The First of Many Long Days to Come

To anyone that doesnt know...this week is my first week covering a film festival as a film journalist. Dont expect reviews for any of the big indie/festival favs since this whole film festival is only focused on films from latin countries or at least films that deal with latin culture.

I will be doing full in detail write ups and some other stuff as well, but for the time being, I am just going to use this post as a log of the films that I saw today. I'm doing it this way because that it way it wont be too hard tracking them all down next week when I do my write ups for each of them.

Plus, it's just impossible to write or do anything because I have no free time at all because of this festival. I am literally watching movies from 12 pm to 1 am for this whole week.

Today however was a long boring day because the first half of the festival was canceled due to some scheduling problems.

Anyways.... here is the log for what I saw today....and I might as well just give them a quick grade....and I might as well write a very,very,very,very brief plot outline for each of them that way I don't get any of them mixed up.

Monday - 10/8

South American Shorts

• Um Ramu (Brazil, Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra, 15 min.) A woman notices a small green leaf growing out of her arm. B-
• La Escala Benzer (Argentina, Martin Deus, 21 min.) -A man who works testing mints by kissing woman accidently has one of his testing subjects fall in love with him. B
• Catalina (United States, James Katz, 30 min.) - A man falls in love with his maid. He also has a lot of nightmares. Really bad. F
• Juanito Bajo el Naranjo (Columbia, Juan Carlos Villamizer, 9 min.) - A little kid has an orange tree grow out of his head after lying to his parents about eating an orange. D

Feature Films

Caixa Dois aka Money on the Side (Brazil, Bruno Barreto) - A devious businessman deposits some money in his secretary's (and lover) account. But a typing mistake sends the money to an honest woman's account, whose husband had just been fired. B

El Corazon de la Tierra aka The Heart of the Land (Spain/Portugal/UK, Antonio Cuadri) - Tensions mount in an Andalusia mining town between local Spanish workers and their British employers. C-

Thats it for now. Its 3 am, Im dead tired, and I have to be up in a couple of hours. Hopefully tomorrows schedule (which looks a lot better than todays) will have more great films than todays did. Plus, tomorrow will be a full 12 hour day of films with no last minute cancellations (I hope).