For five, six, and occasionally seven days a week, I’m the resident corn monkey/assistant manager at the Plaza Theatre, Calgary’s oldest movie house. I scoop your popcorn (bar none, the best in the city), spray butter (only the real stuff) all over my clothes, pour the Cokes and grab the Junior Mints. I’m a slave to a job that pays me less than I made in high school flipping beef, even though I’m now a university graduate. But you know what? I still manage to love my job. I guess some of us suffer for film more than simply by watching The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

Maybe I don’t have much of a life, but I enjoy being around movies. And because of that passion, I was probably the happiest man in Cowtown last week, even though I worked some 50 hours endlessly popping popcorn. For the third consecutive year, the first week of October marked the Calgary International Film Festival. I had the unique pleasure of seeing the festival both from behind the counter as a staff member at a participating theatre and as a theatre-hopping member of the audience.

The festival’s opening gala centered around a screening of Atom Egoyan’s latest, Ararat, The noted Canadian director was in attendance to speak with the audience and mingle over drinks afterwards. The closing gala showcased Deepa Mehta’s upcoming Bollywood/Hollywood. Mehta was also on hand. Other festival highlights included screenings of such international festival hits as 8 Women and Sex and Lucia, and Canadian productions like the massage-themed comedy Rub and Tug by Soo Lyu and Brad Fraser’s Leaving Metropolis. The People’s Choice Award went to an Australian film, Rabbit-Proof Fence, while A Wedding in Ramallah,  another Australian production, won the Canadian National Film Board’s Reel Award for best documentary. Special recognition was given to Alanis Obomsawin’s Is the Crown at War With Us? and David Turnley’s La Tropical.

New to the festival in 2002 was the Restored Classics program. I managed to catch The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum as well as Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand for the very first time – and on the big screen to boot. While I’d heard good things about Mitchum’s performance in Hunter, I went into The Hired Hand blind. I’m not usually a fan of westerns, but this one tackled the genre with intelligence, beauty and some clever self-referential nudging. Now I’m happy to jump on the bandwagon with Martin Scorsese and sing the praises of the relatively unknown Hired Hand.  

Total attendance for the six-day festival eclipsed 25,000, leading festival organizers to already announce plans to expand to 10 days in 2003. “We are excited about adding a second weekend of screenings, allowing us to screen a greater number of films and further increase second screenings of sure to be popular films,” says festival director David Marrelli.