Greetings from the 53rd annual Flaherty Seminar, the Age of Migration, curated by Chi-hui Yang. The cinetrix hasn't yet had her first cup of essential, life-sustaining coffee, so a word on what we've seen thus far. Not sure whether I've yet arrived at a place where I could say what I think anyhow, but perhaps releasing the pressure with this trephine they call the Internet will help.
Saturday evening saw only one session but three films: Q (2002) by Oliver Husain, Cargo (2001) by Laura Waddington, and God Is My Safest Bunker (2008) by Lee Wang.
Sunday morning we got into the full swing. Do note, it is Flaherty tradition not to announce the film you're about to see until asses are in seats in the theatre. Chi-Hui's upped the ante a bit more by not telling us the titles--only the running times. It is also traditional to screen a work by Robert Flaherty sometime during the seminar. And so it was that a rarely seen jawn he put together for the extension service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called The Land (1942) unspooled, followed by Ursula Biemann's Black Sea Files (2005), and, as a lagniappe, Skate Manzanar (2001), by Renee Tajima-Pena.
The afternoon began with another Oliver Husain piece, Shrivel (2005), a short by James Hong called The Form of the Good (2006), and our first feature, Bahman Ghobadi's Half-Moon (2006). [He'd been invited to attend but got tripped up by visa snarls.]
And then there was the evening screening. Given the presence of one Pedro Costa at the cocktail hour before dinner and our half-hour-earlier start time, my money was on Colossal Youth (2006). So it was written, etc. etc. It was the first Costa film I've seen, but not the last, I suspect, and it has been seeping slowly into the crenellations of my brain ever since.
By my count, that makes two mentions of the ol' cranium, which may be its subtle way of telling me it'd like some coffee. More anon.
