Lane meets Rotterdam

So I don't have photo uploading capabilities yet, I'm working on it. But when I do I'll be sure to post photos of the countryside nuclear reactors and the legal drugs. Yes, this place is very strange and very beautiful. The festival so far has been very impressive, while I haven't really seen a single movie that has blown me away, the overall approach to the programming is inspiring. One thing that first impressed me was the festival director's welcome letter, in it he goes on to explain the "Free Radicals" section fo the festival:

"Free Radicals is a term borrowed from chemistry and is used for special molecules or atoms that occasionally provoke fierce reactions. It is striking how many audiovisual makers today do not strive for technical perfection any more, but often seek out a coarse and ragged quality. They prefer creating and distributing a primitive yet pure work above sticking to the enforced formats of the visual industry. During the 37th festival, Free Radicals stand for such an artistic and aesthetic attitude and these can be found at the core of several programme sections: Cameron Jamie, Robert Breer, Paul Sharits, Exploding Cinema and Starting from Scratch."

I'm loving the Cameron Jamie stuff, putting this artist in this context is amazing, in additon to showing a number of his films, they also have much of his visual work on display and are doing a number of live perfomances with his imagery and music by people like The Melvins. Also, they invited him to curate a 12 hour movie marathon of "Strange American cinema that transcends the usual genres and labels." Rad. I'm putting them all on my Netflix list.

I've been seeing about 4-5 films a day with long 12 hour days but I'm loving hauling around this weird city. So I've seen low budget hijacker films, cyborg love story anime and dazzling classic films from America and China. I'll try and post more detialed stuff soon, but the downtime between films is being spent on other work so it's hard to upload. And I promise to add pics soon, to not do so would be VERBOTTEN!