Growing up I was always a huge fan of short stories. I was a voracious reader and they helped make me feel like I was getting more bang for my buck (or my parent’s buck as it were) when I read compilations. But even besides the fact that I could read more stories, and thus go on more adventures, I loved how they provided small snap shots into the character’s lives. They allowed me more freedom to come up with a continuation on the narrative, allowing me to fill in the gaps and construct worlds that only I would experience.

But while short stories have allowed authors to flourish, short films seem to be a slightly different animal. Too often festivals focus only on the ultra short films that have to rely on ironic or O’Henry style endings to drive the film, resulting in an all to often seemingly manufactured and formulaic genre.

Thankfully, the Flyway Film Festival cares not about running times, preferring instead unique tales and wondrous characters regardless of if the film is three or thirty minutes. Because of this, it is the audiences who benefit if they decide to attend this festival.

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While I was only able to make it up for the Friday night opening, judging solely by that the film festival was a huge success. The venue they were using seats ~80 people and it was a standing room only crowd. Several filmmakers were in attendance and Anna struck up a mutual admiration society for rats with Pericles Lewnes, the director of LOOP and a Troma alumni. It was quite the sight.

I also recieved word from Bill Elverman (director of The Wintress) that Saturday was well attended as well and by the time he left on Sunday afternoon it looked like a similar sized crowd was seeing films that day too. Congratulations to Rick Vaicius for putting together such a great film festival. Everything ran smoothly, and film fans had the pleasure of watching a lot of great films they would otherwise struggle to even know about. Hopefully this is the first of many such events, as I know Anna and I are both excited at the thought of making another trip down to Pepin, WI next fall. Hopefully even more people will make that trip in the future.

Due to the overwhelming response by filmmakers wanting me to review their films I am running a bit behind on posting them. I have three more to post and I still have a few more interviews to post as well over the next few weeks. I’m going to do my best to spread them out so I don’t fall even further behind. While the constant feeling of being behind schedule is frustrating, it is absurdly fun as well.

Hopefully veryone has enjoyed the reviews so far and I look forward to doing it again next year.

Being born in the mid-seventies, I grew up with a pretty severe lack of exposure to computers for the majority of my schooling. Sure we had a computer lab where we would learn how to use a computer, but that was rarely more frequent then once a week and the majority of that time was spent playing Oregon Trail. My family didn’t even have a PC until I was in High School, and even then most of my teachers preferred papers to be typed rather then printed on computers. Even when I went off to school at a Big Ten university in the mid-nineties, computers still were not a huge component of the work I did. Though it was in college that I finally began to use the Internet. First on Gopher and later through the World Wide Web. Back in those days 28.8k modems was scorching fast, and texting wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar.

Today college is a vastly different environment. Most students own their own laptops, attend classes online and have never lived in a world where computers and the Internet weren’t simply a seamless extension of their lives. So when director Melody Gilbert came up with the idea of filming a documentary about three students (Mitchell Lundin, Andrew Tate and Caitlin Magnusson) at Carleton college who choose to not use any computers for three weeks, I was immediately intrigued. Just how would they pull this off, and just how miserable will they become trying to accomplish such a task?

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I first was introduced to the work of Alex Karpovsky back in 2006 when The Hole Story was screened at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Film Festival. The Hole Story was an incredibly unique film that seamlessly melded fiction and non-fiction into a wonderfully funny and melancholy story about one man’s dream to try and make a pilot for his television show.

With Woodpecker Karpovsky once again uses his unique style of mixing fact and fiction, this time focusing on the fervor surrounding the sightings of the previously presumed extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the bayous of eastern Arkansas. Following one ardent bird watcher (Jon Hyrns) as he attempts to become the first person to definitively prove the elusive birds existence, Karpovsky also interviews many of the locals who are both thankful and frustrated by the birds sudden reappearance.

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Note to self: If ever I decide to write a movie that is based in Wisconsin, evidently it is a requirement to include some sort of wood cutting scene with a ginormous axe.

Having just recently watched The Wintress, I found it a bit amusing that another film starring Bill Elverman would focus so much on splitting wood with an ax. Knowing Elverman wrote both The Wintress and TREE I secretly wondered if Elverman had an unhealthy obsession with axes. My guess is he watched The Shining one too many times as a child. I know I did. But evidently, their was a far more innocuous reason for including so many axes in both films, TREE was made first, and Elverman likes to plagiarize himself because this idea works quite well in the context of these two films.

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