The trials and tribulations I experienced attending my first film festival started right away when I needed to get my pass to attend the screenings. Some of this challenge was due to my own circumstances, as I didn’t have a working printer at the time and couldn’t print out a digital ticket, so I was left with picking up a physical pass that would allow me to watch the different films. I believe the option I went to – which was overly optimistic when I was planning out the excursion – was an all weekend pass, to avoid having to continually pay each time I wanted to see a movie, might not have allowed a digital pass anyway.
I figured this would be easy enough – just go to the location that was hosting the film festival. This should have been my first sign that things were going to be a bit challenging.
For this particular film festival, there wasn’t a central location. Movies in the festival were being played in multiple locations, which is not uncommon for these events.
However, the film passes weren’t being distributed at the locations playing the movies. They were being held at local businesses that had agreed to participate in holding them until the purchasers of the passes arrived to collect them.
As I said, this should have been a warning.
What’s more, these local businesses were not on the strip of road in between some of the locations that were screening the films (more on that in next week’s post). They were scattered all around the town, and even neighboring towns, which required hopping on some of the highways for a few minutes. It was about a fifteen minute just to get to the coffee shop that seemed to be the closest to the hotel I was staying at.
This should have also been a warning of things to come.
When I arrived at the shop, which was serving customers when I first entered, there wasn’t any signage confirming that the movie passes were being held in the location. And when I talked with the cashier, and sheepishly went through the “I bought a pass to a film festival and was told I could pick it up here,” they of course didn’t know what I was talking about, and had to talk to the manager.
The manager knew about the tickets, but still, this wasn’t a great start. This was my first experience with a film festival, and this was the first thing I did that day.
They did have passes for people to pick up, and although I had some concern because passes were just dropped off at this location, and there was no way to verify who was picking up passes from which location, so there was the possibility someone could just buy one pass, then go to each location, pick up one of the passes, get scratched off each list, but have multiple passes which could create a situation where all the passes would’ve been picked up before people showing up a day into the festival like me would be able to get theirs, ultimately having me walk away empty handed, I was content that I had gotten mine and would be able to attend the films I wanted to.
As I mentioned last week, my car alarm went off every time I unlocked it and opened the door, so after doing this and drawing some stares from the street I parked on, I got in my car and made the return fifteen to twenty minute drive back to my hotel to settle on which films I was going to watch that day.
This action was going to lead to the bigger challenges I faced the rest of the day.
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