Calgary and Giraf

In November my wonderful girlfriend drove me across a mountain range so I could attend my film's screening in Calgary, Alberta as part of the Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival.
Here is the link to the awesome festival promo by Malcolm Sutherland. winner of the Best in Canada and co-winner of the audience award with his short The Astronomer's Dream. http://vimeo.com/6233213
The journey there was an insane twenty hour drive across the plains to the east of Vancouver, through the Rockies and out onto the wide open spaces of Alberta. The journey was almost too fast to take in the sites and sure enough we had a far better view on the return journey when there was light during the trip through the mountains.
There is an awful lot of Canada. My brain just shuts down rather than trying to fit it all into an internal map. Quite often during a drive through the Rockies your eyes try to do the same thing and you end up looking at things like your shoes say, or a dog, because you can fit them easily into your field of vision. The mountains make your eyes want to be bigger than they are.
But just as you can lift anything with a big enough lever, if you get far enough away from the Rockies you can see them all at once and this state of being is called 'Being in Calgary'. Hahaha amn't I drole?
We stayed with a friend of Lisa's called Lyndsey who had a spare room in her flat and is possibly the most likeable person on earth. Lyndsey is a wonderful, generous soul and treated us like long lost friends. During our stay with her she shared her whiskey and fed us Eggnog and without her the trip would not have been a millionth as pleasant.
The Night of my screening came and Lyndsey brought a couple of her friends from church and rock-climbing (they go together like jam and toast apparently). They were a wonderful bunch keen to see what was going on. I gather Lyndsey's seal of approval was the only reason they'd consider coming which made me nervous, but they were engaging and friendly and we had a fantastic night out when the screening was over.
So the screening was a theme-driven competition where the shorts were played back-to-back and the judges would decide the winner, the theme for my section was 'strings'. I later discovered this was an obscure reference to a Canadian film of the same name made by Oscar nominated female team from Calgary, but hey. My film was on last and just as Adrienne reached over to grab my hand and I thought my heart was going to explode it started, then stopped. The end credits rolled and the sound kept going. There were sporadic "Is that it?" claps and it was over.
I rushed out into the foyer and a girl called Joanna whom I had been talking to by email was all apologies. I was quite panicky.
"I'm really sorry! What can do for you though, is play it tomorrow as part of the next selection as well as tonight before the main feature. I'm so sorry it didn't work. Would that be okay?"
"Th-thankyou!"

I've never felt such a wierd combination of still fading horror combined with exultant triumph. I just sort of wobbled. I was consoled by all present and we all stayed to watch the feature, which we all got free tickets for and I fulfilled my biggest ambition of having my film screened before a feature. The film was an Israeli-Australian co-production and it is absolutely brilliant. The trailer can be found here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44lh-RvV4NM

So for the rest of the trip we relaxed, watched more films, enjoyed Lyndsey's hospitality and visited a fossil museum an hour out of town. we visited Jasper and Banff and Lake Louise and chased a truck to Running Down a Dream by Tom Petty.

Thankyou so much Adrienne. X