Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Omaha Film Festival 2008 – Saturday, Day 6

For the entire festival, we will have 60 screenings. 20 of them happened today. Yes, that’s 1/3 of the festival in one day. Four screens, open to close. Seven feature films, four documentaries, three short blocks, two special screenings and all four OFF the EDGE films. Of the twenty screenings, nine of them had filmmakers in attendance. Sweet. It’s a good thing I got lots of sleep last night.

So as not to cause everyone reading this to fall asleep, I won’t go through the entire day, I’ll just list the filmmakers and their films that were in attendance. At 11:30am in short film block #2, writer/director Adem Weldon came in support of his short film “Some Apologies” and helped us generate a decent sized crowd. At noon the encore screening of Derek Baker’s “Ulterior Motives” generated a great second crowd. Producers Colleen Evanson and Jacqueline Willemsen joined Becca Swanson for an increcible Q&A session after the second screening of the documentary “Strongest Ever.” Director of the film “The Listening Project” Dominic Howes and on screen interviewer Hahn participated in an extremely moving and powerful Q&A session after the second screening of their documentary. “The Living Wake” had a very fun Q&A session with producer Chadwick Clough in attendance and gave us a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes info on this fantastic narrative film. Writer/director Rocco DeVilliers was in attendance for his second screening of “The Flyboys” and the film played to a much bigger audience the second time and everyone was once again moved and loved this film. The Nebraska Shorts block had another huge crowd and had most of the filmmakers in attendance for another rousing Q&A. Doug Lantz, director of the documentary “From the 50 Yard Line” remained in town for his second screening and treated the crowd of band folks (I didn’t use the word “geeks” here) to a great look at the filming process. Short film block 3 had Jeff Hoferer, writer/director of the excellent and hilarious short film “Finding Emo” and Justin Lerner, writer/director of the incredibly shot and touching “The Replacement Child” in attendance and the audience responded extremely well to both films, as well as the rest of the short film block. The last film of the day that had filmmakers in attendance was the second screening of “The Wretched” and it gave us our biggest audience of the day. Another rousing screening and another great Q&A session to round out the day.

For reviews of each of these films as well as info about all of the films that we screened, be sure to check out www.omahafilmfestival.org and if you haven’t already done so, be sure to create a screen name and review the films that you saw.

Sunday is the last day. Raise a toast to Sunday. Unless you were in the private party at the hospitality suite, in which case you were raising a toast to just about everything.

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