Tuesday was a travel day, after a final, sleepless night in Las Vegas (a note on that: if you love cinema but happen to be in proverbial Sin City when CineVegas is *not* in session, you must go to karaoke at Ellis Island. This is surely not intended as a slight on the programmers or filmmakers involved in the festival, but the karaoke video that accompanies “Bohemian Rapsody” in that casino bar is as least as good as the majority of short films to which my fellow jurors and I gave prizes. Lest you wonder if I’m joking, I can only say that there’s something about spending four straight days in a casino that makes distinctions between irony and sincerity seem meaningless.)

Anyway. The trip from The Palms to my hotel in Silver Spring, Maryland was exactly 12 hours door to door. I intended to watch a screener of Andrew Jacobs’ Four Seasons Lodge after checking in, but ended up spending two hours looking at Cyd Charisse clips on YouTube, and by the time I put the screener on I had to turn it off almost immediately in order to crash. I only mention this because I went back to it Wednesday morning before a screening of Seaview, and it seems worth noting that it was a total accident that I spent my first day at SilverDocs watching two consecutive films about the refugees of international atrocities struggling to form a community within resorts that have seen better days.

…Read more