The Flipside of Image+Nation, Prologue

Having dedicated myself to no less than 50 hours of volunteer work at this year’s Image+Nation film festival, my coverage of the event will be less a critique of the films, but rather a journal on what it’s like being on the other side of the fence. My goal will be to present a good idea of what volunteer work consists of at a festival, as well as how to deal with film enthusiasts and critics like myself. So it begins…

For some, volunteer work at an event such as this poses no problem anxiety-wise; technically, you are doing the festival a favour for no commercial benefit. I’m a little more self-conscious: “butterflies” rather than a hard stomach my creed. My first task was rather simple: use the paper cutter to cut out small squares of paper so that viewers can rate the films they watch. In the end, these papers will all be counted out to determine which film(s) the audience enjoyed the most. While my first few sets of papers looked more like off kilter parallelograms than squares, I soon got the knack of the cutting system. So far so good. Volunteer work in a back room outside of the main hall is fine and dandy. Being used to office work at my day job and working at a computer day and night (on Cinestrata no less), the lack of human interaction suited me fine.

The volunteer coordinator must have read my mind: so he decided to place me front and center at the cash until the end of the day. Picture: butterflies tearing out of their netted prison. A crash course on the cash-only system followed. Thankfully, the team of organizers, managers and fellow volunteers (most of whom are repeat workers) were more than helpful. While the butterflies morphed into a migraine by nighttime, I can now flip bills at record speed.

As I worked only at the Cinema Imperial, I can’t speak for the De Seve theater showings, but by the last showing there was a fine attendance. The day started with Sa raison d’etre, a French series shown in its entirety that has been compared to the American classic mini-series, Angels in America. What followed was Le nouveau monde, a film about a lesbian couple attempting to find a man to make them pregnant so they can raise a child together. Interestingly, proof from today’s sales and word of mouth of previous years, films with “girls” (lesbian films) have much lower attendance than films with “guys”. Proof being that the last film at the Imperial Cinema, Ciao, did more than double the business. An interesting note is that many male festival goers do judge a book by its cover (see the image from the booklet top-left).

Tomorrow is another full day: 175 mins of the series Dante’s Cove, Nights in Black Leather which is rather self-explanatory, and ending the night is Madonna’s Filth and Wisdom. This last one has received fairly negative press, though it is a landmark film in that it is the first written and directed by the pop star. For all information of schedules and other films playing tomorrow and throughout the week, you can visit the official website.