May 12

It's going to be a short post for today. Sleep was hard last night, maybe because I was too excited or because the pillow was terrible, but I was pretty tired the whole day. We got into our mentor groups and took a short walk around the neighborhood to get a sense of the place where we're staying. Around the corner are some small markets and a bakery. Im really trying to utilize the little French that I have learned, but I feel slightly intimidated. My group seems pretty chill, most of us are in the film program and talked about the films we are excited about and our school programs. One of them, Joseph, goes to UNC and made the film program sound 1000x better than UNL's. They actually get the experience of the film industry mixed with the cinema studies aspect that the UNL film production majors miss.

After the short tour we walked about a mile to the college and learned about the mentors and what type of workshops they're offering. I'm excited to see what they have to say, especially about the aspects of developing style and strengths. Not all of them will apply to me, some are focusing on acting and theater more than what I am interested in, but I'm sure others will find it helpful. The auditorium was hot and I was struggling to keep myself awake due to the amount of sleep (or lack thereof). Afterwards we learned about ticket and badge stuff needed to get into the screenings. Our badges give us access to every film except the ones at the Lumiere theater where all the red carpet events happen. But we have the option each day to enter into a raffle for the late showings, so not the premiere but the one after. We are given three stars to assign to the films that we want to see, which determine the likelihood of being chosen to attend. So I could put one star into The Grace of Monaco, one into Fox Catcher, and one into Goodbye to Language and have a s!all chance of being chosen, or I could
put all of my stars into Goodbye to Language and have a high chance, which is what I'll probably do. Because Godard.

I'm getting to know a lot of the people, some are really cool and others aren't so much. There's a student party tonight, which should be fun. Tomorrow we get our job assignments and badges as well as taking a walking tour of the actual festival, then on Wednesday we start. Its been nice thus far, but it's about to get super crazy.