Posting may be a bit light today and Friday, as I’m heading to Denver to attend the final weekend of the Starz Denver Film Festival. Kevin and Paul will be posting a bit while I’m gone, so be nice to them. Hopefully I’ll find the time to scribble something about the films screening while I’m there, including Starting Out in the Evening, the much-lauded doc  A Walk Into the Sea, and the comedy Karl Rove, I Love You. And if you’re in Denver, come see me speak on this panel on Friday. It’s very important that I put as many sympathetic plants in the audience as possible.

News of a number of can’t-miss events has flown into my inbox over the past 24 hours. In chronological order:

• This Saturday, The Pioneer Theater in New York is presenting a six-film, 584 minute werewolf movie marathon. $25 buys tickets to the whole affair, or if you really just want to show up at 4 AM to catch Teen Wolf (and who could resist, after seeing the poster to the right?), individual shows are $5 each. For more information, visit The Pioneer’s website.
• The Denver Film Festival runs November 8-18. There are many reasons to be excited about this festival (and Mark Rabinowitz has and will continue to list many of them on his blog), but here’s a new one: I’m going to be speaking on a panel about film blogging, alongside Mark, James Israel from indieWIRE, and director AJ Schnack. For more info and tickets, go here.
• Alas, because I’ll be in Denver that weekend, I won’t be able to head up to Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, which is happening November 16-17 at MIT. Organized by the Convergence Culture Consortium of the school’s Comparative Media Studies program, the conference will bring together academics and industry experts to discuss a variety of new frontiers of form and content, from mobile distribution to fan labor and the “architecture of participation.” There are only 200 seats available, so if this sounds good to you, register now.

A funny thing happens at film festivals, I call it festival fever. You arrive after hours of bouncing from airport to airport, having barely slept the night before. Dazed but excited, you wander into your first film. And it blows your mind. This is why you’re here! This is why you love movies! But then you see that same movie a few months later on DVD and it’s… uh… why did I like this?

This happened to me at the first film festival I went to. I was at the Denver Film Festival with Spout and we saw the North American premiere of Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering. Somehow, we all loved it. Later, we all agreed that it was lackluster, especially considering the director of The English Patient and Cold Mountain was teaming up with Juliette Binoche.

Festival Fever is hitting me pretty hard this year at Telluride. It’s been exacerbated by very little sleep the night before leaving, a harrowing drive through a mountain pass, and meeting and being denied interviews with some of the best actors in the world (don’t worry, we’re still trying). Needless to say, I was skeptical of my own opinion after seeing my first film of the festival, Todd Haynes‘ Bob Dylan pic, I’m Not There…

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The description for Mariners and Musicians describes the film best:

A cinematic tone poem based on conversation, writings, and music by acclaimed singer/ songwriter/ author Rosanne Cash. This dreamlike mosaic portrait, with stunning Super 8mm and 16mm visuals and Holga animation, features songs from Cash’s celebrated album Black Cadillac.

The choice director Steve Lippman made to photograph Rosanne Cash in grainy 8mm and 16 mm film was a masterful choice. As Rosanne remembers her recently deceased parents and ponders her great great grandfather who survived a shipwreck off the coast of Long Island, the blurry and grainy imagery of the film communicates where she is at — a woman sifting through memories, memories that are guiding her towards song. Though the film was highly experimental, it was not without a kind of structure. What the film does is portray how we remember and how Rosanne Cash is remembering. After the screening, I spoke with Liselle Feingold who was there to represent the film for director Steve Lippman. We talked the about the film’s style and what her impressions were as a collaborator on the project.

Starz Denver Film Festival, Spout podcast, Mariners and Musicians, Liselle Feingold.

The screening of the short documentary Living Lightly was a debut in more ways than one. Its screening at the Denver Film Festival marked the films first public screening and it was director Robin Burke’s directorial debut. Prior to making this film, she worked predominantly as a producer on other people’s projects. Living Lightly is a debut that any first time director would be very proud of. It is poetic and thought provoking and just plain beautiful. The film is about the Vido family. They have chosen to live in such a way that they only take what they need from the earth. The film focuses on their practice of schything to make hay for their livestock. Interviews with the family are imbued with a kind of pastoral poetry that few documentaries achieve. Burke’s approach is not to charm the audience with flashy camera work or clever editing but rather, she places the camera, frames her shots wide and captures the beauty of this family, swinging their scythes in what amounts to a kind of moving painting. After the screening I talked about her process when making a documentary and what it was like to enter the world of this unusual and fascinating family.

Starz Denver Film Festival, Spout podcast, Living Lightly, Robin Burke