Behind the Scenes of the Global Film Festival

Wow. What a crazy day!

Starting about 3:00, I undertook reception frenzy madness! Running all over campus to get food, and setting up the finicky (but not as finicky as I expected) chocolate fountain for the French reception. It looked really, really cool though! The chocolate flowed great, nothing exploded, no one got splattered, and the worst that happened was the drips on the totally disposable tablecloth. Epic win! I even had it set up slightly before the start time of 5:00, which was great, but as soon as the chocolate was flowing, the NiCad/24 speed awards ceremony came and swarmed the table. A few people had never seen a chocolate fountain before, and timidly asked how to use it. So adorable! I think my favorite part of the reception was the staff members walking around with platters of cheese on baguettes offering them to guests. Very classy! I heard positive things from the crowds too – the buffet-style lines last night weren’t quite as nice as the general atmosphere of mingling. I could only hear the simultaneous live chanteuse music from the theater faintly in the background, wish I could have gotten a better view of that…

With the French reception mostly behind me, around 6:00 things started getting crazy. I had thought we would need to ask Campus Police to unlock the Reves Room for us, for the special “festival guests and staff only” appreciation dinner. I sent someone over to be there for when the cops came, but then I got word that other people were setting up a reception already in there. I don’t think I processed the information for about 10 seconds. I had made the reservation, arranged for ALCOHOL to be left in the Reves room earlier in the day, and had gotten multiple confirmations that there were NO OTHER EVENTS in there preceding our reception since I had set up the room for our event on WEDNESDAY. Overdrive mode came over me somewhat involuntarily – I ran right over to the Reves room and confronted the nicely-dressed students with the conflict, and quite frankly made them appear a little nonplussed. The poor kids in that room saw a very unusual sight of me outwardly frustrated and asserting myself in a conflict. Here’s to film festivals engendering empowerment!

I called back to the staff at the Kimball to let them know what was going on, just as an FYI, and said I would keep them posted on what happened. Five minutes later I had a possy – no, more like an angry mob – of adult-looking people behind me. Granted, they had walkie-talkies, suits and ties, and high heels, but we had important people staring them down imposingly. We managed to work something out – since the Charles Center sponsors the film festival, we were able to offer the nicer Charles Center room as an alternate location for the other reception. The Reves Room IS so close to the Kimball, and the Reves Center also sponsors the festival – it is a “global” fest, after all, and Reves is for all things international. Basically, we won the “dick-swaggering contest,” as I later described it to someone else. It was kind of awesome. I never win things like that!

After that crisis averted, some of the food was slow in coming and being set up, and the beer was not cold, but definitely by 15 minutes into the reception, the party was GOING. Booze was flowing, music was playing, directors meeting musicians meeting students meeting professors meeting significant others, and all having a great time. The food turned out to be fantastic – myself and the team had tried very hard to make sure there was enough food, and we barely got through half of it! The atmosphere was very festive, and everyone very much enjoyed the chance to chill out, relax, and celebrate the success of the festival so far. I felt so great to have helped put that together, and was over-complimented several times. (Film festivals are empowering AND work wonders for self-esteem? What is this?) And of course, halfway through we had a very thorough toast courtesy of Prof. Barnard, and the cutting of the film festival cake, compete with fondant rendering of the film fest logo on top. Yeah. It was that awesome. A friend of mine walked by outside during the reception, and texted me asking what party I was at, it looked like fun. That was the moment when I knew the reception was definitely going well. My first ever foray into event planning turned out fantastically, and so many people come out to help, I still can’t even process it. I must have said “thank you” literally about 150 times over the course of the night. What a great group of people to party with!

And oh boy. Did we party. Needless to say, music + adult beverages + festival success = spontaneous dancing, students and teachers alike. I am SO glad there are pictures of this event. I’ve never really gotten the chance before to just hang out with teachers and co-workers and mentors in a relaxed (read: alcohol-laden) environment, and I absolutely loved it. I can’t wait until I’m 21 next year and can get some of all this free festival booze! Also, I finally got to meet Lee Hirsch – SO EXCITING! He became interested in coming to the festival when I contacted him about setting up an interview, and I had chatted with him on the phone a few days prior to talk logistics, film festival experiences, and his amazing film “Amandla!.” Sometimes it is so great to have an environment where I can let my true inner film geek shine, and in a place where other people appreciate it. (Okay, so film fest = empowerment + self-esteem + identity articulation? I think I just found the solution to my quarter-life crisis!)

People were having so much fun, they stayed past the appreciation dinner “ending” time and were still really enjoying themselves. We even got a great picture of all the interns, staff and guests of the festival near the tail-end. What a great evening. While I waited for the police to come and help me lock up the building, I collapsed on a rug from fatigue and just glowed with joy. The reception had been pulled off. And it was awesome. What a great night. “Hedwig” had already started a half hour previous, and I was exhausted, so I managed to get a ride home and get some sleep. Less than five hours of sleep per night for the past four nights is bad news. That’s probably where I’m going now – I’ll come back and proofread this later.

So, a day at the film festival without any films. Alas. But still, a very festive and satisfying day!

ETA: Saturday morning I proofread this a little – I didn’t make nearly as many typos as I thought I did! Here’s to blogging successfully at 12:30 a.m.!

Got back at 2:00 a.m. after an exhilarating day, mostly spent running on caffeine and little substantial food. But it was AWESOME!
Here’s the play-by-play from the “Special Events Coordinator’s” POV:

8:35 a.m. – wake up before alarm, running on adrenaline, probably after staying up until 3:30 a.m. or so the night before after a long night of doing last-minute festival prep (until 1:45 a.m. in College Apartments with Prof. Barnard and Lita).

9:25 a.m. – grab coffee at the Grind. very, very necessary for functioning these days.

9:30 a.m. – Shakespeare & Film class!

11:00 a.m. – meeting at Sadler Center to talk details for the Blind Boys of Alabama concert on Sunday (the only event not at the Kimball, so thus requiring extra coordination). Get chewed out about the work it will take to get the film fest post-it notes off the windows of the Sadler Center. I ask Diana Morris at the Charles Center about paying for the work, and she fixes everything because she is awesome.

11:45 a.m. – printing & organizing frenzy! answering last-minute fest-related emails, printing signs and labels for inside the tent, making follow-up and reminder phone calls, keeping it together

12:15 p.m. – get together and load food and serving-ware stored in Charles Center into car to head over to the Kimball

12:35 p.m. – haul reception goodies and necessaries into Kimball, and watch Williamsburg Event Rentals work their magic putting up a tent! Get the mini-tour of the inner workings of the Kimball, focusing on storage space for reception items, t-shirts, and tickets, location of sinks for washing dishes, ice machines, dolly cart, etc.

1:00 p.m. – Prof. Barnard and Lita bring a HUGE haul of stuff to the Kimball, with almost the entirety of the Costco plunderings and important festival paraphernalia from the College Apartments.

1:30 p.m. – organize stuff into storage space upstairs. there’s something like 7 boxes of food and serving-ware. navigating the room becomes tricky. Get the tent, red carpet rundown from Steve from WER.

2:00 p.m. – Megan and Caitlin come to help set up! I give them the mini-tour. We start trying to hang our “press backgrounds” on the outside of the tent, and it stays for a while, but in the end it’s just too windy. All our signs and posters almost blew away at one point, while I was on the phone and standing on top of a “press background” to keep it from blowing away. Duct tape is EVERYWHERE.

3:00 p.m.- Mini tent panic: realize there aren’t enough tables for tickets, t-shirts, kegs of beer, wine, AND food. Call and ask WER for three last-minute tables and tablecloths. The half hour it takes them to arrive seems like eternity, but they look super-snazzy with black tablecloths! Decorate inside of the tent with Megan and Caitlin

3:50 p.m. – Lauren gives me half her Wawa meatball sub when I mention I haven’t actually eaten all day. I make a note to give her my firstborn child.

4:00 p.m. – Shakespeare & Film class weekly screening – Orson Welles’ “Othello!” I realize I forgot to make a few important reminder phone calls, so I break my personal rule of not texting during movies and ask Lita to cover them for me. She totally does, because she is awesome. I also recognize the irony of being anxious to get out of a movie in order to keep doing final preparations for a FILM festival.

5:30 p.m. – Festival weekend officially starts with the Worlds of Music Doc Project!!! I am not there though – I get out of “Othello” and head down to Charles Center to make one last haul o’ stuff, since it didn’t all fit the first time around. Diana Morris saves my sorry behind again, and says some very nice things about me while she is on a cell phone.

6:00 p.m. – “Foods of the World” reception set-up. No one really knows where anything is yet, and the “floor plan” was slightly rearranged while I was in class. People are going upstairs for chairs, downstairs for ice, upstairs for food, downstairs to wash a dead spider off one of the bowls (!), into the tent to set up beer and wine, inside the lobby to drop off food, outside again for another haul of hot fresh food, and also are handling random College will-call people as they come in. Frenzied, but not crossing into chaotic.

7:00 p.m. – “Foods of the World” Reception! The ticket lines are crazy for reasons I still do not understand – technically the receptions are ticketed, but no one is taking tickets. Many people are picking up “Zikrayat” tickets, and a few W&M students show IDs to claim Blind Boys tickets too. While I man College will-call, Prof. Knight brings me a bagel with cream cheese and I steal a soda, for my #2 instance of food (not really a “meal”) for the day!

8:00 p.m. – “Zikrayat!” They are AMAZING. I did not know that ab muscles could work that way. And the music? BEAUTIFUL. It was so amazing to see so many talented people in one place! I manage to escape my endless duties in the lobby and tent and duck inside – I have to watch this show for a class, after all. Oh darn. I sit with a few cool freshie film fans, also in the FILM 351 class focused on the festival. We bond about the ridiculous awesomeness of the dancers.

9:30 p.m. – “Zikrayat” intermission. A good chunk of audience members leave at that point, and fest staff has a mini-crisis about the show running over into the 10:00 screening of “A Match Made by God.” I take the initiative and tell the people standing around in the lobby for Bollywood to go ahead into the theater, make themselves comfortable, and watch the tail-end of the “Zikrayat” show.

10:00 p.m. – I wander into the lobby and get popcorn, Reeses cups, and more soda. Yay caffeine! Lita and Caitlin and I brainstorm about the anticipated angry mob for “La Vie en Rose” tomorrow, and how to handle ticket-checking, especially in light of the French Reception that immediately precedes the screening. And the guest- and staff-only appreciation reception starts a half hour after the screening starts. Yikes. We can totally handle it though.

10:30 p.m. – “Rab ne Bana di Jodi” (only a half hour late!) Four individuals from SASA perform to kick off the night. The crowd is smaller, but very enthusiastic (and very couple-heavy?) Cheers abound. Three hours of glorious Bollywood! And I sit with an old Bollywood buddy from Gov School. We make a fake drinking game out of watching Shah Rukh Khan (of whom we are huge fans) – pretend to take a shot every time he cries. Good thing we weren’t actually playing, because one of us probably would have DIED. That man had three hours’ worth of film in which to cry! In a film about a self-imposed love triangle! DUH! It was so beautiful. And so colorful, with great music! What a fun audience experience, too. It’s so great to be surrounded by other super-excited people at film fests. That’s a big part of the reason I like them!

1:30 a.m. – The Bollywood show gets out. I wander the upstairs halls of the Kimball looking for the projectionist to let us festival staff back into our storage room, which became locked but has important things in it, like, you know COATS. We pack up everything, roll up the red carpet for the day, and head out. Max and I chat during the long walk from CW to new campus, and it is awesome. I grin like an idiot while walking into my dorm – what a fantastic day!

2:30 a.m. – Email answering, homework and blogging.

T-minus four (4) days to festival opening!

VITAL STATS
Workload level: high
Level of last-minute guest, ticket, food, logistics, and miscellaneous changes: increasing
Number of shows already sold out: 1
Excitement level: sky-high

Public knowledge of festival: impressive
Public response to festival trailer: overwhelmingly positive
Public response to free random kazoos on campus: confused/ecstatic

Estimated time spent on festival-related email per day: 3 hours
Number of emails related to coordinating Hedwig look-alike contest: 30 and counting
Number of follow-up/reminder/clarification phone calls to make in the next 48 hours: 15 at minimum
Number of pages of festival-related papers to be printed at the Charles Center in the next 48 hours: [this information has been removed to protect the innocent and prevent the powerful from becoming frightened]
Number of selfless Charles Center student office assistants to make oversized thank-you cards for: 5
Number of last-minute special ticket requests to handle: 4 at minimum

Number of hours left free in personal schedule for the upcoming week: 0
Number of hours in week allotted to final festival preparations: 14
Number of hours in week set aside for attending/working festival events: 30
Confidence in upcoming festival success: never been higher!

Film festivals are excessive.

Why? Because that is what makes them festive! It’s not a bad thing at all. And working on a film festival lets you know just how excitingly excessive they can be, every step of the way.

I attended the Global Film & Migration fest at W&M last year, and as an audience member I marveled at the excess. The sheer number of films, each of which cost several times the price of an undergrad education to produce, each production involved countless people – all of that effort was crammed into one weekend of screenings and events. So many guests had come from so far away to present these works, and each of those guests had unfathomable experiences, contacts, budgets, families, and other film festival experiences behind them. Having them all in one place was overwhelming – and thrilling.

As an intern this year, I realize that the excess I marveled at last year was just the tip of the iceberg. I learned today what an “honorarium” is. I also learned how to keep a keg of beer cold. (Yes, there will be free kegs of beer at the festival. Keep it on the down-low, or we might have a stampede.) Programs – themselves the products of countless hours of phone calls, pleading, bargaining, pulling strings, crossing fingers, disappointments, close calls and lucky breaks – then take an incredible amount of hours to assemble, and even minor typos can have huge logistical implications. Also, short program descriptions are HARD. Summarizing a film in one or two sentences is an art form comparable to poetry – every single word carries so much meaning with it, and is almost like a film-goers “code” that everyone knows but few people really understand. For example, in my experience, “innovative” usually means “confusing and difficult, but worth the effort to watch.” I am of the opinion that a “film critic’s dictionary” has the potential to be a hilarious, bestselling work of nonfiction. Or fiction.

But still, those are just the PROGRAMS. The same amount of work goes into getting a red carpet. And t-shirts. And food for public receptions. And booking flights for international guests. The iceberg analogy almost seems inadequate. And those aren’t even the central things to the festival, like, you know, getting prints of the films to screen or making sure the Kimball theater is available. I think a cake analogy might be appropriate – icebergs are impressive creations of Mother Nature, but do not require much human assembly. Cakes in and of themselves are elaborate and tricky to make, even simple cakes. On specialty cakes, there may be a lot of icing on top of that ridiculously complicated cake. Even though icing cakes is a surprisingly difficult art form, in the end, you get something overwhelmingly beautiful and delicious.

So there you have it. Film festivals = gourmet cake. Excessive? Probably. Worth it? Every time.

Welcome to the official blog of the annual William & Mary Global Film Festival! Posts from interns from this year’s festival, Global Film & Music, are coming soon.
In the meantime, check out the 2010 festival trailer below and the official festival website at http://filmfestival.wm.edu

Global Film & Music Festival Trailer