Our first film of the day was a short documentary, Growing In Knowing: The Gateway to Midvale Garden. Scrap metal artist Erika Koivunen gets the kids of the Midvale Elementary School to bring her boxes of scrap metal, and she shows them how she makes a garden gateway out of it. I would have given this a four, but they don’t give us ballots for films less than sixty minutes long.

Typeface began with the struggle of the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers to stay afloat, backtracked to the town’s history as the center of the world for the manufacture of wood type, followed up with how wood type is used today, and ended with the dispiriting news that the museum’s future was in serious doubt. The Q&A afterward made me feel a little better, though: The museum’s newest director gave us a quick summary of what he was doing to improve attendance and network with graphic artists all over the country, who dearly want to use the museum’s resources. Four out of five.

We ended the festival with two thrillers:

There suspense in nearly every minute of Cell 211. A newly-hired prison guard is on an orientation tour of the prison he’s going to work in when a riot erupts. Caught in the melee, he poses as a new inmate to survive. Four out of five.

The director of Mother must’ve been a Hitchcock fan. The twists and turns of this crime drama would’ve earned more than a few knowing smirks from the old master. Four out of five.

One thing I’ll remember about this year’s film festival was how Meg Hamel, the festival’s director, seemed to follow us everywhere! It was like she was stalking us! We went to fourteen films (took Thursday and Friday off from work to devote ourselves full-time to it), and Hamel must’ve been on hand to introduce at least ten of them. She told us she got in more time riding her bike during the five days of the festival than at any other time during the year.

The first two movies we watched were being shown on the Orpheum’s main screen. It was the first time I had ever been inside the Orpheum, a theater built back in the day when they had ceilings high enough you could fly airplanes in there. I’ll bet the balcony could seat at least 1,500 people all by itself. Now it’s a little bit worse for wear, sad to say, but it was a treat to finally get inside it and have a good look around.

Speaking of firsts, we had about three hours between the afternoon and evening shows yesterday and used it to our advantage to finally have a long sit-down mean at the Icon, right next to the Orpheum. If you’ve never eaten a tapas-style meal before, you’ve got to give it a try. It’s a lot of fun.

The theater at the Monona Terrace is a fantastic place to take in a show like Whad’ya Know? but it’s terrible for watching a movie. I doubt very much there’s a seat anywhere in the place that’s not directly behind another seat. The woman in front of me was not tall, and yet her head obliterated fully one-third of the screen; I had to sit on one cheek with my head cocked to the left if I wanted to see any of the two short documentaries we saw there.