A day bookended by two extremely captivating films: Matt McCormick’s The Great Northwest, which uses a thrift store scrapbook as a starting point to trace a road trip made by four spunky spinsters in 1958, and Ozualdo R. Candeias’ A opção (The Option) from 1981, which follows the bleak fates and fortunes of a group of rural women-turned-prostitutes as they journey from the countryside to São Paulo. Although vastly different in technique and style, both films are poetic, spare, tinged with humor, and quietly haunting.
In between screenings we eat delicious Italian tomato soup to stave off the cold (each day the temperature drops another few degrees as if taunting us thin-skinned Californians) and meet with the students for our 48-Hour City Symphony workshop at Blaak 10: Cola (originally from Shanghai and currently studying animation at Piet Zwart Academy), Daan (born and raised in Holland, studying film production and film theory at Piet Zwart), and Albert (a nattily dressed elderly gent with a certain continental air and a lot of opinions about absolutely anything and everything…imagine DJ Chicken Leather in another 30 years and you get the idea). Armed with HD Flips and a crash course in camera angles and in-camera editing, our intrepid gang of three head out into the streets… Stay tuned!
Sounds like a pretty perfect day and the soup looks amazing.
good stuff!!!!!