Buffalo round-up!

I bet that make you think I’m going to be lassoing huge woolly mammals, doesn’t it?

Well, I’m not. For your bison rodeo needs, look elsewhere.

I’m back from Buffalo! More specifically, back from North Tonawanda, NY, home of the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival and the beautiful Riviera Theatre (which is in turn home to the “Mighty Wurlitzer”, a turn of the century pipe organ). Robin and I had a wonderful time screening dead saints. We ran around and hung up a lot of posters on lampposts in the lead up. And, dead saints recieved an honorable mention at the awards ceremony on the last night! (Just incidentally, we have finally created a facebook page for the movie, and you should go and “like” it, here. There are lots of pictures from the trip there, too.) We met a lot of interesting people (Like Greg Dwyer of Dwyer’s Irish Pub, who once offered us a boat ride back across the river to the hotel. I’m not even kidding.), and even found the time to take in a few local sights–the roller rink and the carousel museum, where i rode a lovely and noble steed built in 1860.

We watched a lot of movies, the majority of them very, very high quality.  There was a short film of Romeo and Juliet performed by actors with down’s syndrome that was enchanting, and a wicked short from Portugal called “Deriva”(Drift) which was one of the highlights of the festival for me…it had the feeling of possibly being the first fifteen minutes of an absolutely brilliant feature film yet to come, and I hope that actually turns out to be the case and not just my wishful thinking.  My favorite people we met were, absolutely and without a doubt, the cast and crew of Tin Can.  I am going to shamelessly plug their film now, just to warn you. For starters, they built a flipping spaceship in a ~garage. then they shot the bulk of the entire feature length movie in said spaceship. The script is great, the actors are great, the movie looks great, it’s all just flat out great. Plus they are all really cool people. In fact, I instantly dorked out and told them I would cheerfully haul arse to Vermont to work with them anytime, and I totally meant it.

On our last morning, i managed to empty an entire bottle of orange juice into my purse leaving the hotel, fried my phone, and made the rest of my stuff a nice sticky mess for the bus trip back across the border. I’m amazed they didn’t have to wring out my passport at customs.  I have taken this as a sign that I need the sleep I did not bother with while we were cavorting about the festival, and have decided to sleep from now until next week to make up for it.