Our second film festival debut was at the Des Moines Interrobang Film Festival, as part of the Creative Roots Arts Festival. It was such a better experience than the embarrassing Humboldt Park “festival” here in Chicago. I have to say that the Creative Roots Arts Festival is absolutely terrific. The art is simply amazing. I was really honored to be apart of such fine artists and craftspeople. Seriously. It was so much fun to talk and interact with the artists and for the first time be able to say “yeah, we’re in the film festival” when the artists asked if we were in the festival (they just assume we’re artists because of our messy clothes & weirdness I guess). We thoroughly enjoyed the outside arts festival. Its HUGE, its FREE, and its FABULOUS.
The film festival was in an ultra modern building right in the heart of the arts festival–integrating it nicely with the tactile art. However, my biggest complaint was the lack of good quality sound in the auditoriums. These rooms were setup as lecture halls or preview rooms of some sort so the fact that they didn’t have built in surround sound was really beyond my comprehension. What on earth did they build these rooms for? It was weird. Secondly, they really should have moved the bands away from the film festival building, particularly when they chose to hold the film festival in a building lacking the audio equipment to overcompensate for the loud bands directly below…The other HUGE complaint is that somehow they reformatted my submission onto their own disc which I’m sure made it run smoothly, less errors (such as the Humboldt Park Festival which let one guys entire disc play and showed his penis–thanks, but no thanks), etc. However, the compression was completely fucked up and really disappointed me. Those images were taken with a Rebel Xti, they shouldn’t look like shit….or worse, youtube.
Regardless, it was a very good experience. I would definitely recommend it for budding filmmakers. The small auditorium was PACKED for the showing! The audience was engaged and responded very well to our short. They even laughed when MD fell off of her bike. I was very pleased. All in all…a good experience. I wasn’t even questioned for having a vagina–no, not once. But once again Iowa showing up Illinois in the progressiveness department! Who would’a thought? Come on Illinois-how embarrassing. 
