Day 8: My Festival Experience
It’s a moist day all round, what with the double dose of humidifiers, the grump-inducing rain, and a good old-fashioned movie cry.
It’s day eight of the festival, and I’m only just now beginning to figure out how everything works. Just in time for my final two days of the Festival!
What I Learned on My Winter Vacation, by Evany Thomas
It turns out many of the town hotspots that I’ve been dying to get to – the drug store (lotion! lipbalm!), the coffeeteria (latte!), and even some of the theatres (movies! the whole reason I’m here!) are actually within doable walking distance. So no real need for all the elaborate ride-wrangling and toe-tapping. Also the toaster in this place is the devil: As my condomates and I have each learned in turn, it’s completely without insulation, so unless you want your hand transformed into a claw of burnt flesh, do not under any circumstance touch the outside of the device while it’s operating. Actually it’s plenty hot even after it’s stopped toasting. In fact, better just stay a minimum of five feet away at all times.
And humidifiers. I could now teach a whole course in humidifying. First, they need to be refilled every seven or so hours, which means for a full night’s sleep, you need to water them moments before bed. Also if you don’t care about the aesthetics or navigability of your room, get multiple steamers and place them in strategic locations all around your bed. I recently discovered a duplicate steamer in the back of my closet, so now I have two running at all times, like some kind of insane steam farmer, and my room is moisture heaven. Which I realize sounds like the name of a poorly translated massage parlor, and yet…isn’t.
Thanks to the steady supply of steam, and the mild exercise of actually using my walking stems, I sleep in until 10 a.m. this morning. The added sleep feels glorious, but since I’m so used to getting up at 5 a.m., this means that half my day is now gone. I scramble into the office in a work panic.
Rain on Me
All this week, the weather report has been calling for snow, but instead we get rain. Rain is like snow’s frumpier, boring-er cousin. When it snows, everyone runs outside and spins around, laughing, white specks scenically dusting rosie cheeks. When it rains, people turn up their collars and grumble.
Everyone at work is thrilling over the Oscar announcements, with a long list of Sundance alums getting The Nod, including one of this year’s Festival shorts, This Way Up, which, for those big on follow-through, is actually available for download on iTunes FOR FREE. But click fast, the “free” part goes away end of day Sunday.
Also it turns out that rain on top of snow transforms the world into a one-inch layer of deathly slippable Slurpee. And because falling isn’t the hottest idea when you’re pregnant, this means that I have to do the “elderly mental patient shuffle” everywhere I go, painstakingly edging my feet forward in 4-inch increments.
At 2 p.m., I dash out to cover the Q&A for a screening of Barking Water. I have to admit, when I first heard what this film was about – elderly man escapes the hospital and, hitching a ride with his estranged ex-girlfriend, drives across Oklahoma for one last visit with his estranged daughter – I wasn’t all that fired up to see it. It sounded sad, and hard, and a little bit like homework. But this is one of the things I love most about Sundance: Sometimes, either because of scheduling limitations or ticket-getting challenges or whatever, you wind up seeing films that you wouldn’t otherwise go to if left to your own narrow-minded devices. And sometimes you luck into something truly special.
Barking Water is good like that. It’s a small, quiet film, but it does that great service of providing a shift in how you of look at things. Love, regret, last chances, ideas of right and wrong – these are complicated, personal things, but if a film does a good enough job of getting inside a character’s unique perspective, there’s always something recognizable for the viewer to relate to. Even if the character is of a different generation, culture, or part of the world, there’s something eye-openingly universal there.
At the end of the film, after the credits start rolling, I find myself getting all choked up. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you I’m a big crier, but crying over the credits is a new thing. Usually it’s a specific scene that sets me off – the fish’s mother dies, the cancer patient needs painkillers – a specific sadness that kicks me right in my weak eyes. But this time, it was the movie as a whole that got me, and it was only when it finished telling its story that I felt the full weight of it.
I walk back to the office, and the rain-clean air smells fresh and amazing and hopeful.
A Quiet Night at Home
After typing frantically for a few hours, I leave the office early to go back to the condo, where I can get caught up on some work from the comfort of my sweatpants, but instead wind up getting caught up in the jaw-dropping law-shirking Death Wish 3, in which Charles Bronson bazookas coked-up criminals with inverted Mohawks. Again!
Tomorrow’s to-dos: Finally see The September Issue, then more man-on-the-street talk, then dinner with friends who are in no way related to Sundance – whatever will we talk about?
MY FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10
