Sunday. Mother’s Day.

The Mother’s Day weekend was dedicated to the Maryland Film Festival for as long as I can remember. I think only once it took place a week earlier or later. I have been lucky because my mother lives in Germany and six hours ahead of our time-zone. But not everybody is so lucky. Other people have mothers here, who may want to spend their day with their children, and who may not be interested in movies. This has always been a problem…it never felt right to ignore Mother’s Day in favor of our movie habit.

So this time we made a compromise: We skipped our first movie and had a nice Mother’s Day breakfast instead before we started our festival day in the early afternoon. We missed our traditional silent movie with live-music — this time it would have been probably the most important film of the silent era: Man with a Movie Camera — but I think we made the right decision and it all worked out very well. I have seen this film several times before anyway, with Cinematic Orchestra’s soundtrack being one of my all-time favorites.

Our first screening was a short film program called These People Have Issues [MFF] including: Continued…

Our movie marathon continued Saturday, May 8 with four screenings at the Charles. In the last few years it became our tradition to start off the festival Saturday with a screening in 3D. This year it would have been Inferno in 3D, but we decided to break our tradition and watch one of several foreign movies in this year’s line-up:

Lake Tahoe [IMDB][MFF], directed by Fernando Eimbcke, starring Diego Catano, Hector Herrara and Daniela Valentine…a story of Juan, a teenager who crashes his car on the outskirts of a sleepy Mexican town and tries to find a mechanic. During his quest he doesn’t seem to find what he is looking for, but meets an old paranoid dog owner who wants him to walk his dog, a young punk mother who is looking for a babysitter and a Kung Fu fanatic who’d like to watch a Bruce Lee movie with him. Their relationship to each other is quiet, perhaps as sleepy as the town, but during his mission to get the car running again he slowly finds some friendships and people he hesitatingly begins to care about. Continued…

When we put together our five screenings for the first full festival day I already thought it would become quite an exhausting Friday. And this really turned out to become one rock star day of watching movies without a pause and living on popcorn, energy-bars, water and sangria. But it was absolutely worth it.

Our day started with Modern Love is Automatic [IMDB][MFF], directed by Zach Clark, starring Melodie Sisk (as Lorraine) and Maggie Ross (as Adrian).

Modern Love is Automatic was a dark and dry comedy-drama about nurse Lorraine who, bored with with her environment and the people in her life, detached herself emotionally and socially from everything. Controlling every detail in her life it doesn’t seem surprising when she finds interest in a dominatrix magazine. When she finds her boyfriend cheating she decides to look for a new roommate and becomes a dominatrix at night. She finds aspiring fashion model Adrian, whose emotionality and bubbliness very much is Lorraine’s total opposite. But just as opposites attract, they very slowly develop a friendship in the background of their individual lives and Adrian’s boyfriend Mitch who is uncontrollably obsessed with Lorraine. Continued…

This year it was especially difficult to create our movie schedule for the film festival weekend. The line-up includes so many great movies, documentaries and foreign entries…it is impossible to watch everything on a single weekend. But we managed to put together a selection of 14 screenings I’m going to write about again like every year.

By the way, we are celebrating our 5^th red carpet membership anniversary supporting the film festival as Friends of the Festival! Amazing how quickly all these years passed. I still remember our exciting first festival in 2002 before we became members as if it took place just a few months ago.

MICA Brown Center