Day Two at Sarasota

We had another incredible day at the Sarasota Film Festival. At 12:30 we did a spot on ABC Channel 7 with John Scalzi. (We waited in the green room with another guest, Duke the dog from the Sarasota Humane Society. Ha!) We'll post the interview clip as soon as we get our hands on it.

We also visited with students in the film program at Sarasota's Booker High School. Having already watched Brownstones, they had lots of great questions for us. And Chad, waxing academic, dropped an Orson Welles quote on them. Oh boy.

A typewriter needs only paper; a camera uses film, requires subsidiary equipment by the truck-load and several hundreds of technicians. That is always the central fact about the film-maker as opposed to any other artist: he can never afford to own his own tools.

We had our second, and final, screening at 7:15. There was a nice turnout and the crowd was very responsive. Not surprisingly, Malik had them in stitches. And after the Q&A, many people came up to us and confessed that they had tears in their eyes when the Sierra Leone kids performed the play reenacting how the rebels had killed their parents. We left feeling pretty grateful.

We also got to see an incredibly moving documentary about a man's quest to run 63 marathons over 63 days to support kids suffering from a terminal disease known as ataxia telangiectasia. Check out Feat, created by the talented couple, Deb and Brad Carr.