Ray of Light

Well, one can’t see five shows in a day at Edinburgh Film Festival without wanting to blog/brag about it, but the trouble is, one is tired.

A couple of days ago I started to flag, feeling quite ill during STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (Errol Morris said he aspired to make a film that would rob an audience of the will to live, and maybe he’s done it). But I got my second wind and have been combining the odd meeting, plenty of socialising, a bit of partying, and a ridiculous amount of film-going, reasonably well. But it worried me, the tiredness. “How will I cope with my first feature film as director, should it happen, if I can’t handle a ten-day film festival (with a two-day lead-in of press screenings)? But I was chatting with Martin Radich, who’s just made his first feature (as director AND cinematographer) and he reckoned the fest was much harder work. So that’s good.

Today was hard not just for the eleven-hour span of events, but for the fact that four out of five shows overlapped. But since nothing ever starts EXACTLY on time, even at film festivals where there are no ads and trailers, I was able to get from screen to screen without missing anything most of the time. This was made harder by the fact that no two consecutive screenings were at the same cinema, and each cinema is five-fifteen minutes’ brisk walk away from the other. Bystanders would have seen a blue streak of Cherenkov radiation go by as I broke the so-called “light barrier”.

The trickiest part was the two unrepeatable events which were on simultaneously with each other. This is a conundrum that has baffled some of the greatest filmgoers of our time, but I reckoned that with SUFFICIENT CONCENTRATION it should be possible to attend both events at once.

It was slightly strenuous, but anything worthwhile takes a little effort.