Festival crazy

I attended a conference on digital cinema today in Montreal. Cory Docotorow spoke at the conference on Monday (and apparently he was very good), but I missed it.

I’ve been to a few of these new-media-related conferences now and I’ve accrued a short checklist of requests for presenters:

Rant on.

1) Can we please stop calling the internet “the wild west”? If you’re used to selling widgets and/or staring out a window all day, I can see why the internet might be a little intimidating at first, but we’ve had over a decade to live with it and, in general, it’s a rather predictable, civil place to do business.

2) Dialogue=Good, Monologue=Bad. You don’t put 400 new media professionals into a room to have them all listen to one person. Get your 20 minute schpeel out of the way and let the group discussion begin as soon as possible.

3) Presenters: Please leave your powerpoint presentation you usually give to potential investors at home. We don’t care how many years you’ve been operating; we don’t want to hear an annotated history of your company; and we don’t want to see advertisements for every product in your catalogue. We’re here to talk about ideas not products; if you can’t articulate your ideas then shut up and get off the stage. That may sound harsh, but 400 people wasting their valuable time to be advertised at is a lot harsher.

Rant off.

The conference segued into Montreal’s Festival de Nouveau Cinema du Monde, which starts tonight.

Going to check out a few new(ish) flicks:

• Shortbus

(US), D: John Cameron Mitchell

• The Wind That Shakes the Barley

(UK), D: Ken Loach - Another British director tells the story of Irish oppression. Winner at Cannes this year.

• Linda, Linda, Linda

(JP), D: Nobuhiro Yamashita - Looks like a cool, fun flick about a group of Japanese school-girls in a rock band.

• Away From Her

(CA), D: Sarah Polley

I’ll also check out the Web 2.0 panel discussion tomorrow, which should be fun, provided everyone sticks to the ground-rules!