I’m sitting at a bar in Vancouver’s international airport waiting for the call to board my plane back to the UK. I’ve just spent three and a half weeks in LA and Vancouver, showing Critical Mass at the Newport Beach Film Festival (where, in case you missed the massive laurel we immediately stuck on our homepage in an outburst of shameless self-promotion, we won an Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking award) and at DOXA.
I’ve been through a fair amount of airports in the past few years but I have to hand it to Vancouver. They have an aquarium and trees, a small gesture that allows me to somehow ignore what the airport (and my use of it) represents.
A few days ago, I was interviewed by a blogger in a cafe called Our Town in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver. Our Town is also of course a play by Thornton Wilder which uses warmly human Americana to evoke the pain of coming to terms with death.
That’s been a theme on my trip. I was on The Future of Filmmaking panel at DOXA where the other filmmakers had also all made films about coming to terms with death.
While packing earlier today, I was overcome with the urge to hammer out my will, as if this flight in particular represented something final.
As John Irving wrote so astutely all those years ago, “in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases”.
I don’t know why that occurs to me now, but it does. My flight has been called and it’s time to board.
See you on the other side of the pond, everyone.
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