bring with me for lunch.