Finale

(S.S) Sunday, the 17th, was the final evening of Director's Lounge 2008 and the atmosphere was lounge-like indeed. The Flying Vibes played a set of inspired vibraphone jazz music and later in the evening they put their talents to use by providing a live soundtrack to a silent film from Brazil, André Ricardos´ Exequias (3 min 56S, DV, 2007)

The Directors Lounge crew made a 'greatest hits' set of films from the past 10 days and it was impressive to look back at the variety of films that were shown: comedy, documentary, text based pieces, textured film, poetic film...from all over the world.

Brendan Howell and Lars Kuenstler performed a live mixed DJ/VJ set using imagery from East German communist gymnastics training videos.The footage was really beautiful and Lars overlaid the found footage with different colors and textures, speeding things up or slowing things down in time to Brendan's wild synthesized beats.

One award was given to the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Machado for The Long Overtone (18min 25s, 2006) and surely if their was an unofficial soundtrack to the Director's Lounge 2008 it was the ambling guitar solo from this film. For my part, I would have given the best film award to the Spanish filmmaker Xavi Sala for his entry La Parabólica (2007, 12 min). I will never look at satellites and umbrellas the same way again.

It has been a pleasure writing about these beautiful and off-kilter films and I hope to do it again next year. In the meantime, if any of you readers would like to contact me about what I have written for the Director's Lounge, my email is foodandfootage@gmail.com 

Thanks for reading!

 Sabrina Small