Getting to the woozy stage

I have been so busy at Hot Docs. I've done three of my five volunteer shifts and have seen more than one movie on most days.

Lots of organizations get a few film tickets and do "retweet to win" contests, and it often seems like I am the only person to retweet! This year I won tickets to Obscuro Barroco, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos, The Beksinskis: A Sound and Picture Album, Primas, Grit, Yellow is Forbidden. I think that is all. And how many of those free tickets did you use, Mary? Zero! I gave tickets away to friends; I left one outside the theatre last night because I'd already seen a movie at 6 and couldn't last till midnight to see the later show; I put some on Freecycle... Very few didn't get used. And perhaps I have learned my lesson about Twitter!

On Tuesday I slept in a bit and then went to see some shorts. I do love a nice collection of shorts. These all had to do with family and memory and old super-8 movies and grandmas and so on! If you click on that link, it will lead you to all the descriptions if you like. My favourite was Haunted, maybe, or Crisanto Street. They were all very good!

In the evening, Stephen and I went to see Omni: An Act against Gravity. A guy tries to build a hoverboard. It was kind of cool to see the process of making it, with his dad hauling on various ropes while his mom offers sandwiches.

The filmmaker liked long shots of our hero pondering, looking out the window -- I'm not sure why. This would have been a great 30- or 40-minute movie, but it did drag on. Kind of full of itself.

Wednesday we saw a really fun, really interesting and thought-provoking film called More Human than Human about artificial intelligence and robotics. The filmmaker wants to make a machine that can conduct an interview, along with filming the interview in a certain style. Along the way he talks to various experts in AI, in ethics, in robotics --even Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who was famously beaten by a computer -- and shows movie robots through the ages, from Frankenstein to Blade Runner. Really very good.

Today I saw two more, but will leave those for another day. Tomorrow I think I have no movies scheduled, but you never know what might happen. Then the weekend, and then finally some laundry and grocery shopping!