cornerstone film festival

one of the things that I think is really cool about Cornerstone is that they try to appeal to more than just one audience, and more than just one aspect of Christian artistry, or in many cases, artistry in general. They offer a number of seminars each day from how to hone your artistic talents, to growing in your faith, to simple prayer times and devotionals. Unfortunately, we didn't get to go to any of these, they all conflicted with concerts we wanted to see.

We did take advantage of the Flickerings "tent", which was actually in the warehouse/storage area where they host the dance party every night. During the daytime they screen a number of short films that are submitted by attendees, and they usually pick a theme and show full length films and have discussions about them afterwards.

This year, the theme was "Outlaw Cinema". There were lots of movies listed that were very intriguing to me, tho we were able to go see 2 of them. One was Bonhoeffer, a documentary about the life and teachings of the german theologian. Very interesting, lots of interviews with family members and students of his that really showed the struggle that he faced trying to seek out God's will and actively live as a pacifist all the while secretly taking part in an assasination attempt on Hitler. I had wanted to rent this one for awhile, so I'm glad I finally got a chance to see it. Even for people who aren't into documentaries, it's an attention-holder.

On Sunday morning I also went to see The Motorcycle Diaries while Seth was investigating a promising Ska band. Simona had told me awhile back that I would really like this movie, and I did, in so many ways. I did have a hard time catching on to the spanish until I got used to it - I haven't talked to many Argentinians, so the accents threw me for awhile, so yay for subtitles. Then there was the picturesque South American countryside, Argentina, Chile, and especially Perú, where they were both up in the mountains and on the Amazon, very very beautiful and sentimental for me. And there was the theme of the movie - 2 guys opening their eyes and seeing the injustice and oppression of the poor and the indigenous peoples of these countries for the gain of big corporations, or just because of economic status and bigotry. It's nice to see something like that change a person to the point that they do something about it.
The movie definitely painted Che Guevara in a positive light, which some people do not appreciate. He is seen as someone struggling with the inequalities that he was seeing - even from people who were doing good, but still allowed injustice to infiltrate their actions. The tagline for the movie was "let the world change you, and you can change the world". They just stopped at a certain point and didn't say much about how he changed the world. But as a movie, it was funny and intelligent and very enjoyable to me.