Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Omaha Film Festival 2008 – Tuesday, day 2

Today we screened five feature films, two full length documentaries and one block of short documentaries. The crowds were moderate in size, and there were a lot of attendees that had been to several of our events over the last few days, so it’s great to see so many repeat faces coming out and supporting the festival.

For me, the day started pretty early and had me basically sequestered up in the projection booth helping setup the various media decks and projectors and going through all of the films for the day. You would think that only screening eleven films on four screens would be easy enough, but due to a lot of varying mitigating circumstances, it took most of the day and we finally had everything setup and ready to go just before we started screening the films. Fortunately things ended up working out just fine (they always seem to) and all of our screenings went off great, on time, and without a hitch. Not bad for our first day with four screens.

The highlight of the evening was the documentary “Strongest Ever” featuring Becca Swanson, the strongest woman in the world, who happens to be from Omaha. The documentary made by some New York film students was entered into our general competition and our judges loved it enough to give it a screening. Becca was gracious enough to attend the screening and got up afterward to do a very enjoyable 30 minute Q&A. Before the film started, I asked the crowd how many people in the audience knew Becca, and every hand in the place was raised, except for one, so they were quickly introduced and we started the film. This was our biggest crowd of the day so we were happy that the word got out about this terrific documentary. We will have an encore screening of the film at noon on Saturday and Becca will be attending that screening as well, so if you missed it tonight, be sure to check it out then.

The rest of the films for the evening were all fantastic as well, and why wouldn’t they be, since we culled them from over 400 entries. Be sure to check out the website to see how people are rating what they saw. Hopefully people are putting some good reviews up.

Wednesday is going to be the first of our four Nebraska feature film nights, so we’ll see how that goes.

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