Saturday, February 28, 2009

Omaha Film Festival 2009 – Friday, Day 7

I think we can officially call this the home stretch. That is if home stretches are covered in snow and ice. Why does this happen every year during the festival? Oh, because we have the festival in Nebraska in February. Anytime anyone asks why we do this in February, I always tell them that if people can go to Park City, UT in January, then they can come to Omaha at the end of February. And why at this point in our lives people are still afraid of snow I’ll never understand. We ended up having great turnouts all evening so it was a very successful night.

Tonight was the second screening of the Nebraska Shorts and we had another great crowd. We moved the screening into the largest theater we had and I think it was a great move. Once again after the screenings we had all of the filmmakers in attendance go up for a Q&A and they all fielded a variety of interesting questions. I’ve heard a lot of feedback from this year’s group of locally produced films and most people are saying this is our strongest group of Nebraska short films so it’s good to hear that that block is getting better.

Other highlights included films with filmmakers in attendance. Lane Wyrick, director/editor of the documentary “A Friend Indeed: The Bill Sackter Story” has done a great job promoting his screenings and was in attendance for his first screening. As you would assume from the nature of his film, his Q&A was moving and gave everyone further insights into the filmmaking process and into Bill himself. Three of the promotions people for the OFF the EDGE film “Clear Lake, WI” were also in attendance in support of their film. Hearing how they were able to shoot the way they did and were able to navigate through a town and make it look like a ghost town covered in snow was an interesting conversation.

The Q&A sessions are always my favorite and the Saturday screenings will have a ton of them. We have seventeen screenings and eight of them will have filmmakers in attendance, so that should keep us on our toes.

There are still plenty of tickets available for all of the screenings and being outside won’t be any fun, so you might as well head down to the Great Escape Theater and watch some films. It’s entertaining, inexpensive, and it shows us that the community supports what we’re doing and would like us to do it all over again next year (and the ticket sales help keep the creditors at bay).

Thanks to everyone that’s come out so far. Seeing the faces of people that are entertained by the movies that we’ve chosen to screen makes all of the work (and lack of sleep) totally worth it. I’d break into song with “you are the wind beneath my wings” but no one really wants to hear me sing.

And thanks to that one special person that brought Jeremy, Jason and I a RedBull today. It went down nice and smooth and helped get us through the day.

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