Abu Dhabi Film Festival

I guess I should start off by explaining the picture. This is a picture taken on the way in to Abu Dhabi from Yas Island. There are a couple ways to get out there, and this is the newer road. Right now it is sparsely developed, although that certainly won't last. So why the picture? Partly, it relates to the number of times that I travelled back and forth to view films at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Plus, I just think it is an evocative shot, and sort of reminds me of the opening scene of Fargo. It also speaks to my general homesickness of late - it reminds me of winter in Vermont, with the ribbons of sand replacing the ribbons of snow on a wind-swept day. Now, the Film Festival itself. I loved it! For some reason I never went to the Green Mountain Film Festival back home, although if I make it back to VT I'll definitely be attending the next one. The film festival was more than a bit chaotic, and featured the usual unnecessary chaos which marks most aspects of life in the Emirates, but overall it was a great experience. I saw six films, and would have seen more if I had been able to make my schedule work: Monsieur Lazhar (Canada); Almost in Love (U.S. Independent); The End (Morocco); She Monkeys (Sweden); Troll Hunter (Norway); and Smiles of a Summer Night (Sweden). I really liked all of them, and they ranged from good to great. It was great to see Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night on the big screen. Fanny and Alexander closed out the Festival, but I was off participating in the second dragon boat practice so I couldn't see it. One think of Bergman films as being so deeply brooding, but Smiles of a Summer Night really displayed his humor - I laughed out loud several times. Of the newer films I think that She Monkeys was the best, although I liked it less after hearing the director talk at the end. That said, I think I liked all of them less after listening to the directors (maybe I don't really want to see what is behind the curtain). The female director of She Monkeys was clearly shocked that the film was chosen for a Middle Eastern film festival and it was her first trip to the region, and I think she might have been uncomfortable with what she could say or couldn't say, which is also understandable. However, to be fair, and to the credit of the film festival, the films were shown uncut. The most pleasant surprise was Troll Hunter. Think of a more clever, self-assured and funny Blair Witch Project and you'll have a sense of the movie. The director had the confidence to be scary, but also occasionally wink at the audience and say, essentially, "yeah, this is a movie about trolls so we can't take ourselves too seriously all the time." For example, there's a great scene where the troll hunter, followed around by a group of documentary film-making students, tries to capture a troll by placing first one, then two, and finally three goats on a bridge, and the troll comes up from underneath, and you would have to have been completely out of it to not get the Billy Goats Gruff reference. I saw the movies either by myself (I have always loved going to movies by myself), Laura (who can't stop talking about Troll Hunter) or Tanja (who is a huge movie buff, and who, in addition to knowing a lot more about movies than me, must have gone to a dozen films or more - and was a great person to spend time dissecting the movies with on the long drives back to Yas). I'm already missing the festival, although Shark Night 3D is opening soon (although I doubt it can compare to Shark Attack 3, one of the favorite bad movies that my son and I love).