Marc Hughes & Kim Storeygard look on at the SuperKids.

A column wherein SM staffer Kim Storeygard recounts her first day at the Cucalorus Film Festival with editor Noralil Ryan Fores in tow.

11.7.2007 --1 p.m.

We start our drive to Wilmington armed with MapQuest directions, two sandwiches and two dill pickles for snacks. We think we’ve planned it so we’ll get there in time for a 3:30 show to begin our evening. So we drive, listen to my iPod and try to come up with a game plan for how the two of us are going to cover this festival. It's in the midst of this all, we get lost.

Horribly lost.

The directions told us to follow 17 into Wilmington, so we follow signs for 17, which—instead of taking us into Wilmington—takes us around Wilmington and puts us on the road to Myrtle Beach. We’ve just about realized that we need to turn around when fittingly enough we see a sign marked with a U-turn symbol directing us back the way we came to get to Wilmington. Nora turns a video camera on me as I rant about how such a sign 10 miles outside of a city indicates the signs weren’t good enough in the city to get us there in the first place.

4:15 p.m.

We’re back on the road to Wilmington, slightly grumpier and decidedly anti-MapQuest, but having ditched the directions, I decide to just follow my instincts and hope they’ll be enough to get us where we need to be.

4:30 p.m.

We arrive at Thalian Main, thanks to my nose, no thanks to MapQuest. Since we missed the first show we wanted to see, we pick a bench on which to reevaluate our M.O. for the night and decide to start with Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about American interrogation practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. It begins a little after 5 p.m.

Knowing we won’t have much of a chance to eat dinner tonight, we head back toward the parking lot in search of a place to grab something and talk strategy for the rest of the festival. We decide on a small bar called The Copper Penny and order a couple of 7&7s to celebrate our new venture. As we get settled, we find ourselves face to face with Marc Hughes, a distributor for Life Size Entertainment. We make our introductions and plan to meet up later then settle down to business.

I had originally planned only to come to opening night of the festival, knowing that I was scheduled to work at my “real job” during the rest of it. But one thing leads to another, and I decide to “have a migraine” on Saturday so we can more evenly split up festival duty. We map out who’s going to go to which films, try to make sure one of us will always be able to pop into the filmmaker’s lounge and get on with the night.

5:15 p.m.

When we get back to Thalian Main, we find we have a few extra minutes before Gibney’s film is about to start, so we pick up the other tickets we need for that venue. While we wait, we converse with the gentleman standing next to us. By some chance, whose odds I don’t care to calculate, he turns out to be Stefano Giannotti, an Italian filmmaker whose newest film Chiayi Symphony is the exact one that over our quick dinner I'd most pressed my 7&7'ed comrade to go see. I wasn’t going to be able to see it because of my work schedule, but I’m a musician by training and by heritage, so I had a great interest in the film. Fortunately right then Stefano and I talk and build a rapport, and he gives me a copy of the film to review. We make plans to speak about it on Saturday when I’ll be back in Wilmington, and the evening officially begins.

7 p.m.

Gibney’s film over and my feelings on the political doc already taking shape, we're quickly onto the next thing, a dance and film production called Dance-a-Lorus. We’re not allowed to take flash photography, but we try to get down near the front in case the lighting is good enough for us to shoot a little bit anyway.

The performance is equal parts choreographed dance performance and film-viewing, but they happen at the same time, so the dancers interact with the audience as well as the film, thereby providing multiple levels of audio-visual stimuli and performance art.

8:30 p.m.

We don’t have anywhere to be for another hour, so we decide to head down to the “carnival” by the water. Though we don’t find any clowns, there’s booze aplenty and an inflatable slide that seems to amuse some daring souls. Along the way, we’ve run into Marc again, so we make the rounds talking to people and getting to know him a little better, while tricking our bodies into thinking we’re getting warmer.

A short surfing film is screened on a large inflatable screen, and people crowd close on the big stone steps in front of a cruise ship looking for warmth and amusement. A duo calling themselves the SuperKids hosts a number of films, including this one, and they try to get the crowd involved by giving away skateboards and eventually even the boxes the boards came in, just for a laugh.

10 p.m.

The screening is over and the crowd is starting to dissipate. Stefano, a guitarist, as well as a filmmaker, gets up on the stage to treat the remaining people to a smattering of Italian folk songs. The cold is starting to get to all of us, though. It must be about 40 degrees or below, and the heat lamps can only do so much. We’ll just have to come back for more another day. A long drive still waits for us. We’ve got to go back to Raleigh tonight.

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