Somehow I made it to the festival with my film in hand. Although the Digibeta master was done a week ago, the post house and I found that all text and titles in the film were blurry and staggered, so we dove back in and found that because I shot on 720x480 DV and we mastered on 720x486 Digibeta, those 6 lines of pixels were blurring the titles. Thus we spent all weekend up until midnight the day of my flight to fix the master Digibeta in Venice Beach, CA.
I made it home in time for three hours sleep, packing, then caught my a.m. flight to Vancouver, master tape clutched in hand, and rushed straight to a dubbing house, and somehow managed to get a screener to the festival. After a well needed nap I dressed for the filmmaker reception for those films in The Ark series, an environmental and animal series of films here at Vancouver, which Blue Gold is part of.
There I finally met my new mentor and collaborator Mark Achbar, after working together for 10 months in cyber-space. I have only two documentaries in my DVD collection, The Fog of War and The Corporation. It was actually after reading Blue Gold and seeing The Corporation that I decided to make the film Blue Gold, which I premiere here this week.
The Corporation has a small section about water for profit in the corporate system, and Blue Gold is really an expansion of that chapter. Both authors of the book knew Mark and gave me his email. I initially contacted him for Bolivia water war footage he used in The Corporation, but he had donated it to a university.
I asked him to view my rough cut of the film and he agreed. He liked it enough but gave me four pages of notes in his first email, and I was stunned I agreed with them all. I asked him to Exec Produce the film and be my bouncing board during the editing process. He did so for 10 months, 10 cuts, and 1000 emails before we finally met here tonight for the world premiere of the resulting film.
Slept right after the reception and look forward to the week ahead.
Sam Bozzo is the director of Blue Gold: World Water Wars premiering at the Vancouver Film Festival. He is blogging about his experience of bringing an environmental film to the festival.
The Vancouver Film Festival: http://www.viff.org/
Blue Gold: World Water Wars: http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/
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