Community Film Festivals and Outdoor Cinemas

One thing I'd thought of was to show films from other successful festivals. For example, choose films from ones that won the Sundance Festival Audience awards or choose from the films awarded honors from a single year.

That's a great suggestion, Piffka -- the Newport Beach and Laguna Beach festivals do exactly that.

Those sound great but much bigger than we've envisioned. Have you volunteered with one of these?

We're showing Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Corantonight and several films to show for the month of August -- our first "Showcase Series" is War and Peace. We'll be showing Paths of Glory, Le Roi de Coeur, & Best Days of Our Lives over the next couple of weeks, plus two Anime films and one from Australia, Rage in Placid Lake.

Great, Piffka - very cool.

Way back some time when I was a student, I joined the university cinema group - just a bunch of volunteers, really, led by the one coordinator. We showed all kinds of films, ranging from classics and the typical art house films to, you know, Singles and stuff. Took turns playing 'em - you know, hooking up the film rolls and stuff - and writing the A4 info pages on 'em. The twice-yearly discussions on which movies to play were fun, too, we would pick a theme and string at least a couple of films to it. It was fun.

I also worked at the International Documentary Filmfestival here in Amsterdam one year, but that was co-ordinating the guest desk, so nothing programmatical. Hard work, though! The coolest filmfestival here is the International one in Rotterdam ... but for that one all I ever did was hand out & collect evaluation tickets the one year - saw almost 40 movies in 7 days!

Anyway, even so, I'm thinking, but I cant actually think of any useful advice to give you ... just, go for it, it'll be a lotta fun I'm sure! I love outdoor movies in summer, its always such a great experience ...

I went to see one on the Nieuwmarkt here (Amsterdam) tonight, the Gay Pride festival screened open-air movies two nights in a row, there musta been threehundred people on the stands ... It was kindof a cheesy movie, but I thought it was touching that the one full round of applause it got was when the kid finally came out about being gay to his mother, and his mother, who'd been really angry, glowered, turned to him, said ... "I know" - and then reached her arms out to embrace him.

Rather poignantly, just about immediately after that some crazyman that had come walking up to the stands started yelling at the top of his voice, "foul, dirty ******* fags" ... for a while. :-(

Hi Nimh,
Thanks for the interest! You've had more experience than I have with community films (and your communities are lots bigger!)... but it is fun to have those meetings and pick out the films to show. I've met some people who put on outdoor cinemas. Those can be wonderful. Ours are inside the library meeting room. Sorry that there were detractors last evening who were yelling. That's gross. We had someone bang the door once really hard last night, as though they were trying to shove it through the wall. Yikes. We had blackout screens up, so we couldn't see who it was, so I went out to investigate. It sounded so aggressive that afterwards I thought, "Hmmm, should I really be out here?" Then the librarian came out (she's about five feet tall, but I felt more secure. Anyway, no one was there with a stick to hit us. In the parking lot were a couple of kids and a crazy-looking guy. We think it was the crazy guy, but it was a scary moment.

The film was great though. Some men, like Omar Sharif, seem to age well. I wish we'd had you around to hand out evaluations. We forgot to do that and now wonder whether our small audience (25 people) enjoyed it as much as we did. At least they stayed through the whole thing! We did have one lady who kept saying it was "interesting" but she didn't know what she'd tell her friends. There was (shhhh) some [size=7]sex[/size] in it, which may have offended these suburban sensibilities.