The Grand Cinema Offers a Peek at Upcoming Tacoma Film Festival
by Christopher Wood
Tacoma filmmaker Andrew Finnigan with TFF director Emily
Alm. Photo by Christopher Wood
We sure do love us a good prequel, the party before the party.
Friday night’s “Sneak Peek” event at The Grand Cinema was the Prometheus to its
here-before-you-know-it Tacoma Film Festival (October 4-11), except it actually
made sense and involved a lot less alien goo. Attendees answered trivia about
the fest (which turns 7 this year) and won prizes, while Rachel Marecle and TFF
director Emily Alm launched T-shirts into the crowd.
But besides scoring some free merch, we all really came for the
movies. To whet our appetites for October’s celebration, the theater ran four
entertaining shorts that appeared in past years at TFF, with one 2012 debut.
The idea of escape seemed to link these very different films together - from
the gripping drama Ana’s Playground
(2010’s Best Short), about a girl who uses soccer to survive in her war-torn
neighborhood, to the whimsical The
Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (last year’s Best Animated
Film), with its reading-is-magic! moral. (Watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adzywe9xeIU)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adzywe9xeIU)
Even the tumbleweed in the 2012 entry Tumbleweed! wants to explore new vistas, or at least another county
in Texas. Tacoma’s Andrew Finnigan said his own escape into filmmaking began
when he saw Superman at age 10 at the
Blue Mouse Theatre. About his craft, this two-time TFF winner for Audience
Choice told the audience, “It’s an escape for us (moviemakers)...going into
another world and living there for awhile.” Finnigan’s picked for his latest
“vacation” the post-apocalyptic Koinonia,
a feature currently in post-production. (http://www.facebook.com/koinoniamovie)
We avid moviegoers, who prefer living on the other side of the
screen, duck into theaters not simply to leave our world, but to reenter it
with recharged imaginations and a renewed appreciation for its wonders. The
2012 Tacoma Film Festival should offer 8 days of chances to do exactly that.
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