Tanked on beer, Minneapolis crowd gawks at pandas and priests

by Mark Weaver, TC Daily Planet • July 11, 2008 • As promised, the 10 Second Film Fest took place immediately following the St. Anthony Main fireworks display. When I arrived, it felt like a party. Tiki torches blazed, people milled about and lined up at the beer wagon, and the projector blazed an ad for the Hotel Minneapolis up on the side of the Soap Factory. Attendees tripped through the uneven rubble and weeds to find seats on the ground in the dark.

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The festival included a broad range of films, the most memorable (a series of some four or five separate films in different categories) of a man dressed up as a panda doing various things with a priest. Many of the films were like watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, except in a more interesting milieu. As an art gallery, the Soap Factory also included many artsy-themed films, but the rambunctuous crowd was least impressed with these. The category for the most artistic fims received the most boos and exclamations of disdain. Indeed, the crowd was hard to please and a tad harsh, booing any film that didn’t have an immediate impact. When the crowd is tanked up on beer, I suppose anything conceptual is doomed to be lost in the fog.