The dangers of burnout

I saw a lovely documentary called Quest on Thursday night for closing night of HRAFF, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which I helped curate.

I should have seen it at the beginning of February, but, you know -- burnout.

I started watching this movie about an "ordinary" African-American family in North Philadelphia as one of my last movies to consider for this year's festival. It had debuted at Sundance, and our festival director had gone there to see it, as well as any other new films tackling the broad subject of human rights.

And even though I know she's fond of Sundance movies -- both for their increased marketability and to justify her long and expensive trip to Utah -- I turned it off after 20 minutes.

You know, burnout.

I will admit, even after the second viewing, that the first 20 minutes of Jonathan Olshefski's film do not give it its absolute best showcase. He follows the Rainey family, two of whom are pictured above (the film has no proper poster at this point), for a nearly ten-year period, the first few years without any idea what he was going to do with the material. That shows in the kind of rambling nature of the oldest footage we see. "Why are we watching this particular family?" I wondered at the time.

But when certain events in their lives really kick in, boy does this movie get going. And then there's the natural affection you start to feel for them just by spending time with them, which can only occur gradually over the course of a film's running time, increasing power and profundity the longer it goes.

I shut it off for two reasons:

1) Too much American content. Every time we choose movies for HRAFF, we seem to become acutely conscious, almost immediately, about how much good material we have from the U.S. As this is an international festival, and as Australia naturally has a bit of a "little brother" syndrome related to the U.S., we really try not to hit the American material too hard. Last year, that resulted in one of my favorite films we were considering being left off the program.

2) Too little, too late. When it's the end of the reviewing period, and the lineup is basically set, a film really needs to knock your socks off, or else you might as well just shut it off.

Quest didn't knock my socks off in those first 20 minutes, either time I saw it. But to have disqualified it so quickly discounts the possibility of a movie growing in power as it goes along. The conventional wisdom when reading a script is that if it hasn't grabbed you in the first 20 pages -- maybe even 15, maybe even 10 -- then it's never going to get any better. Movies must be front-loaded in order to get made. But that doesn't mean that a back-loaded movie can't be exquisitely satisfying, and Quest is one such movie.

I'm writing about this today primarily as a kind of apologia to Quest, which would have sat out in the cold if my advice had been followed. Advice that was based on an assumption formed after only 20 minutes, when any movie really deserves to have its whole running time considered.

But I'm also writing about it to suggest the practical limitations of any intense period of considering films for a festival. And HRAFF is, I have to imagine, one of the more intense out there, especially for a comparatively small festival (only about 30 features). Eight of us watch five dozen films over a period of five months from August to January, as many as five to six per week. If each contender were only being watched by one of us, we'd get through the lot more quickly, but it's an issue of fairness that demands each be watched by at least two people. That way, a programmer feeling a bit cranky that day can't single-handedly sink the fortunes of any particular film.

Or, a programmer suffering from burnout.

But we all suffered from burnout at one point or another during those five months, and I don't know that there's any way to avoid it short of considering fewer contenders overall. When I first started with HRAFF, I wondered how many human rights films could be made in any given year. The answer, as it turns out, is: a lot. And you won't really know if they're right for the festival until you watch them.

So now I'm questioning whether that's something I'll be doing again next year.

Two years should be sufficient to show myself as a seasoned festival programmer on my resume, should that kind of thing be necessary to any future career goals I have. But that kind of practical resume polishing wasn't the only reason I returned to HRAFF for a second year. Seeing the fruits of my labors in last year's festival, which included my three written pieces in the handsome festival program, and reveling in gala opening and closing nights that featured copious amounts of wine, I really felt the reward of all those months of grind. It was something I wanted to do again.

I suppose everything that is rewarding about HRAFF was rewarding again in 2017, if maybe to a slightly lesser degree. I was still proud of the blurbs I wrote about the films in the program. I still had my baby that I felt I had personally shepherded into the festival, Tanna this year on the heels of The Armor of Light last year. And opening and closing nights still consisted of copious amounts of wine.

But everything that is challenging about HRAFF was even more challenging this year -- and more challenging to a greater degree than it was more rewarding (particularly since it was slightly less rewarding). I think the burnout was a bit harder this year, and I think I have suffered even more of a setback in my overall desire to watch documentaries. That's not something I want. Sooner or later I will be far enough removed from watching 50 documentaries in five months that I will eagerly pop them into my DVD player again (or the digital equivalent thereof). But that day still seems pretty far in the future.

I guess there is a third reason I'm writing this post today: to sing the praises of Quest. Sadly, I doubt a theatrical release is forthcoming, and the director, who spoke about it at closing night in an engaging Q&A session, talked about it being most likely to materialize on public television. And while I would not want to denigrate public television, especially as it comes under threat from Donald Trump, I'm realistic in my idea of how many eyeballs it reaches in that capacity -- even though it should theoretically be available to everybody. Here's hoping it does eventually appear on Netflix or something, which will confer it some of the prominence it deserves.

The fact that we're living in Trump's America -- even if we live halfway across the world -- is all the more reason for a film like Quest to be seen. It's a film that celebrates the everyday exceptionalism of one underprivileged African-American family trying to navigate uncertain times, though it's not even explicitly about race or politics. Families that expect to be further marginalized under Trump deserve this kind of loving spotlight that doesn't preach at you, only showcases their messy, inspirational humanity.

That fact that we're living in Trump's America also gives me real pause when considering whether to come back for a third HRAFF, which will be kicking off all too soon in scarcely two months. While a part of me is inclined to reclaim the hours devoted to watching human rights movies, 80 percent of which won't make the festival, another part -- a stronger part? -- feels even more committed to doing my part to contributing art to the human rights conversation.

Even if it means debilitating levels of burnout.

A Bad finish to HRAFF

In name/title only.

The closing night film was The Bad Kids, which I watched back in January not two weeks after it debuted at Sundance. I gave it four stars on Letterboxd and became one of its staunch supporters, though that did not distinguish me from anyone else. We were all only too eager to jump on the enthusiasm train toward its inevitable inclusion in the program. Our program coordinator had actually flown to Utah for Sundance, the last major festival before our program had to be finalized, and that kind of financial expenditure needed to be justified by at least one selection from that festival, and probably more than one. (In fact, three were chosen, and a fourth was offered a slot but passed for an undisclosed reason.)

In fact, it was anything but a bad way to finish the festival. And again, I almost didn't go. Will explain that quickly without dwelling on it.

Given all the nights I had been out and that I was going out Friday night as well, my wife decided to claim Thursday night as a night to go to opening night of another film festival, the St. Kilda Film Festival, which shows short films. Some of her co-workers were going to go, and she had had fun when she went last year. So I advised the ticket coordinator that I wouldn't be going to closing night after all, in kind of a deja vu email conversation to when I'd given up my ticket to opening night. In another bit of deja vu, I then recanted that stance -- just like I'd done with opening night -- when my wife found out that most of her co-workers weren't going to St. Kilda and she'd just as soon pass. So in the end I did go, feeling like the ticketing coordinator must think I'm the biggest idiot in the world. (I actually met her at the closing party and we got along famously.)

I liked the film just a smidge better the second time around, as its merits had quickly faded in my memory -- or more likely, just become part of the big blur that characterized the end of five intense months of vetting films. It's directed by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, the directors of the great documentary Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to make a Don Quixote movie. Fulton and Pepe got an intimate level of access to a high school in the Joshua Tree area that enrolls at-risk 11th and 12th graders who are otherwise likely to drop out. They shot the film beautifully and got a startling level of emotional honesty from their subjects. You should see it arriving at a cinema near you later in the year, I would think.

Fulton and Pepe were there for a Q&A, and were a delight to listen to. They were also available at the after party, and I thought of approaching them to tell them how much I'd enjoyed La Mancha -- except that I saw that film a good ten years ago, and I'd be utterly unprepared for any follow-up conversation on the topic that might transpire. It's not like an awareness of their previous credits made me a particularly keen observer, since La Mancha was referenced in the festival booklet. So I decided to just let them be.

The after party. Well. If I thought I drank a lot at opening night, I hadn't yet fully tested my limits, it appears. In fact, I stayed so long that I missed the last tram at 12:15, and ended up walking home from downtown. I could have gotten a cab, but let's just say the state I was in made the walk plenty easy, and I had music on my iPod to provide additional accompaniment.

And though only three of the eight members of our featuring programming team were there -- kind of a surprise -- one was my viewing partner, who had been through the whole experience with me in that she and I had seen almost all the same films. We snapped some pictures and chatted up some others, some whom I sort of knew, others I was just meeting. And one wine glass led to another, and before I knew it, yeah, I'd missed that tram.

Still don't know if I'm in for another year of HRAFF, as there'll be a hell of a lot of more viewings between me and another closing night. But the satisfaction of experiencing the festival has been worth the work. And oh yeah, there'll probably be wine at next year's after party as well.

For now, a return to a more everyday viewing schedule ... and maybe some sleep.

You can't spell HRAFF without two F's

The most unusual double feature I have ever unwittingly planned was the one where both of the movies contain a euphemism for the word "fuck" in their titles.

That happened on Tuesday night, when I went to see the HRAFF screening of the movie GTFO, followed by a regular old cinematic screening of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Be it the word "Foxtrot" or just the plain old letter F, both movies were trying to tell me about the word "fuck" without actually saying it.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is, of course, the acronym WTF as spoken in the military alphabet. I would probably know that anyway, but I know it even more because I've memorized the military alphabet as part of my job. I regularly read out serial numbers to users and vendors, and the military alphabet lets a person do that without any confusion or fears of being misheard ("Did you say C or B or D?"). Here, I'll show you: alpha bravo charlie delta echo foxtrot golf hotel india juliet kilo lima mike november oscar papa quebec romeo sierra tango uniform victor whiskey x-ray yankee zulu. (You have no idea how quickly I typed that, but it was pretty quickly.)

Then GTFO stands for Get the Fuck Out, an acronym male gamers regularly hurl at female gamers who are trying to share their testosterone-laden gaming space. (The documentary is about the unsafe and abusive environment for female gamers and what to do about it.)

Unfortunately, I kind of wanted both of these movies to get the fuck out. I gave both of them 2.5 stars, and I think I may have been even a bit generous to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. (It's just hard to be mean to Tina Fey.) GTFO is on an important subject, but it's a poorly made film -- badly lit and using some interview footage filmed over Skype. It just doesn't look very nice, it's edited poorly, and the information is conveyed haphazardly. Then Whiskey is kind of a big collection of "so what?" Fey tries her hardest to be chipper and appealing, but she doesn't come across all that well, and the characters are difficult to care a thing about.

Because I was worried that I might be told to get the fuck out, I told a funny little lie before my screening of Whiskey.

I was well within my rights to be using my critics card, as the movie had only been out for five days and it was an approved night of the week to use the card. Yet I stumbled when confronted by an innocent question from the person printing me my ticket:

"Are you going be reviewing this film?"

Now, to be clear, she was not asking me this because she wanted to determine the validity of me using my critics card. If anything, she was starstruck. "Here is this great person before me, who has the power to tell other people to see movies or not see them." If anything, she couldn't believe that she was in some way involved in the process of a movie review coming into existence.

But I acted on instinct and saw a threat. "Yes," I said.

Well, I'm not reviewing this movie. My editor reviewed it like two weeks ago. And disliked it even more than I did.

But she wasn't done. She asked where my review would be appearing. Still starstruck, mind you. Still not checking up on me.

"ReelGood," I said, continuing the lie. I mean, that is the site I write for. But I did not venture a "dot com" or any other indication of what type of media organization ReelGood actually was. If she really wanted to follow up on our conversation, she could do the digging.

Not that it will ever come back to me, but if it did, I could always say I thought I was reviewing it and hadn't realized that we'd already reviewed it.

When I got inside, I jokingly texted my editor that he needed to repost his Whiskey review tomorrow and put my name on it.

To quote Curtis Armstrong, sometimes you just have to say WTF.

HRAFF - My baby

When you sign up to help program a film festival, you never know exactly how much your own imprint will appear on the final selections.

Sure, films you liked are going to get selected. You'd be quite the useless programmer if you ended up being at odds with everyone on all the selections.

But I didn't know how many films I personally championed would make the final cut.

The best example of that was The Armor of Light, the third film I've made it to as part of this year's HRAFF (Human Rights Arts & Film Festival). I've been calling it "my baby," and I got my "proud papa" moment on Monday night, with my wife sitting next to me.

Abigail Disney's documentary is about an evangelical minister and the mother of a black teenager who was shot to death over a dispute involving the volume of his rap music. The two come together to make unlikely crusaders for gun control -- unlikely because his constituency is comprised of massive defenders of the second amendment, and because as she states so movingly, she never expected she would ever personally be in the position of mourning a slain child. It's a truly profound consideration full of twists, turns and defied expectations. Your average liberal viewers will be naturally unsettled to meet the Reverend Rob Schenck, a one-time anti-abortion activist who used intense rhetoric in pro-life rallies and who currently ministers to Republican politicians in Washington D.C., instinctively believing that he could never adopt a viewpoint that's close to their hearts. Yet his personal examination of the conflict between being pro-life and pro-gun is engaging and poignant. And Lucy McBath's testimony about the loss of her son and her campaign to prevent other parents from being in her position ... well, it's hard to choke back the tears. Not only is the film challenging and invigorating, it also has some of the best cinematography I've ever seen in a documentary.

I gave The Armor of Light five stars on Letterboxd after I watched it in September, and ultimately ranked it 14th out of all the movies I saw in 2015. (I now wish I'd had the courage to rank it in my top ten.) Immediately after my viewing I began talking off the ears of all the other programmers. My viewing partner also liked it a lot, but stopped short of giving it the rating of "Lock" I had confidently bestowed it. So while we jointly loved some films that didn't end up making it, The Armor of Light was really all on me. My enthusiasm put The Armor of Light on a shortlist of highly rated films for other programmers to watch, and soon I had a couple other passionate supporters on my side, including the program coordinator. It ended up being one of the first films offered a slot in the program.

So while I saw other films I was interested in go down to defeat -- in some instances because I knew the festival director didn't particularly care for it -- I always had The Armor of Light in my back pocket as one certain programming victory for me. I wrote the blurb that appeared next to it in the program, and couldn't wait to watch it with an audience.

Which almost didn't happen.

Although I'd told my wife I wanted to take her to this showing not long after the schedule was released, it wasn't until a couple days before that she actually asked my sister-in-law about babysitting on Monday night. I could kind of understand her hesitation. The movie didn't start until 8:45, so it would be a somewhat late night for my sister-in-law. While in some respects it would be an easier night than some of the times she babysits for us, as the kids would already be in pajamas by the time she came over, the fact of the matter was that she wouldn't be getting home until 11:30 or so -- on a school night. I suspect this weighed on my wife's mind as she procrastinated asking her sister.

My sister-in-law was all too happy to oblige -- she's good like that -- but then came the sickness that hit our family, in different ways for each of us. My older son has been sniffling for a couple weeks, and the younger one got sent home early on Thursday when one of his carers informally diagnosed him with hand foot and mouth disease. Whether he really had it or not I'm not sure of, since he seemed perky as hell. But we kept him home on Friday and weren't sure we'd be sending him Monday until Monday morning. Then my wife had been sneezing incessantly since early Sunday morning, and I had a tickle in my throat that I was sure would turn into something more. Needless to say, an 8:45 screening on Monday night was looking doubtful -- especially for my wife, but really, for both of us.

By Monday morning, though, everyone was fine, and we haven't looked back since.

Well, it turned into a lovely evening. My wife and I got down there early enough to have a nice dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant near the cinema, and even each dared to have a drink with dinner, despite the possibility it would cause our eyelids to droop during the movie. I didn't worry so much about myself -- I knew it was engaging enough that I wouldn't doze off, or if I did, it would be okay since I'd already seen it anyway. I worried about my wife, who's slightly less likely than I am to fight off sleep at the movies (in part because she goes a lot less than I do), but falls asleep on the couch at home all the time.

Fortunately, these fears were also unfounded. I could tell my wife was pretty gripped right from the start. There's some very emotional testimony by Lucy McBath not ten minutes into the movie, and I could hear my wife fighting back tears. She also laughed at a few of the film's lighter or more ridiculous moments (Sarah Palin makes an appearance), and scoffed when she was supposed to scoff.

Hers was the only reaction I could really gauge, unfortunately. There were maybe 40 others in the theater -- not the sell-out I was hoping for -- and they too reacted audibly at various junctures. I might have also caught a little weeping here and there too, I don't know. But really extrapolating much from their behavior was impossible.

I don't know exactly what I was expecting. I knew a standing ovation was probably out of the question, since this doesn't really seem to be that kind of festival -- the audience didn't even stand and applaud on opening night, even though that was a really good film and they knew the filmmaker was present.

But I decided it didn't really matter. This was my moment of glory, and nothing was going to sully it for me. I didn't feel inclined to look for a specific response. I already had all the validation I needed, that a little movie I'd unwittingly watched in three different sittings on my laptop at home, in part while putting away laundry, had made it to the big screen as part of a festival on human rights. It felt that in whatever small way, this was my contribution to making the world a better place.

And it was a joy to do something I wished I'd have done in the first place, if I'd had any reason to suspect it would be so great -- watch the whole thing in one uninterrupted sitting.

And yeah, it was pretty obvious that the evening's main draw was the film playing in the other screening room, the third showing of the opening night film, Chasing Asylum. That one looked pretty much sold out.

But I'd like to think that it was our 40 in my screening room who were really having their perspectives, their very minds, expanded.

Ernest, not Angry

On Sunday my son chose Ernest & Celestine over The Angry Birds Movie.

He didn't know he was choosing Ernest & Celestine, because he didn't know what it was, and we didn't end up seeing either movie anyway. But he knew enough about The Angry Birds Movie to reject it, which was the most interesting takeaway. Essentially, he preferred whatever was behind Door #2 to The Angry Birds Movie.

I'll explain.

Ernest & Celestine, a 2013 Academy award nominee for best animated feature, was supposed to be the third movie I watched for this year's Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), which I helped curate. It was part of the festival's children's program called Cineseeds, which is just two features -- one aimed at younger children, one at older -- on the festival's second Sunday.

I was going to take my five-year-old to see it, in part just for an activity on a Sunday afternoon, but in part also to show him the kinds of things that daddy has been up to. In fact, daddy had not seen Ernest & Celestine either, but oddly enough, was directly responsible for it being part of the festival.

The committee that approves selections for Cineseeds is notoriously selective, and there had been about 15 choices we'd vetted as a group that they had ultimately ruled out, despite enthusiastic recommendations on our part in some cases. Desperate, the festival coordinator contacted me and asked if I could provide another list of options, based on my wealth of general cinematic knowledge. They didn't have to be new releases, so that was supposed to make it easier. I did my best to come up with some on my own, but also asked my Flickcharters Facebook discussion group for recommendations of (loosely) human rights-themed choices that would be appropriate for kids. Ernest & Celestine was one of their recommendations, and I passed it on to the coordinator, having no idea if it was a useful suggestion or not, and even less assumption that it would actually be selected.

It was selected, so that gave me a little bit of extra pride that made me think I should take my son -- even though he's a lot more into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers these days than hand-drawn movies about a bear and a mouse. Just to be on the safe side, I didn't show him any images from it.

As he's been somewhat difficult to please at the movies, I expected he'd need more of a buy-in, but he was willing to go. In fact, he seemed cautiously excited about it.

Unfortunately, we've all been a bit sick the last few days, and the movie was starting at 2:45, kind of a problematic start time for a number of reasons. That meant we needed a full other activity to start the day, and ended up going to the home of one of my wife's friends, who has a son just a few months older than my oldest. Three hours over there took enough out of me that a nap seemed more appealing to me around 1 o'clock than being dropped off at the theater early and having to kill 90 minutes until the movie started.

Waking from my nap way too late at just before 2, I randomly decided to check the HRAFF website to make sure I'd gotten the start time right. I had -- but I also hadn't anticipated the demand. The movie was sold out. A ticket had already been reserved for me, so that wasn't a problem, but I'd never bothered to buy one for my son, not wanting to commit the money if we didn't end up going. I had been monitoring the website, though, and it hadn't even been listed as "selling fast" in the days leading up to it.

As my wife was sicker than I was and needed her own nap even more (while the younger one was having his), there was no doubt that my son and I were still going to try to make the movie. So I texted the festival coordinator, wondering if she might have some idea what to do. She wasn't actually there, but sent me the phone number of the festival director, who would be and might have an idea. I couldn't actually read the contact card she sent through, adding a further level of complication.

While this was all transpiring, though, we needed to actually be leaving. So we went and jumped in the car, which was probably the thing that ultimately sealed our fate. We'd been meaning to go by public transportation, since parking is hard near that theater, but the unexpected delays of the later nap and lack of available tickets made the car seem like a faster choice. When traffic was also bad, the writing was on the wall that we would miss Ernest & Celestine.

Before breaking the news to my son, I quickly came up with what I thought was an air-tight backup plan. Checking the Hoyts app on my phone for any child-appropriate new releases, I struck gold -- The Angry Birds Movie. I didn't expect it to be good, mind you, but I expected it to have a lot more natural interest for my son's current tastes than Ernest & Celestine.

What was so lucky about that particular choice was that my son was fresh off a moment of Angry Birds-related triumph on Mother's Day, just a week before. That morning I took my kids out for pancakes and some errands at the mall, one of which was going to the video game place my older son loves. There he played an Angry Birds game that involves shooting an actual "angry bird" with an actual sling shot at a video game screen of pigs balanced on precarious wooden towers. Wherever the ball hits the screen, some amount of corresponding damage occurs to the towers. If you can create a domino effect of destruction with a particularly well-placed shot, and knock off all four pigs with one bird, you can win the grand prize of 500 tickets.

I assumed that no one ever does this. But my son did it, probably without even trying to. As he watched the tickets getting digitally applied to our game card, and all the game's pomp and circumstance involved with the perfect shot, he had a silly grin of victory on his face. Since he can often get down on himself when he isn't immediately good at things, it was great for him to have a win like this. It also was a nice early financial lesson, as having all these tickets meant he could afford to buy something in the store -- something that was actually kind of cool, not just plastic hair clips or a little hard candy. With his winnings he bought a little gun that shoots potato pellets, and he was happy as pie.

Seizing on that experience, I promoted The Angry Birds Movie as a backup plan. He barely stopped to consider it. "Nah," he said. "Not interested."

I had almost no time to revel in his good taste before he hit me with a big dollop of emotional manipulation. The idea of missing Ernest & Celestine -- whose title he did not even know -- was now suddenly going to crush him. He kept asking if we could drive faster and whether we could honk the horn to make everyone get out of our way. Eventually I had to tell him that not only would we not get there on time, there would be no tickets waiting for us, and only if I could get in touch with the festival director would we even have any hope of getting in. I had the festival director's number by now, but closing the space in the amount of remaining time was quickly becoming a physical impossibility.

My second backup plan, one that was sure to satisfy him, still seemed only barely able to do so. My second backup was to take him back to that same video arcade where he'd won at Angry Birds. He reluctantly agreed that this was an acceptable plan. Though even after that, even after he knew we were no longer going to Ernest & Celestine, he asked how close we were to getting to the theater.

It's about a bear and a mouse, kid! It's got no guns or mutated reptiles! And it's not even drawn very well! 

An apple juice, a chocolate bar and a handful of video games later, he was fully happy and seemed to have forgotten the aborted plan. He played the Angry Birds game once again, did not win the 500 tickets, shrugged, and walked away.

I too was a little disappointed not to get to see Ernest & Celestine. Not only is it of presumably high quality, as a recent Oscar nominee, but it taught the important lesson of tolerance. My son's expressed some fears about people who are different from him, so this could have done the valuable work of helping assuage some of those fears. Theoretically.

Or he could have been bored to tears and made us leave after 20 minutes. There's that.

He didn't get that dose of tolerance, but at least he didn't replace it with a movie where enraged birds shoot themselves at pigs.

HRAFF: Flocking

When choosing which sessions of the 2016 HRAFF festival -- which I helped curate -- I would like to actually attend, I focused mostly on films I hadn't already seen.

Oddly, especially for a festival in which I was one of the programmers, I haven't seen more than a third of the 30 films ultimately chosen. In fact, a better way to describe it would be that I've only seen just over half. Thirteen of the 30 films were unseen by me, which gives you some indication of exactly how many contenders we had.

So that left me no shortage of choices. And having become a bit warn out by all the documentaries I watched, I naturally gravitated toward one of the two narrative films I hadn't seen.

That was Beata Garleder's Flocking, which I watched on Wednesday night in what felt like ages after I attended opening night. In reality, it was six nights later. My HRAFF schedule gets a bit more packed from here on out, as I will see four more films between Sunday and closing night next Thursday.

I wish I could say it was a movie I would recommend that others should flock to.

It's not the subject matter that ended up turning me off. I knew it was about a town who turns against a high school girl after she accuses one of her classmates of raping her. No, it was the total lack of charisma of the actors that did it. And the total lack of surprises in the way the movie investigates victim blaming. I knew the people would be assholes, but I thought at least they would be assholes in interesting ways.

I think I was probably also comparing it to a similar film that I had championed that we didn't end up programming. I'm probably not supposed to say the title, but I will because it could help other people eventually get to watch it. (As opposed to me mentioning a rejected title in a catty light, which would have no positive byproducts for that film.) That film was/is called Three Windows a Hanging, and instead of being Scandinavian, it takes place in Kosovo. In that case, a woman is shunned by the others in her village, especially the men, when she tells an international journalist that she and other women in their village were raped during the Serbian conflict back in the late 1990s. Not only did that film have acting that was far superior to the performances in Flocking, but it's also shot and framed beautifully. If I'm going to struggle with the darkness of sexual violence, I at least want it to be aesthetically and dramatically pleasing.

So while Flocking wasn't a hit for me, it was nice to return to the festival after nearly a week without screenings.

And it was also nice that I was able to avoid making eye contact with the festival director on the way out, so I wouldn't have to give him my thoughts on the movie.

HRAFF Opening Night - I made it

For those of you on pins and needles about whether I got to go to HRAFF Opening Night after initially turning down my free ticket, well, the subject of this post has already spoiled the suspense for you.

I did indeed get to see Eva Orner's Chasing Asylum, a film so new it does not yet have a proper poster available on Google Images. It just had its world premiere last week at a documentary festival in Canada, and the screening last night was its third to the public overall.

When I emailed the HRAFF marketing person to ask if there were perhaps one more "secret" ticket that had been held back to the sold-out performance, she told me that indeed there was -- exactly one extra ticket. Whether it was really the only extra ticket or not, I'll probably never know, but I do know that it was waiting for me when I showed up at the box office Thursday night at around 6:25.

I thought I'd be burnt out on this stuff after five solid months of it from September through early February, but as it turned out, a good film can still speak to me, no matter how many similar ones I may have seen. The plight of refugees trying to enter Australia by boat -- who are instead diverted to detention centers on the small islands of Manus in Papua New Guinea, and the island nation of Nauru -- struck me freshly. So not only was it worth going just to swan about and enjoy the fruits of my labors, but also to see a movie that really moved me.

I ended up running into two fellow programmers in the lobby, one from my team and one from the team that selected the shorts program, but who I'd met before. The three of us sat together for the movie and the Q&A session with the director that followed. Two screening rooms at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) were filled for opening night, and since we were in the second theater, we had to watch the speeches on live video from the other one. But that hardly mattered, and if anything, gave us the freedom not to be as well-behaved an audience. (Not that we behaved poorly, but there were some people checking their phones during the Q&A who probably wouldn't have been doing so otherwise.)

Listening to about four speeches that kicked off the ceremony, I felt really glad that my wife had encouraged me to go to this. When you watch 80 movies over five months in putting together a film festival, the least you can do is show up and be feted on opening night. I wasn't thanked by name, of course, but our progamming team was thanked, and I did feel a bit of a rush of pride as this happened.

I wasn't sure what would follow the film, whether a small contigent of programmers would go off to get drinks, or whether I might even sneak off and see a second film in a nearby theater. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the Q&A wrapped up with the moderator telling us to go enjoy some drinks downstairs. Some? I had about eight. Or it felt like that, anyway. I started with a beer, and then flowed on to wine. And flowed. And flowed. And flowed.

And thank God for the tray-passed hors d'eouvres, as I hadn't managed to grab dinner before the screening.

And as I talked to a second programmer -- my viewing partner -- as well as the two I'd been sitting with, not to mention about three of their friends, and then a fourth programmer and the festival's coordinator and director, getting steadily drunker over the next 90 minutes, I thought really seriously for the first time about doing this again this year. The party at the end is all worth it. Am I right?

I'm a big hungover today, but that's a small price to pay for months of toil culminating in an evening of drinking and celebration. And through my hungover haze, I'm still basking in that glow.

A big thing I never told you about

You probably think that I fill you in on every minor detail of my life as a cinephile, between either writing about what I've seen or simply recording it in list format to the right of these words. But I've been keeping a major aspect of my cinematic life a secret from you for about eight months now. It's finally time to tell all.

Starting in September, I began watching as many as six movies per week as one of the programmers for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), a Melbourne-based festival that also tours an abbreviated version of its schedule in other cities around Australia after its initial two-week Melbourne run. Here is the website if you are interested in taking a gander at the program or learning more about the organization. The viewings themselves ended in mid-February, and now opening night of the festival is tomorrow night.

I am probably not going to opening night, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Why was I keeping this a secret from you? Well, I'll tell you.

We weren't meant to tell anyone what we were watching for the festival, as it was supposed to be confidential. I guess that's to protect the people whose films were considered but ultimately rejected, or possibly something that has more of a legal basis than just being wary of hurt feelings. In any case, we were asked to keep our discussions of the films limited to weekly team meetings. (We'd also usually watch a film at these meetings.)

So I ran into a bit of a logistical problem. See, I'm nothing if not set in my ways, and my ways include always updating my Most Recently Seen For the First Time list on the right side of this page, without fail and without exception. I could continue to do that ... as long as I didn't tell you why I was watching these movies. Or so went my rationale.

Now that this list hasn't contained one of these movies for something like ten weeks, I figured it was finally safe to tell you about my experience. I hate holding out on you.

My wife saw that they were looking for volunteer programmers for HRAFF around the end of August, and encouraged me to apply. As a person who does not naturally gravitate to human rights films, I didn't consider myself a strong applicant for the role. But my wife persevered, pointing out that serving as a programmer for a film festival would look good on my resume if I were ever seeking paying work in this type of field. I could not argue with that logic.

After meeting with the festival coordinator and festival director, I got excited by the idea ... but was also wary. They told me up front that the role would include five additional films of "homework" per week, beyond the film we would watch once a week as a group. Given some of the commitments I already had on my schedule -- like, watching lots of movies for the film series on this blog and for my year-end list -- I doubted I'd be able to manage it. But they offered me a spot on the team, and again my wife said to just try it out -- I could always quit if it were too overwhelming.

Well, it was too overwhelming -- but the last thing I wanted to do was quit. I'm not a quitter, but more than that, I was loving being part of this team.

I was one of eight programmers, which included two other men and five women. We were divided into groups of two, and your partner and you would watch the same films each week and include comments in a spreadsheet that we would all jointly update. You'd give each film one of four ratings: Lock, High Consider, Low Consider or Pass. Then include a sentence or two (or in my case, six or seven) singing the praises or bemoaning the shortcomings of each film. That way, every film that we were considering -- either because it had been submitted to us for a fee, or because it had been cherry-picked from other festivals -- would be seen by at least two people. If the film were really good, the director and the coordinator might also watch it, as might the other six programmers. If the film were really bad, it would never be spoken of again.

What tends to happen is that you give any film you are not really sure of a High, "to keep it in contention." In other words, to let someone else be the bad guy who ultimately passes on it. A Low or a Pass is basically a death sentence for a film, though I did give one film a Pass that ultimately ended up making it into the program. (I won't tell you which.) A Lock is meant to be reserved for films where you want others to prioritize watching them as soon as possible because you feel that there's no doubt this should be part of the festival. So you are not meant to be careless with your Locks. The result of this scoring system is that sometimes people will give a film a High/Lock or a High/Low, to try to suggest a subtler gradation to their feelings about a film. But since we are asked not to do that and since I was one of only two people who actually obeyed those rules, I ended up giving out a lot of Highs and significantly less of the other three grades.

I loved going to our weekly meetings and hobnobbing with the others who had been chosen, all of whom were interesting people with whom I could have seen myself striking up friendships. It's great to have your opinion on a film valued, and to be assembling your perfect lineup for a festival that intends to effect social change and call out tyranny. So there were societal benefits to what I was doing, it stroked my ego, it was rewarding socially, and it was also just plain fun.

But that's not to say it was not hard, and did not get incredibly tedious.

Fortunately, many of these films were only just over an hour long, and running times over 90 minutes were extremely rare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 90% of them were also documentaries. So it was easier to squeeze them in than if I had been watching that many narrative features per week. But that was still at least five hours, and probably more like seven, of additional film programming per week, when I was also trying to maintain my regular viewing schedule and doing a side gig for a little extra pay. It was physically and mentally taxing, and I sometimes felt like Sisyphus pushing that boulder each time we got our list of links to five new online screeners each Monday. I had been hoping that there would be enough films of sufficiently low quality that I could turn them off after 20 minutes, and we were indeed allowed to do this. But I ended up doing that less than ten times out of an eventual 80 films I watched for the festival. (Eighty was actual the number I watched all the way through -- with the other ten or fewer, it was a total of around 90 that were assigned.)

So yeah, now you know why I set a record for most new films watched in 2015. And you also have an explanation for this post, which must have seemed pretty random at the time.

The cumulative effect of watching so many films about asylum seekers, repressed Muslim women, gay Israelis, people seeking voting rights and women being denied abortions is that you get kind of burnt out on films about asylum seekers, repressed Muslim women, gay Israelis, people seeking voting rights and women being denied abortions. I'm exaggerating a bit here to suggest that the content was limited to these five topics, as it certainly wasn't, and even if I saw a number of films about these topics, that's not to say they did not approach them differently and interestingly in most cases. But I wrote in this post from a year ago about struggling to summon enthusiasm for documentaries in general, even before my experience with HRAFF, and an influx of 70 more of them into my 2015/early 2016 viewing schedule probably drove me even further away from them, in the end. Even if I ultimately loved some of the ones I saw ("my baby," The Armor of Light, nearly made my top ten of 2015 -- I'll be seeing it again next week, this time on the big screen).

So yeah, it was a struggle at times. A lot of films were watched late at night between bouts of sleeping on the couch. Some of them are total blurs. Others were watched in 15-minute segments over the course of two days. When you are watching so many movies, you just fit them in as you can. It's an imperfect system and maybe we only should have watched three a week, but I also feel pretty sure that this method allowed us to choose the best of the relevant material out there at the time.

And this experience also opened my eyes to just how many films are being made each year that we never see/hear about. How many good films. How many good films just about human rights. It's kind of astounding. I didn't include many of them on my year-end list because films needed to fit certain release criteria in order to be included. A lot of these were films that had not yet been released theatrically, or at least not in the U.S. or Australia. Some of them were disqualified as 2014 films, or in a rare case or two even 2013. If I'd let them all in, I would have had nearly 200 films to rank from 2015 and my list wouldn't have been that relatable to the casual reader. So I let in about ten that had a U.S. or Australian release in 2015.

During the year, we had three special programmer meetings where we watched no films and only discussed our ten favorite so far, in trying to draft a preliminary list. These were my favorite meetings as they involved the most interaction between programmers and the most sharing of warm fuzzies about films we loved, and occasionally, bonding over the weaknesses of films we didn't. When the last one came and went in late January, ending the formal portion of my programmer assignment, it was not without some melancholy. The experiences that drain us the most can also be the most rewarding.

We've had one event since then, the program launch at the beginning of April. Here we got to enjoy free drinks with other industry types as the director announced which films had made the final cut. As I also wrote three blurbs about the films for the program, I also got to hear my own words quoted back to me as he announced the films with a slide show behind him. It was a nice reward to months of hard work.

Unfortunately, I disqualified myself from one of the other HRAFF spoils I should have enjoyed.

As an additional thank you for all our hard work, we were allowed one free ticket to any ten of the 30 sessions, as well as tickets to opening and closing night. In a decision I now regret, I released my right to my opening night tickets, in part because of the subject matter burnout alluded to earlier. Because there were more films being considered than any of us could possibly see, it turns out that as many as half of the films selected for the festival are ones you haven't seen. I'm correcting that with a couple films over the next few weeks, but one I chose not to watch was Chasing Asylum, the opening night film. Yet one more film about asylum seekers was just too much for me to handle at that point, so I decided to be magnanimous and let someone else attend the sold-out opening night.

I didn't give it a second thought until my wife said yesterday, "Aren't you going to HRAFF opening night?"

When I told her I had relinquished my right to my tickets, the fact that I didn't want to see the movie sounded like a particularly weak reason. I mean, this was my opportunity to swan about and enjoy the fruits of my labors, in addition to probably the only time I'll get a chance to see all the programmers together again. I immediately emailed the ticket woman to see if there were any "secret tickets" stashed away somewhere. As of this writing, I have yet to receive her response.

But whatever happens with that, I'll try not to be too disappointed. Instead, I'll hope to run into some of my programming colleagues when I go see Flocking next Wednesday, Ernest & Celestine next Sunday (as a part of a kids program -- I'll take my son), The Armor of Light the following Monday (I'll be bringing my wife), and then GTFO on Tuesday. Closing night is The Bad Kids, a film I've already seen, but you know what? I've decided I am going to that, because that will be the really last time I'll get a chance to be part of this experience.

Will I give myself the chance to be part of it again next year? Three of this year's eight programmers were returning from last year, after all.

It's hard to say at this point. I am probably leaning towards "No." After all, there were times that I thought it might kill me. And the cumulative effect has, indeed, been to numb me to the legitimate human rights concerns these people have, to dull some of the righteous indignation I should feel about their plights.

But maybe all I need is a rest. Maybe in August I'll feel differently.

And if I don't, well, this was an experience I'll never forget.

Now, off to enjoy the easy part of the experience ... to just sit back and enjoy the finished product.