Black Bear Film Festival

Last Saturday we took a ride to Milford PA which is about a forty-five minute ride from our house. The goal was to attend the "Black Bear Film Festival" which is held every year in Milford. Now this is not exactly the Sundance festival, although there was an incredibly handsome guy named Robert in attendance this year (cough! cough! choke...). Seriously, it's a small but quite good festival and we ended up seeing a couple of very good indie films.





The festival web site can be found here: http://www.blackbearfilm.com/





The films were shown in a little old town movie theater which has seen better days, but I think the fact that it was not held in some megaplex added to the charm of the experience. In honor of the festival, they had an exhibit of cleverly decorated bear sculptures set up outside the theater. My favorite was a bear gotten up like Indiana Jones.

Here's a picture of the theater from the 2002 festival with that year's bears.

We saw two movies that day: "Absurdistan" and "Dreams With Sharp Teeth". The former was a Russian film with English subtitles. Now I'm not usually a big fan of subtitled films, but this movie was hilarious. It is set in a place that is so remote no country wants to claim it and tells the tale of how the town's womenfolk go on strike when the menfolk are too lazy to repair the town's broken water supply system - i.e. no water, no sex. I always saw the Russians as having a fine tuned sense of the absurd and this film with its various plot twists and complications bore this out. It is a very funny movie and if it shows up on IFC well worth a Tivo-ing.

The second film was a documentary on author Harlan Ellison. It was the least boring documentary I have ever seen and nearly as funny as the previous comedy film. Harlan Ellison is a writer who has been active since the Sixties and has won just about every award there is in the field of fantasy and science fiction. He has also written scripts for films and TV shows including "Star Trek" and "The Outer Limits". Dedicated Trekkies may remember an episode called "City on the Edge of Forever"- this was the one with Joan Collins where Kirk goes back in time to the Depression-era U.S.- well, Harlan wrote the script for it. He is and was a proud and outspoken skeptic, curmudgeon, and all-around troublemaker and the film covered his many feuds, battles and eccentricities. He is a very funny guy.

To add icing on the cake so to speak, after the film finished, the organizers arranged a speaker phone hookup with Harlan at his home in California and he answered questions from the audience. Apparently, he was involved in a science fiction writers workshop in Milford in the Sixties and Seventies and has a soft spot for the place. He even wanted to know if the Milford Diner was still open (it is).

After this, we headed home with a stop for dinner at the Jefferson Diner on State Route 15 - a joint which is actually featured on the Food Network.

All in all, it was a pleasant, enjoyable day, and we hope to attend the festival next year. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys offbeat film and a nice ride in the country.