Wild Sound Festival

30 June, 2012

This weekend, I'm trying to see how far I can push myself before starting to feel my age. That's what it feels like in retrospect, at least! Friday evening, we shopped till we dropped, and discussed Ikea's wily plans to make us shop some more. Saturday, during the day, I volunteered at the Pride Festival  and was thrilled to see parents bringing their kids to the event too. What better way to tell a child that they can just be themselves, no judgment? Beautiful. 

And then, last evening, though it felt like my feet and hands were falling off in different directions after all the barricade-moving and heavy labor at Pride, I just had to check out Wild Sound Festival. It's a feedback event where the audience gets to watch, discuss, and then vote on a set of short films, handpicked to ensure we're watching movies from different countries, across different genres, with different budgets. Considering it's free-entry, and first-come-first-seated, the hall filled up remarkably fast with people who were soon talking to each other though many had come there alone.

The evening started off rather darkly, with a man tracing the history of dementia in his family (La Calma, Spain), and it got even more rocky with Netherland's entry, Year Zero OFFF, which was kind of a wordless Doomsday prediction. To end the last act on a cheerful note, we witnessed a soldier's interaction with the inevitability of death in the Canadian movie, The Soldier.

A moderated session followed, where the three movies were discussed by the group who'd come in early enough to secure seats in the main theater (and I was so glad I got a seat there, since I had lots to say!) while the ones in the side theater watched the comments through a live stream. We then went on to watch two slightly longer short films, Ireland's Nowhere in Particular, and an American Film Noir style flick, Vodka 7. While these two films also spoke about life and death, they were definitely perceived to be more optimistic than the first set of films. 

In addition to the five short stories we'd watched, I felt like I watched many more short stories as the personalities of the audience members came shining through in the moderated discussions. From the ex-army man who said he related with The Soldier, to the critique in the front row who bemoaned the Mustang's dent in Nowhere in Particular; you felt like you were getting a little bit of insight into the people watching the movies. There are 2-3 more events like this coming up, so let me know if you're interested and I can tell you when they're happening.

The Ukrainian girl I spoke with during a break mentioned another short film event, Short & Sweet, at No One Writes to the Colonel (Little Italy). It's free-entry Mondays, 8-10pm EST. See you there one of these Mondays? Let me know if anyone's going and I'll make my plans. For now, I'm a bit busy shifting houses and then watching the fireworks at Niagara Falls to celebrate Canada Day and then moving all that lovely Ikea stuff into the new flat and putting it together to make a home. Internet-less times ahead. Perfect time to hit Toronto's Public Library, which I've heard so much about!