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Chennai International Film Festival

This week, A Stone Throw was awarded Best Short Film at the Chennai International Film Festival in India.

Chennai is home to the international headquarters of The Theosophical Society.

The Theosophical Society (emblem pictured), founded in 1875, is a worldwide body whose primary object is Universal Brotherhood based on the realization that life, and all its diverse forms, human and non-human, is indivisibly One. The Society imposes no belief on its members, who are united by a common search for Truth and desire to learn the meaning and purpose of existence by engaging themselves in study, reflection, purity of life and loving service.

While my stuff has sold and been shortlisted internationally, I have never actually won an award (other than encouragement awards and special mentions) outside of Australia.

I'm very pleased about this particular win for two reasons:
  1. After making films since I was but a wee child, I can finally replace "has sold and screend his short films internationally" with "international award-winning director" on my CV - without resorting to semantic sleight.
  2. If the Theosophy Society is anything to go by, then Chennai sounds like my kind of city.
As the world is becoming more and more fundamentalist in nature, I find myself sliding from Atheist to Agnostic. I think our spiritual bent is ultimately the difference between hopelessness and hopefulness. It has to do with my survival and the way I see myself continuing on into my 40s (I turn 40 in December). I could get grumpier (like most pessimistic atheists) or I could become more hopeful (as an Agnostic).

The way I see it is that we're all completely and utterly condemned to nuclear inferno - especially with a whole bunch idiots in charge of Australia and the US presently.

I don't want to feel this way. It affects everything I do. So I'm trying to find god (my definition of it) in a whole bunch of reading and scientific literature. To this end, I've just ordered Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion - which I can't wait to read.

Tomorrow, I will be replacing the 16mm short film, Bertolt with the flash animated ABC short, Indy Nile Investigates which I wrote for my buddy Roberto Palmonari.

Then on Thursday, Phil Jeng Kane and I will interview Gordy Hoffman - director of the world's largest growing screenplay competition, The Bluecat Screenplay Competition for our podcast. Gordy wrote the feature film, Love Liza, starring his brother Philip Seymour Hoffman and since then he has tried his hand at directing a digital feature of his own.

So it looks like 2007 is about to go off with a bang.

New Years' resolutions: stop biting nails, become lean, make films. What are yours?
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