MATT'S CINEMA DIARY: March 7-13, 2016
Matt's personal experience at various cinematic screenings throughout the week. This week, screenings from Prague's One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival; No Man is an Island, Horse-Being, White Rage, How We Became Military Volunteers, A Dog's Life, The Pearl Button, Speed Sisters and 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets.
In the last while I have been quite busy, between various works, travelling, but most importantly, the beginning of the production of my very first fiction short film, which will be titled Love, Maybe, Not Quite. I am almost ashamed to admit that since the start of the year, I was barely able to make two or three cinema screenings a week, and this caused me some amount of grief.
I didn't stop watching films altogether of course, how could I ever do that. But of course, to me, and to the vast majority of cinemaphiles I would hope, that is not the same thing. It is a completely different experience. So different and special is it to me that in fact, I aimed to promote it late last year when I started a regular feature in which I documented the screenings I would attend during the week, and talk more about the collective experience than the actual films themselves. So, this turned out to be quite a successful feature for CineCola, and I kept it going right up until the start of this year, when my regular screenings attendance became less regular.
Nevertheless, this week I hope to start over again, not just with keeping up my cinematic habit, but also with this feature. In other words, Matt's Cinema Diary is back. And part of the reason why that is, is because in the last while, I showed it to a number of friends who found it to be entertaining. Some of them had attended the screenings with me, and were surprised to see me mentioning them. Overall, they found them pretty entertaining, so heck, why not do it again?
Well, this week was heavily marked by the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. My experience at the festival, from a journalist's point of view reporting for FRED Film Radio and CineCola was widely negative. So much so that I was tempted to stop attending, but then I thought to myself, why in the world would I pass on free cinema tickets? Besides, just because the organization skills of a festival are awkward and shallow, that is no excuse to blame the films themselves, or the filmmakers, many of whom, however, decided not to show up to the festival despite having been announced. So, without further ado...here we go!