Sarah_Coleman's blog

My sojourn at the Woodstock Film Festival is over, and it's time to reflect a little on the gazillions of frames that have passed in front of my eyeballs in the last four days. As with any other works of art, films often demand some settling-in time.

Today is Bob Dylan day at the Woodstock Film Festival. The four-day fest is closing tonight with a screening of the Todd Haynes biopic I’m Not There, in which six different actors, including Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett, portray various incarnations of His Bobness over the years.

Meira Blaustein is the director of the Woodstock Film Festival, but this year she's also a contributing filmmaker. She's screening her heartrending documentary about her disabled son, For the Love of Julian, and it begins my day of documentary viewing. "I made the film out of necessity," Blaustein told me when I bumped into her at the opening night party.

I'm facing a difficult choice this morning: whether to go to the screening of Black White & Gray, James' Crump's documentary about the relationship between Robert Mapplethorpe and his curator/lover Sam Wagstaff, or Julian Schnabel's feature The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which sounds even prettier in its French title, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon.) In the end, for logistic

Everyone loves the Woodstock Film Festival. That's the sense you get, anyway, when arriving at this picturesque little Catskills town that proudly bills itself as a "colony of the arts." Here, there are no red carpets, no velvet ropes. The town's only permanent big screen venue, the Tinker Street Cinema, is a modest white clapboard building that used to be a church.