It’s 9am on a chilly Friday morning, and I’m about to bid New York adieu. The last 96 hours were eventful: an overnight bus from Montreal, followed by four days of mingling and touristing, as well as three nights of sci-fi films from around the world.
I love this city… In some other timeline, one where Amazon didn’t roll back its expansion, I would’ve moved here instead of Canada. So it goes. The subway, the busy streets, the grandiose and gorgeous monuments the locals take for granted – I’m not sure I could ever grow bored here.
I’ve done all the usual touristy things: the Grand Central Terminal, an overpriced lox bagel, several laps around Times Square, and hours upon hours of walking and gawking and taking pictures. (Hey, it’s a photogenic city.)
Elsewhere, one potential renter after another lies about their intention of renting my Quebec City apartment, and time passes. It sits empty, waiting. By now, I’ve figured out the landlord’s strange chain of communicaton, sending a message in triplicate each time another desperado messages me, aiming to rent an apartment they can’t visit, guided solely by the video tour I’d recorded and annotated in my pidgin French. With any luck, this latest candidate will comr through, or I’ll be on the hook for yet another month of rent on an apartment I have no intention to return to.
This film festival has remarkably more AI fanboys than last year. (And even one fangirl!) For the time being, they’re not in the majority, or even the plurality. When my film, “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace,” screened and when the viewers saw my note that I hadn’t used AI, there was some passionate applause – so I’ve got that going for me.
Last night was my film’s worldwide premiere. Not my first screening or Q&A, and not even the third. And yet the jitters never fully go away. Will they hate the film? Will they boo? Will they form a remarkably well organized mob and proceed to tar and feather me? (The odds of that are low, but never zero.) And then the film begins, and the audience laughs in all the right places, and seven minutes later, they cheer and clap. (And then they laugh some more once they see the Easter egg at the very end.)
Afterwards, a few of them walk by to tell me they liked it, to ask – with reverence in their voice – where they can find the story the film was based on, or whether they can follow me on Instagram. (But of course.) In turn, I encourage them to read Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel without a crew” and try to make their own low-budget films. I hope to meet at least one of them at the next year’s festival – as a fellow filmmaker, not as an audience member. (The odds of that are low, but, yet again, never quite zero.)
The dozens of short story submissions I’d sent out last month are coming home to roost. Only rejections so far, but that’s okay: I redirect them to other publications using my personal system. I’ve got time.
A small film festival from Stockholm emails me: they like my debut film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” and it’ll be part of their program. Neat.
An experimental musician who dabbles in 3D imagery performed at last night’s film festival as the opening act. Another short film idea – or maybe even more than that – popped up in my brain.
At film festivals, names and faces and tenses eventually blend together, mixing, combining, forming something better and stranger and new. Even more so when free beer is involved. (The free beer was great. The free gelato had been a lie. So it goes.)
During my final subway ride, in the tunnel by the exit, Wonder Woman plays the violin – one pop-culture tune after another. The violin has formed a blister on her neck. I help her apply two bandaids during a lull in foot traffic. I record a video I’m unsure I’ll ever watch. I leave a tip.
By the escalator, at the boundary between the artificial dungeon and the dull October sunlight, a street preacher practices his craft. “What part do I play in my own destruction?!” he shouts.
I board my bus to the next city, the next film festival, the next improbable adventure.
Onward.
Ever onward.
Grigory Lukin.com 