Lunafest

For the third year running, Shippensburg University hosted Lunafest. For those of you who haven’t been to one before, the event is a film festival. All the films shown are short (this year, they ranged from 5 to 11 minutes each) and they were made by women, about women and for women. As with last year, we didn’t have a lot of attendance, but it didn’t detract from the overall quality of the films and the experience I had. As per usual, the proceeds went to benefit the Breast Cancer Fund.

A little before seven in the evening, the weather was murky and rain was coming down. It wasn’t enough to need an umbrella, but still enough so that you’d notice it. Cars traveled their usual paths across the maze of roads that wind their confusing way through our university while students walked about with their suppers in hand. All in all, it was a normal Tuesday evening that felt largely unremarkable. What I felt inside was a little different, though. Having attended the Lunafest last year, I knew a little bit about what to expect. Some of the films I saw the first time around had been funny, some of them interesting and some made no sense to me at all. But, considering that the event was inexpensive and enjoyable, I had been looking forward to it for most of the semester ever since I heard it announced. What could be better than a showing of films about women in which you got to eat all the bite size candy you wanted?

For that reason, as I hiked out of my dorm room and up the hill to our Union Building, I didn’t feel like any other person walking around looking for their late evening meal. I felt as though I was about to experience something unique, something that doesn’t come along very often and something I would remember for a long time to come. In this respect, I wasn’t disappointed.

The festival started off with a film about a woman who writes subtitles for movies. In the film, subtitles appear when she perceives something about how two people in a relationship are interacting. When she realizes her sniffling cold-stricken boyfriend is no longer trying, she doesn’t get off the subway but instead chooses to stay on and leave him behind. I suspect she doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’s going to get there.

The third film shown dealt with two women who met while waiting for a subway. The first three films dealt with public transportation. The film, which is called “Touch” involved a woman going to an interview and another woman, who is feeling suicidal and who is also going somewhere without really knowing where. She’s a woman who no one talks to, and she has a voice that sounds a little timid, as though she’s not used to asserting herself. They hold onto each other as the train comes, and the future- with whatever it might bring- arrives.

The other films included an African-American woman’s experience as the first cable car operator in San Francisco, a group of people interviewed about their experiences in a knitting circle, a 14-year-old girl who enjoys playing table tennis and receives private instruction so she can go through school, a series of voice recordings set to animation about a (now deceased) woman from Africa who had caught HIV and was struggling to figure out what it meant for her, an unusual animated film about a midwife who delivered children, a short documentary about a 92-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease from Ireland who still wanted to be independent but was staring down the impending choice of living in a nursing home or not, a story about a woman who waited fifty years for her boyfriend to return and a film about a people who spend their time sending each other telegraph messages all too similar to what text messages look like today…including a message that said ;).

All in all, I was very impressed with the quality of the films. Not only did I enjoy myself, but I learned a lot about what different women go through and what their perspectives in life are. It’s this kind of multicultural experience that you just don’t get very often that I have come to appreciate. The only real problem I had was that at an hour and a half, I found the event a little too short for my taste. I would have liked to see more flims, be exposed to more perspectives and learn more things.

To me, there isn’t an event that does more than Lunafest does and the wait for next year’s event is definitely longer than I’d like it to be.