TriBeCa Film Fest

Well, got lucky & scored some free tix to a screening last night. Friend & I saw Windows, which was preceeded by a screening of 16 Letters (a concatinated version of 25 Letters). Now, I'm all for "experimental cinema," but I can't say that I recommend either of these pieces for viewing. 16 Letters was mostly time-lapse recordings of rotting fruit, which is okay when you see it once, but it was three of the 16 vignettes in the short film. I actually liked the director interviewing himself, even seeing that section more than once. The rest of it was too kind of bland and decidedly anti-war. So much so that I almost literally felt beat over the head by it.

Windows was a much better piece, but you knew from the intro animation (a shadow figure literally trudging through endless spaces that looked like they had been taken straight from Pink Floyd's "The Wall") that you were in for a downer experience. I knew people would be walking out after one scene in which a rape occurs in a park; sure enough, another scene, intimating at either an older man with a young girl being held captive or incest, caused an en masse exit by a great number in the theater.

While neither of these works were my thing, it was interesting and informative to hear the Q&A session by the filmmakers at the end of the film. For example, it took 2 years for the director to finance his piece, but even still, most of the film was paid for with credit cards (the director's)!!! He also had a great response to the question, "where did the ideas for this film come from?"

"I dunno. I wake up with ideas every day. These are just some of them that I thought fit together into a film." Classic. And priceless. I'll need to use this for my writing projects.