All Over

The Brussels Festival of Fantastic Film is finally finished. Saturday was the closing night ceremony, closing night film and the Vampire's Ball. The Ball began at midnight and lasted until 7am (we only managed to stay til 2am and then walked home because the metro wasn't running). Today I am recovering, but only for a little while. This afternoon I have to go back to work and begin packaging up the remaining films for shipment. Each film weighs about 25 kilos, so I get a good workout moving them from the theater to the office, even with a dolly! I've spent so much time lately thinking about what I have to do and where they all have to go, that I've been dreaming about boxes and film titles and destinations and FedEx.

During the festival my job was to make sure the films arrived in time for their screenings and then send them back out afterwards. Lots of the films came to us from one film festival and then were to be sent to another festival - sort of a film festival circuit. I ended up sending films all over the place; to Singapore, Denmark, Philadelphia, Germany, France, Luxembourg, etc. But this only took three or four hours a day, so I had plenty of time to read or run errands or whatever. True rest and relaxation will have to wait a little longer because I am working for two more weeks, helping Freddy get the awards shipped to the winners and sorting out all the Beta and VHS copies of the films (the festival has a video archive of all the movies they've screened from the last 10 years). This should only take a couple of days, so I think by the 8th or 9th of April I will be done.

The festival was fun and tiring and not stressful in the least, so all in all, a good experience. The best part was seeing movies for free! Rich and I saw 13 films during the last two weeks, including my favorite, a hilarious Danish film called "The Green Butchers." Freddy (my boss) saw to it that we had unlimited drink tickets for the festival bar, gave Rich free passes to all the films and a ticket to the Ball. Working for free since the end of November paid off!

To see photos of the film festival events and read about the films, click here.

~K