I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts and impressions of the films we saw this year at the 9th annual Maryland Film Festival. Perhaps you share some of my views—perhaps it helped you to discover some new interesting films you didn’t know before but might enjoy as much as I did. Perhaps you didn’t get anything from my reviews, except a massive waste of time.
This year I really wanted to write about the films we saw and I enjoyed writing about them in the course of the last few days. Sometimes it was difficult to come up with something to write, and I didn’t want to take every single film apart and look too closely or academically at every single technical or creative detail. Other people already did it or will probably do it eventually.
Films that touch me and make me think often leave an very internal impression on me, so internal I don’t feel like talking about it after leaving the theater. Generally I also don’t feel like talking about films I did not enjoy because what more is there to say? This really makes me the wrong person to write film-reviews. To me personally, these reviews are nothing more than aid to memory. In the previous festival years we watched a similar amount of films we really enjoyed, but if you squeeze so many films into a short period of only 3 days you are bound to forget about them. It was good to step back, give it a distance of a few days, recall the films again and remember what I liked about them. Writing always helps. And if I still forget some of them in a few months, I will be able to return to my reviews.
I have to confess that this year I had a few difficulties developing some initial excitement before the festival started. When I looked at the program, no film descriptions really hooked me so I would feel like I have to see it, at first. But I was very pleasantly surprised as most of our choices turned out to be really great. As you can see above, there were only a very few films I did not enjoy. This proves again that you shouldn’t read any reviews or descriptions before you watch a film.
The tent village with the series of interesting presentations was a wonderful addition to the festival. As mentioned earlier they all looked very interesting and I would have loved more time to attend at least a few of these lectures. The filmmaker’s lounge was moved to a different building this year. I really liked the new location and the way tables and seats were set up. Food and drinks were very good again like in the previous years. Also new was a computer corner. I think this festival was a great success and had a lot more to offer than in the previous years without sacrificing the overall atmosphere.
It was a great pleasure and we had a lot of fun at the festival this year. It’s always a wonderful highlight we both, Alice and I, look forward to as our “vacation” every year. I am already curious and excited about its 10th anniversary in 2008.
Last but not least I want to thank everybody who made this festival possible and brought such a great selection of independent films to Baltimore again! And if you really read all of this from top to bottom: Thank you for joining me on this festival-odyssey! :-)
