Networ-queen

I have been taking advantage of the current German film festival in London, seeing as many interesting films in my native language as I could.
This has led to some lovely and interesting encounters with the filmmakers, who were happy to follow my suggestion of going to a local bar and having a chat with a Londoner.
On Friday we missed getting tickets to the coveted opening film, "Barefoot" and instead opted for the ultra low-budget "Netto" at 9pm, which was a lucky stroke by a film student in his penultimate year. Basically, his €3000 summer project ended up going on national release, what a result!
It was an intriguing, humane story about an alcoholic loser-type whose encounter with his 15-year old son changes both their perspectives on life.
We had a nice chat with the director, his friends and the 17-year old star of the film at BKB, and I am planning to email him my CV for consideration for his next project, as well as promoting his film to my distributor contacts.
You never know, I could end up going to Berlin for his next project with the astronomical bidget of €5000! Seriously, I would be honoured. He obviously has great vision, a sensitive understanding of characters and the creative process an actor goes through, as well as the ability to finish a project and make it look good.

The next film I saw, "The Day Bobby Ewing Died" was an intimate portrayal of life in an 80's green hippie commune, and the difficulties a city teen faces integrating with the commune and the village population, and climaxes with the Tchernobyl accident. It made me very eighty-mental and I remembered the year we had to drink powdered milk and weren't allowed out in the rain. Great fashion, too! ;-) Obviously a lot of work went into the set design, and the characterisations were subtly funny yet realistic.
Again I ended up going out for drinks with the team of directors and their friends, which led to a good conversation about the 7/7 bombs with the director of "About a girl", a boxing movie which I'd missed due to my acting class at the same time. I hope to have made a few more nice and useful friends- I mean it's always great to get on with people whose work you admire and I hope one of them may give me the chance to audition for them in the future. None of them had been to Cannes before, so they were also interested to find out about that.

Yesterday I saw "One Day in Europe" with a friend who couldn't stay for the Q&A session, which was almost as interesting as the film itself. I loved it, it reminded me a lot of "Night on Earth", what with the taxi drivers in 4 different cities.
After the film I got talking to a guy in the foyer who wore a very similar 1980's jacket to Niels in the nuclear power plant film. He ended up selling me a ticket for today's screening of "Stroke", a very moving documentary about the aftermath of a young musician's multiple stroke, filmed by his wife.

I never know how beneficial networking really is for an actor. I mean, people meet you as you, a real person, without any idea of what your capacity as a performer may be. Also, people above a certain level tend to go for "names" to cast in their films, unless they are pretty unknown themselves. So, an unknown actor trusts an unknown filmmaker who may then
- run off to New Zealand without passing you at least a copy of your rushes,
- forget to use proper sound and lighting equipment, making your performance useless
- change their number and move back with their parents
- edit your bit out
or whatever. This has all happened to me, and most actors I know.

If you are lucky however, your mate who wants to put you in a film happens to have a decent budget, decent idea or the luck to get it picked up and shown at a film festival, and hey presto, you are beginning to be one of the "names" and will be able to do more cool projects in the future, and maybe even get paid for your efforts!