A Constant Visual Feast

Every year for the last five years, springtime has provoked a transformation of sorts in me, or maybe more accurately provoked my unabashed and kinda obnoxious excitement. If you’ve been keeping up, you can probably guess why: Spring in Boston means Independent Film Festival Boston, which means that for a week or so, Andy gets to go to a festival and act like this writing thing is his full-time thing and not just something he does to ward off the creeping sense that he’s a fucking failure with little to nothing going for him as a professional adult human being. 

Whoa! Whoa there! That got real. Sorry. I don’t know how that happened. Look, the point is, the 207 festival is just around the corner, commencing on April 26th and ending on May 3rd. Both of those dates will be here sooner than you know it. (I’m looking more forward to the former than the latter, for obvious reasons. Starting the 365 day countdown, give or take a couple days, until the next fest is always an exercise in self-torture. I digress.) Thus, this handy update, designed to point your eyeballs to IFFBoston’s official site, specifically this page here.

No schedule yet, but we have a timeline for announcements, and that’s not nothing. Mostly, my goal here is to remind you all that IFFBoston ’17 is happening; the festival means a lot to me, and in too many ways to count, so I’m going to go out of my way to promote it through this here blog. 

My suggestion, my proposal, my advice, my plea: If you love Boston and love film, mark April 6th, 10th, and 26th on your calendar, and think about buying tickets to the movies on the schedule that sound most interesting to you. The movies have been in a state of transition for some time now, as they always are, but the current transition revolves around the very nature of how we watch and engage with cinema, a topic too complex to delve into here but which can be boiled down to words like “devices” and “streaming.” (Netflix: I’m lookin’ at you.) Festivals are, by consequence, in a weird place, especially festivals like IFFBoston, which come after Sundance and SXSW and have more to lose in a marketplace that’s more and more becoming dominated by streaming platforms designed to circumvent the theatrical experience.

Basically, if you care about seeing movies in theaters, IFFBoston is the perfect opportunity to spoil yourself with riches. You might even see me there! I’ll be the well-dressed, hirsute, increasingly crotchety and manic guy with a frosty craft  beer in his hand. Pay attention to this here website, and of course to IFFBoston’s, for updates as they come in. I have a feeling 2017 is going to be a good year. (It is, after all, the festival’s 15th anniversary. Expect greatness.)

(Author’s note: Samuel L. Jackson almost certainly has nothing whatsofuckingever to do with Independent Film Festival Boston this year, and while I am too lazy to fact-check to see if he’s ever been in a film that has screened at the fest in the past, I’m pretty confident that this is not the case. I chose this image mostly because I have no good official IFFBoston image to use, but also because Sam looks like he’s on the edge of his anticipation here, like he’s just moments away from being handed a hot mug of coffee spiked with Baileys. This is the feeling I had looking at the IFFBoston announcement posted today, and it is the feeling I wish to impart upon you. If you don’t get it, then you are wrong. )