AFI Dallas Dispatch #1: Docs, Aliens and Superheroes

Ah, the glamour of traveling to film festivals. It all seems like such fun, and really it is ... once you get here. I headed out for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival (which will hereafter and forevermore be referred to here as 'AFI Dallas' for simplicity's sake -- and because I'm lazy), only to arrive at the airport and find that my flight to Denver had been delayed by four hours, which meant I wasn't going to make my connection to OKC.

See, I had this brilliant plan to fly into OKC and drive down from there in my mom's extra car, thereby both saving AOL bucks on a rental car while also getting to say howdy to my family. Unfortunately, thanks to spring break, I couldn't get a rebooked flight into OKC until March 27, but they were able to get me into Dallas. So I arrived here a day early and got settled in so I could hit the ground running.

This is the inaugural year of the fest, and things were a little hectic over at the press office when I went to check in on Saturday. They appeared to be getting things under control, so hopefully by tomorrow things will really be churning along. As always, it's tricky to peg from the program descriptions what's going to be good and what's not, and that's true even more so for the first year of a fest, when they really just want to fill up a program. The program descriptions, while vaguely helpful in discerning the gist of a film, also tend to make everything sound like the next Citizen Kane -- although this fest doesn't seem to be quite as bad about that as, say, Sundance.

So I got my press badge and packet and then managed to catch three films yesterday. I kicked things off with one I knew would be a winner, War/Dance, which I was dying to catch at Sundance but managed to miss. It's a doc about a group of orphans in a refugee camp in war-torn Northern Uganda who are invited to participate in the prestigious national music and dance competition at Kampala, and it was just as good as I'd hoped it would be. The nearly packed audience was crying throughout -- the stories of what these children have lived through is nearly incomprehensible -- and during the big competition everyone was clapping and cheering the kids on as if we were really there.

Next up for me was Veritas: Prince of Truth, a family film that mixes live action with animation in a tale of a fatherless boy who latches onto Veritas, a comic-book superhero as his idol. When the comic book publisher threatens to kill off his hero, the boy becomes caught up in trying to save both Veritas and Earth when fiction bleeds into reality, bringing both Veritas and his arch-nemesis out of the pages of the comic book and into real life. Local filmmaker Arturo Ruiz-Esparza helmed the film, and it played to a packed house with lots of kids in the audience. Ruiz-Esparza was on hand with a huge entourage of folks involved with the film, and they decided to jazz it up by dressing up semi-formal for the premiere. I don't see a lot of that at fests, and it was really cool to see so many people come out in their dressy attire to support a film.

My final screening of Friday night was the midnight screening of alien abduction flick Beings, directed by Fredrick Wolcott. This was a very intense film -- one of the freakiest alien flicks I've ever seen. The vibe of the film, which is shown from the perspective of the aliens who have abducted four college students, reminded me of Cube meets The Descent with a dash of Communion.

Today I caught two good documentaries, Where the Sun Rises and Darius Goes West. Things seem to be going pretty well for the fest so far. Last night's sceenings were quite packed; the two docs today were less packed but the audiences were very responsive. People seem excited about the fest, and the volunteers have been great. Lots more yet to come this week -- reviews are coming your way on all these films and more, so stay tuned.