AFI fest

The last two weekends in LA were full of highlights! On Saturday we volunteered for the AFI (American Film Institute) Fest. This film festival is a young one, it has the common competitions of feature, documentary and short, but it also hosts some glamourous red carpet premieres. One of them, the "centerpiece", was the 4 hour movie CHE (2 parts à 2 hours) with Benicio del Toro playing Ernesto Guevara. It took place in the legendary 'Graumann's Chinese Theater', the central building on Hollywood Blvd. Lena and I had to usher people to their seats inside the theater. It was exciting because the cast and crew of the movie was there, of course. We did not follow the speach by Steven Soderbergh, the director, because we were too busy working. It became very difficult to fill the last spots here and there in the dark correctly when people kept arriving and the movie had started. It was all in Spanish with English subtitles. But I had seen that the documentary about Gogol Bordello (the band I'd seen at the Detour festival) screened in another theater and that Elijah Wood might be there! So Lena convinced me that this was the chance and we arrived there just in time. The film had just started, we could use our ticket vouchers we had from volunteering and - Elijah Wood sat right on the first seat when I entered the small cinema. I realized that his girlfriend sat next to him and that she was actually in the BAND (!), a dancer and kind of go-go-girl, but very witty (she was interviewed in the documentary) and beautiful. After the screening she answered questions from the crowd and when she and Elijah stood in front of the theater for a long time, chatting with friends, I just talked to him again and asked him if he remembered me from the shooting in Prague. He did, after a while. People don't understand why I am so crazy about that small guy. But I was happy and that was it.

The next weekend I volunteered for AFI once more, this time at the premiere of "Last Chance Harvey", a Hollywood comedy with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. This time it was much more relaxed work and I got to see the whole movie. Dustin Hoffman clowned about instead of giving a speech before the screening... :-) Maybe he's sick of those things.

But before that a lot of things happened... see next post!