The ninth annual Maryland Film Festival took place last weekend from Thursday, May 3rd to Sunday, May 6th. We were looking forward to this for the last twelve months, and just in time I caught myself a really bad cough or flu last week that knocked me out on Wednesday and Thursday. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it, but I swallowed some pills and felt well and fanatic enough to ride my bike to the festival on Friday and forget about my illness for a few days. Cough drops, water, sangria, wine and other beverages helped me to stay awake and fit for the twelve movies were about to see. I would never allow myself to miss the Baltimore highlight of the year! If you were there and heard somebody coughing and snuffling then I might have been the one you heard. Although, I tried to keep it as quiet as possible during the films.
This year our film festival took place at five venues. The heart and main venue of the festival was, of course, the wonderful Charles Theatre again. The parking lot across the street from the Charles Theatre was home of the box office and for the first time: the tent village. The tent village was created to improve the chance for interactions between visiting and local filmmakers and also to allow visitors to learn about shooting in Maryland. During the day you had the opportunity to follow lectures and presentations about screenwriting, documentary filmmaking, story boards, special effects, sound design, cinematography, digital workflow with the Adobe creative suite and much more. A lot of these lectures sounded extremely interesting to me and I would have loved to attend at least some of them. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time between the films we were planning to see, and we couldn’t rearrange our plans because we bought the tickets in advance.
Sometimes it’s really tough to make a decision what to see during these three days, because it is impossible to watch them all. There is only so much time…but in the past few years we became quite good at picking our favorite choices. With the additional program of the tent village we might have a new challenge to compiling our festival schedule next year. I wish there was a whole week for the festival—this would allow us to relax the days a little bit.
All of our screenings were presented at the Charles this year, so we didn’t see any films at the other venues which were the Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) again and new this year: the Landsdale Library and Student Center at the University of Baltimore, all located near the Charles theatre.
We decided to skip the opening night on Thursday—I was too sick to be out that night and had to get up early again on Friday, so it was good to save some energy. In this and the following two blog-entries I will try to document my impressions and write a bit about the 12 films we have seen at the 9th Maryland Film Festival.
In none of my following film reviews do I claim to be professional, academic, wise, literate or knowledgeable and I’m not following any commercial or scientific interests. It’s all very personal and subjective, so please don’t kill me if you don’t agree with some of the things I’m going to write. I’m not a critic but only another human after all… :-)
