We attended Sujewa Ekanayake's world premiere of his new documentary Indie Film Blogger Road Trip last night and had a great time. The film is about a blogger (Ekanayake) who travels to several U.S. East Coast cities in the Summer of 2008 and discusses the thriving world of indie film journalism on the web, related Internet writings & other matters relevant to the indie film community with over a dozen bloggers who write about indie film and or media professionals who rely on indie film blogs to accomplish their daily work.
The film overall was informative, and I found myself literally taking notes of some of the film bloggers names who from their interviews, sounded like good people to read and to possibly send copies of our films to for review. An interview can be considered a successful one, if the viewer or listener takes notes from what he or she perceives about the subject's tastes, etc, and furthermore, seeks out that subject to initiate a discussion - or in our case, even solicit a review about a film or two in our growing catalog.
Self serving? Well yeah, thats the point. Bloggers are self serving too - and as we saw in IFBRT, get the same rush out of their reader hit count as actors seeing themselves on screen for the first time, or that filmmakers get when their film is projected in a dark theatre before an audience. I also found it refreshing to see the personal side of some of these people - to be able to put faces to the writing, and get an overall sense of what drives them to write.
Far too much has already been made of the film's shortcomings, so I will leave links below, should you feel the need for your dosage of mostly negative feedback. But what we found about the film, was not only a new and daring (and some might say unsuccessful) way to make a documentary film - which is essentially to make it a conversation as opposed to talking heads giving you information - was that it took us behind the scenes of some of the lives and thoughts of our favorite bloggers. That in itself, is an achievement. 
We also had a great time hanging out afterwards at a nearby diner over cantaloupe and french fries (though not in that group), and talk film business, criticism, and art with writer and professor Chuck Tryon (which was my first time meeting him), and our friend Susan Buice (from Four Eyed Monsters) her boyfriend Josh, and with Sujewa Ekanayake, the filmmaker himself.If you want you can check out the more unfavorable reviews, as well as Sujewa's gracious response to all of the criticism at his blog, here are some links:
http://chutry.wordherders.net/wp/
http://blog.spout.com/2009/02/18/indie-film-blogger-road-trip-review/
http://blog.spout.com/2009/02/18/indie-film-blogger-road-trip-review/
Stay tuned here and below for more about the next screening near you!
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