Somewhere in the next bunch of weeks-Wait who the hell am I kidding- some time after the New York Film Festival there is probably going to be some changes to Unseen Films.
The pace of the blog and real life has been devouring what little sanity I have. If I was in any sort of a relationship I’d put Unseen to bed or at least change things up sooner than later.
Yes, I know that we’ve been talking about changes in the physical nature of the blog for ages. While much of the talk hat been about adding additional material, say the long in the running music pieces, The changes I’m talking about are slightly different… Basically the blog may have to rejigger it’s focus and figure out what in the hell it’s doing, the reason being we’ve been too successful thanks to being too timely (you guys love when we are current and up to date and I've been willing to try and give you what you want).
I’m exhausted. My fellows here at Unseen are exhausted. Its been a crazy couple of months and an even crazier last couple of weeks. The short version of everything is we’ve been to Tribeca, Monclair (via Planet Chocko), Lincoln Center’s Open Roads series of Italian Films, The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, a film series at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Korean American Film Festival, AFI Silver Docs and we’ve started wading into the New York Asian Film Festival (we’ve already written up about 28 of the festivals 55 films).
We’ve been doing all of that in addition to giving you all a film a day.
It’s an insane level of activity to try and keep up for the small group here at Unseen, and me in particular.
Actually the problem is not so much seeing and writing up the films, its simply doing the administration of the website that is the killer. It’s not just writing, it’s coordinating everyone’s schedule, trying to make contact with the various festivals, traveling to see the press screenings, trying to get word about the website out, ect, ect. The administrative stuff is a job unto itself.
While it’s all well and good, we’re not paid to do this. No money is made, nothing comes in, it only goes out. When we go to a festival, or see a movie, 9 times out of ten it’s out of our own pockets. Yes, we get an occasional free movie or two, but mostly we pay to be there. For the Asian Film Festival we’ll be seeing about 50 of the 55 films, 8 films have screeners, 3 at press screenings, but 22 of the films we’re reviewing come from my collection, and another 21 films I bought tickets to, and Mondocurry, Mr C and Chocko will have bought tickets whatever number of films they are seeing (plus train and subway fare)
It’s not a complaint. I’m not complaining, only that we’re getting bigger and bigger and this thing that we all love to do is devouring our free time.
Something has got to give.
Once the NYAFF is done things should calm down a bit (or not since there is Japan Cuts and the NYCIFF are right afterward) and we can take stock. We can all sit down and see where we want to go.
I figure by the time we decide what we want to do we’ll be him deep in the NYFF so it will have to wait until that’s done and we’ve decompressed.
For now nothing should be changing. We’ll still give you a film a day, and that will stay until at least February 20th and Unseen’s next birthday. Other than that or after that I’m not sure. Something has to be done.
I’ll let you know what we come up with.
I do want to mention that if you have suggestions do email us or comment and we’ll listen. We may write on the films, but you all read it so do feel free to tell us.
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This week's films are another group of WTF films. Also Friday night we start reviews of NYAFF reviews. Multiple reviews every day through the start of the festival on the 29th when we switch to reports from festival screenings while counter programming with a film a day.
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