Wait, She Was Gone?

You know how when you're out of town for a few days, you have to make sure you have something good to do on the night you get back into town so you won't feel let down that the trip is over? No, neither did my traveling companion, so it must be just me.

And actually there were three strong possibilities for tonight (a Sunday night at that), but I decided to go with the James River Filmmakers Forum at Balliceaux.

It's a quarterly event and since I'd missed the Reel Pride Film Fest during my absence this weekend (I so wanted to see Howl and Auntie Mame on the big screen), I was definitely in the mood for film.

When I walked into the back room, I was just deciding on a chair when a stranger came up, smiled and asked, "You were at the Ghostprint show the other night, weren't you?"

I was but I didn't recognize him at all. I thought maybe he'd been sitting behind me and that's why he didn't look familiar, but it turned out he was one of the chair-less ones on the floor in front of me. Try to pay attention, Karen.

We got to talking about who we knew in common and he turned out to be a musician, so we did share some friends and had even been to some of the same shows.

He's originally from Chicago and is as big a fan as I am of Ghostprint as a music venue. We were in complete agreement about Benoit Pioulard's performance that night being our favorite. When it got to be time for the program to start, I sat down and he sat beside me so I had company after all.

The films ran the gamut from pithy political satire (a clever PSA on tolerance done by a film teacher who made his first film in- gasp-1959 -at age 8) to two entries from this year's 48-hour Film Fest, but only one of which I'd seen.

And now I know that the other one was fueled by Amp gum, apparently a dangerous substance to those lacking sleep and overly full on pizza ("I thought I was going to throw up").

There was a dream-like montage trailer for a movie that won't be finished anytime soon (the director's first effort took 7 years) and an experimental documentary about the power of icons and how they mutate over time. Jesus action figure, anyone?

We saw a Super 8 piece from a longer documentary about transient, train-riding homeless Christians, apparently a distinct group of rail riders. The director, still an undergraduate at VCU, rode the rails for 2 1/2 years gathering interviews and footage of some of these people and this clip focused on a rider named Ben.

During the directors' panel after the screenings, the train director said that he wanted to thank the kitchen for the background Lou Reed song and the noise of the cash register providing the perfect sounds to underscore his documentary's anti-capitalist message while it was showing.

When the director of the icon film was asked if she seeks out death when traveling, as seemed apparent in her film, she acknowledged that she does ("I need to see Rudolph Valentino's grave.") and that a friend refers to this habit of hers as necro-tourism.

Nerd that I am, I always look forward to the panel afterwards mainly because the other directors ask such great questions of each other. Some of them are purely technical (how did you transfer from Super 8 to digital?), while others, especially with the documentaries, are more questions of style.

My style is to get back from a really interesting trip and jump back in to something entertaining and artsy with both feet. Even better if I meet someone and have some good conversation while I'm at it.

It almost makes it worth coming back. Almost.