Right, another festival under my belt! Let’s do a recap, by the numbers.
Number of shows I planned to see: 20. Which I realised was insane unless I took the entire week off or something.
Number of shows I actually saw: 11. Last year I saw 17, fell way behind on my reviews, and then felt guilty and stressed out about it. It looks like this is about the optimal number if I want to balance the festival with work and non-queer-film-related life.
Favourite feature film: A tie between The Way He Looks and Drunktown’s Finest. Honourable mention goes to Children 404.
Favourite short film: A three-way tie between Stop Calling Me Honey Bunny, Orbits / Orbitas (shown in Grrls in Space) and StandStill (shown in The Coast is Queer)
Movies I wanted to see but didn’t:
- Love is Strange, showing at the same time as Pierrot Lunaire, but it’s mainstream enough that I can catch it on Netflix or OutTV or something soon enough
- Test, pre-empted by a friend’s farewell dinner
- POWER, pre-empted by the Doctor Who season premiere
- Anita’s Last Cha Cha, ditto
- Through a Lens Darkly, pre-empted by my recovery from volleyball tryouts
Drunktown’s Finest would have been listed here, but some movies pulled out of the festival at the last minute, and the Monday night late show was graced with an additional showing of Drunktown’s Finest.
There were a couple other movies I’d planned to see, but I’m not that broken up about missing.
Percentage of subtitled films I saw: 5 / 9 feature films, or 55%. (6 / 9, I guess, if you count the Navajo dialog in Drunktown’s Finest.) Not as high as last year, but still respectable. I managed to see films from Argentina, Brazil, Morocco/France/Switzerland, the Netherlands and Russia. Also Australia, Spain (no dialog) and the United States.
Percentage of films I saw that were directed by women: This year, over 50% of the festival feature films are directed by women. This is a big, big deal, since the percentage in mainstream cinema is apparently 8%. Dropping to 6% if you only look at Hollywood. How does my festival experience add up? Well, out of the 9 feature films I saw 4 were directed by women, so that looks about right at 44%. Incidentally, I had to look up the name of Boys’ director, Mischa Kamp, but it turns out she’s a woman. Counting short films, the percentage is 17.5 / 33 (Trenchcoat Lesbians was co-directed by Ryan Steele and Amy Goodmurphy) which just edges it over the 50% mark.