EIFF

Edinburgh Film Festival was a great experience and gave me some insight of the type of films that have a chance to get into such a prestigious festival, also the great variety of people who usually attend the event. 

It was full of press, Scottish citizens who are regular at the festival, as well as many international people who travel the world to attend film festivals. For example, during "The girlfriend experience" I was sitting next to an Italian person wearing a Cannes Festival Cap, who told me he was about to see  "Antichrist" next, because it's really eccentric and it left him confused in Cannes. That's what caught my attention to go see this film.

Also it's worth mentioning the many fresh graduates from Glasgow Uni's Film& TV course, who came well prepared and fired interesting questions to the film makers. 

As far as the film program is concerned, we started off with Adventureland on Saturday afternoon. It's an entertaining, witty film set in the 80's, about a teenager who has just graduated from college but lacks funds to go into graduate school. He starts working in a theme park, where without realizing it,  he instantly becomes the center of attention. Moreover, he finds a girlfriend with many secrets.  The best part of the film was the use of 80's hits.

After Adventureland, we didn't have any other free films to attend. The drawback of the program is the arrangement of 4 films that start at 9, then 2 starting at 9.30, and 2 at 11.30 (All in different cinemas!). So practically it's hard to see more than 2 or 3 films per day, and not feel totally exhausted moving from one place to another. 

On Saturday we headed to Sheraton for a Scene Breakdown class, but came across Allan Cuming who was interviewed by BBC and had children as an audience. He shared that his greatest dream is to perform in the Citizens in Glasgow, which still hasn't happened. I stayed until the end of the interview, so I missed the class. 

The next day, I went to see  International Animations 2, which was the reason why I chose my dates. I am extremely disappointed that I missed the Saturday ones, due to lack of organization. Some of the animations I saw were quite impressive-  "Wires" (Spain), "Coffee and Chicory" (Slovenia), "The performance" (Germany). I don't remember the names of the rest, one Russian one was quite good, but I was surprised to see the level of entry in the festival. Among all the above stunning animations, there were a few with rough qualities, as if they were 1st year student projects. No wonder that a Glasgow School of Art student had an oscar nomination for animation, before even graduation!

Afterwards, we headed to Cineworld to see Running in Traffic, produced by Abigail Hawkins. 

It was not my idea to see it.... I felt absolutely exhausted after watching it...

I guess I generally don't like films based in Glasgow, because I don't find the topics interesting enough to follow. Maybe an Edinburgh film or somewhere in the Highlands will be much more intriguing to me.  

Luckily Sunday turned out to be a long film day! We managed to get some free tickets for a documentary called "Outrage" and a foreign production "Vinyan". The documentary turned out to be brilliant! It focuses on homosexual politicians who have voted against gay rights or marriage throughout their careers, despite their own sexual orientation. It's rather controversial, and apparently quite relevant right now in America. The great thing about it is that it shows many different angles of the story, and also the different people suffering from such life build on lies- for example, the politicians' wives. One of them shared that she had no idea when she married her husband and found out after years of happy marriage. On the other hand, the politicians who have had the guts to admit their secret,  have managed to free themselves of the double life and great burden that they've felt forced to carry. 

 But the point is not admitting sexual orientation, it's being true to yourself and not following "the strong of the day", especially when it totally opposes one's lifestyle. 

I'll end it here, and blog about the rest later on. 

By the way, for everyone who I haven't mentioned it: I saw GAEL GARCIA BERNAL y DIEGO LUNA!!!! How great is that :)