Excitement!

Excited...overjoyed...humbled....pick your positive adjective, we felt it last week at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth. 

Here's the rundown.

Now, I can't give a full account of the whole weekend, though I wish I could. I was unfortunately graduating that weekend (what a drag), and wasn't able to come until the last day, which was when our film would be closing the festival weekend. But! What I was there for was phenomenal and a weekend we will never forget.

There were some serious nerves (especially Michael's, Scott's, mine) and some uncontainable excitement (Michael's parents, my parents, friends/significant others), but the show inevitably started. Now, I can't speak for everyone else, but I remained pretty white-knuckled throughout the whole showing. We've shown The Reunion to friends and family, but never to a theater full of people who have no obligation to like our film, or us, for that matter. Talk about scary! Having your face humongously displayed on a theater screen puts you in a super-vulnerable place. It is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Luckily, I had little reason to be scared because the response the film got completely exceeded expectations. People loved it! A Q&A afterward gave people the opportunity to express their thoughts on the film and ask Michael and the actors questions. It was completely wonderful--the other filmmakers and audience members were so complimentary and supportive of our little film. I felt so humbled that all of these amazingly talented people loved our film, our film that we worked on for countless hours, our film that kept us up all night, our film that somehow, in our naïveté, we thought nobody could possibly love as much we do. I am so happy and proud that our film touched and impacted other people, if only in a small way.

The night just got better at the awards ceremony following the film, where Jesse Harris (everyone's new crush) announced that our film won the Jury Award for Best Feature. I wish I could adequately describe how excited we were--I mean, the Jury Award is the BIG one! And THEN things just got better, as Michael was chosen by a screenwriting program for a special scholarship. I mean, whoa! Over one hundred filmmakers, and they chose our Michael!

We met a lot of awesome people that night (and weekend) and are eternally grateful to the folks at NFFTY for believing in our film and bestowing us with the honor of choosing it as their closing night film. To all of you young aspiring filmmakers out there, NFFTY is an invaluable opportunity to display your work and network with other talented and creative people. We can't recommend it enough! We had such an amazing and memorable experience. It's surely one we'll never forget.