The long and the shorts

Keeping the Tengu out

The LDS Film Festival is always a party.
Marc and I enjoy going for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to see what's new.
He's into movies and likes to watch them, be in them and tell you what he knows about them.
I like the escapism, the dark theater, the bliss in knowing somebody other than me is on the screen trying to fall in love, get away from the aliens and bad guys or attempting to right a wrong.
We both know going in that it might be painful.
Some of the amateur productions are pretty dorky and really hard to sit through.
(We are still trying to recover from a production called "Uinta United" that we saw years ago.)
And some are purely delightful and fresh and just plain interesting because they go where no man or producer has gone before.
(We found that last year in "Clara's Tale.")
This year, we only had time to see a nightly feature film and a couple of shorts featuring children on Saturday.

going, going, gone

I squeezed in a documentary called "Passages" that told a few stories about LDS people who either just missed the (Titanic) boat and thus lived to tell about it or died helping others as the liner sank.
It was a marvelous watch and something new about the event that I hadn't known before.
But the best part of the day on Saturday were the shorts featuring children.
We saw Graham Crackers and Guilt, a well-done piece about a little boy who kept getting notes from his teacher to his parents and thereby losing his after-school snack. In the end, it was so rewarding to see him earn three, count'em, three chocolate chip cookies to dunk in his milk.
We watched "The Lemonade Stand" produced by a photographer friend Mark Hedengren that featured a totally cute and precocious little girl who was so fun to listen to, for a while. We watched an insightful piece about an autistic child by the name of "Lucy."
My favorite short was"The Boy and the Tengu." (In case you don't know, a Tengu is a Japanese boogeyman with a long red nose, a boogeyman who's not too bright.)
It's a charming little story that resonated with me and it wasn't until it was halfway through I realized it was done by the same people who did "Clara's Tale," Mormon parents Eliza and Jan Dawson.
It had the same sort of magic and innocence.
It made me want to look them up again and see how they're doing. Apparently they now have several new films almost ready to go.
I consider that good news.
Here's the link to their stuff: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/48383514/clara-tales-second-attempt/posts/385201)
Enjoy.