Micah Bhachech, Campus Carrier Copy Editor
Last Thursday at 11 p.m. the Rome International Film Festival (RIFF) kicked off its tenth festival. The festival, spanning three days, showed dozens of independent movies at the DeSoto Theater and Rome Area History Museum.
Volunteering for a two hour block meant that I could attend whatever film blocks I wanted with the mere flourish of my volunteer badge.
I made a special point to see as much as I could of the student film block on Saturday. All of the movies played were products of Berry students except for one from a group of students from New Orleans.
Unfortunately, I missed a lot of the student film block. However I saw “Missed Connections” by alumna Rachael Wheeler and seniors Brian Russell and Emily Faulkner as well as “Routes and Routines” by Alumni James Clark and Carina Broomet and senior Josy Roman.
Though I didn’t get to see all of the films, the atmosphere in the venue felt like exactly what I wanted from an independent film festival. I climbed up a narrow staircase behind a dismissible door in a museum to get to a dimly lit room full of mismatched chairs pointing to a big screen. For whatever it’s worth, it felt as “artsy” as I could have hoped.
Both films themselves were impressive and earned a lot of praise and interest from the crowd during the question and answer session. Both films had recognizably Berry locations and props, but I was impressed by the amount creativity demonstrated to generate multiple unique stories within “The Bubble.”
From that showing I went to the DeSoto Theater for the Georgia film block. The movies there were striking in the excellence of their production as well as the originality of their material. Within an hour I saw a gruesome retelling of Little Red riding Hood (“Red”), a story of a desperate man and the robot son he created (“Sol”) and an adorable documentary about an old lady that made cakes for people (“The Cake Lady”).
These movies did not struggle with the same limitations that their student-made counterparts did. They had the budget and the means to use more varied settings and techniques (lighting, sound, etc.). However, they were not so high profile that they suffered from the depressing lack of originality of big budget blockbusters. They were, in short, what I wanted from a film festival. A lot of them were strikingly weird, but in the most human, captivating kind of ways.
One of my personal favorite films, “Buried Treasure,” won Best Narrative Short. The lighting in that one was fantastic, and the lead actor was fantastic. “The Cake Lady,” possibly the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen, won Best Documentary Short. Best Narrative Feature went to “Against the Grain,” and Best Documentary Feature to “The 25,000 Mile Love Story.”
At the end of each film block the audience was given the opportunity to rank the film that they enjoyed the most, and “Hollywood to Dollywood” won the Audience Award.
My actual volunteer work was minimal. Basically, I had to do almost no work and was able to hang around downtown enjoying some of the most original cinema that I’ve seen in a long time.