jaunthie | Wow!!!

fisherbear and I went to a special event tonight. A friend of ours from our photography group has been working on his first film, a documentary, for the last two years. Tonight he had a movie-theater screening of his completed film. It wasn't a big theater - about fifty seats - and it wasn't an enormous screen, but it was a real movie theater and a real audience and a realization of a dream two years and endless hours of work in the making.

I'm biased, of course, but taking that into consideration, I still have only one conclusion: the documentary was great. Funny and dramatic in turns, it was very well paced, never dragging, and never losing focus. More importantly for a good documentary, it never let filmmaking get in the way of the events. It was a filtered down record of events, of course; the events took place over several weeks, and there were many, many more hours of footage shot than appeared in the seventy-odd minutes of the movie. But it did what any good documentary should do: it told the story in a memorable, moving, and thoughtful way.

It was an amazing achievement, and we were very fortunate to have had the opportunity to see it come to fruition. We'd seen bits and pieces of it at various points over the last two years. In particular, our friend had shown fisherbear and me and our small working group the original opening fifteen minutes or so, to get our reactions and feedback the same way we do with each other's prints. But it was completely different seeing those few minutes on a computer monitor or TV screen than it was to see the whole, finished product up there on the big screen. It was, in fact, utterly and completely awesome. The theater burst into enthusiastic, sustained, well-deserved applause as soon as the first end credit rolled.

And speaking of those credits...I was utterly floored when the thank-you section came up, because we were in it. Not just the name of our photography group, but fisherbear and I personally, by name. Talk about completely gobsmacked! I'm still stunned, not to mention incredibly touched.

All in all, an amazing evening. :-)