C-U Blogfidential

…that I sat in the lobby of the New Art Theater in downtown Champaign with operator Tom Angelica as well as Grace Giorgio, Eric Fisher, and the other core Freaky Film Festival volunteers as the opening night feature pURe kILLjoy finished unspooling and freaking out our audience. We had just cleaned up pizza boxes and other refuse so when the movie let out things would look back to normal. Not that anything involving an event called the Freaky Film Festival could be construed as normal, including kILLjoy which I skipped because it had already bent my mind via screener videotape (remember those?), although I stayed in the auditorium long enough to catch the film short that officially kicked things off for the third annual go-round, RESURRECTION directed by Leslie Nagy.

That night proved to be even more of a happy anomaly for myself. Somehow, the pizza buried the butterflies released in my stomach just prior to the films during opening remarks, when Giorgio invited me up front to introduce a new C-U publication designed to address exactly the sort of out-there oeuvre which powered Freaky Films and the United States’ burgeoning underground film festival circuit of the Nineties. Our popular local event provided a refreshing antithesis to commercial movie-making and gladly went places that neither the cinema studies department at the University of Illinois or the brand-new Overlooked Film Festival hosted by Roger Ebert would ever go. The same could easily be said for that which I held up high so everyone in the SRO crowd could see:

It certainly qualified as a high point in my life, especially given that my force of will pretty much pushed this issue out the door and into existence more than anything else. Let’s see what we can do about reinvigorating them apples in the coming months for the sake of all micro-films great and small, true believers, whether locally composed affairs or cultural products of this great wide world.

~ Jason Pankoke

p.s. Strangely, this marks the first-ever appearance of MICRO-FILM on C-U Blogfidential. You can bet it won’t be the last.

p.s.2 We’re also going to leave the Comments fields open for this one. Please contribute your thoughts on our first 10 years of micro-cinema activity after the jump. Encouragement, constructive criticism, and free advice are all welcome!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Area Festivals, MICRO-FILM du C-U, Public Events, The Old School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.