Festival Director James McNally is attending this year’s Sundance Film Festival from January 21st to February 2nd.
T-1 day until festival begins
Up at 6:30am this morning to make sure I could get into HQ before 9am. I wanted to make my traditional coffee stop at Starbucks. At the shuttle stop near Fresh Market, I met Romina, who is the Artist Relations Liaison for World Dramatic and World Documentary. She lives in Mexico about half the year and works at Sundance during the festival and also during the summer labs. She worked at Sundance 2018 and took last year off. It was nice to catch up. At HQ it was a mixture of familiar faces and new ones, but everyone seems really nice and we are all looking forward to getting to work.
Tony is the department manager, and he’s returning from last year, and Tenley is the assistant manager, and she’s worked lots of Sundances in the Press Office, so they are an experienced team. Of course, Kir Chalker is back as the head of Artist Relations, and this is her 18th festival. Tony and Tenley ran the training during the morning, and then we broke for lunch. My roommate from last year, Bryan, will be working with me this year as he’s the volunteer for International Shorts. He and I went with Marci (with whom I’ve worked for the past three years) to a sort of health food cafe for lunch, on Bryan’s suggestion. It was further away than I thought and we ended up not back until nearly 2pm, after which they set us to work assembling filmmaker folders until 5pm.
Upon coming back to my lodging, I was mortified to discover I’d emptied my right pocket this morning which held all my Canadian money. It also happened to hold my key! Luckily, I knocked and woke Greg up from a nap who kindly opened the door for me. I won’t forget my key again!
All three of us went to the staff and volunteer party tonight, where we hung out together and then mingled on our own, and then all decided to leave at 11pm. It was still a bit of an adventure getting home. We took the bus in the wrong direction from the Main Street transit hub and had to get off and wait for the one going in the opposite direction. All tucked in before 12:30am but only 5.5 hours until I have to get up for a long day tomorrow. Still, nice party where I got to talk to a bunch of people.