So this is my question on the WHOLE fest thing....

[Charli]

Will there EVER be a fest where we won't see a gun?

[Tom Shortridge]

Only if it's "NoGun" fest...

[Richard J. Johnson]

Or the requried element is "No Guns"

I take it you have gun overload

If the next fest is crimefest or the like, You are in for it.

[Michael Anthony Horrigan]

I don't think it matters. There are some films that use guns as a crutch, but there are others that use them but the story is about so much more, like LAWLESS.

There were a LOT of guns in this fest though.

MAH

[Richard J. Johnson]

I don't think it matters. There are some films that use guns as a crutch, but there are others that use them but the story is about so much more, like LAWLESS.

There were a LOT of guns in this fest though.

MAH

good point.

[seanmcleod]

I have to preface this with admitting I'm bias, but I keep seeing people saying "with betrayal a lot of people would take the easy way out with guns and drugs" or like charli said "will there ever be no guns?" And I feel like I have to defend and say it's not just the easy choice to do that. It could be, but for some like myself, it might actually be harder. I, and I'm sure others, felt added pressure to do it well or give the audience something relatively new. So when people say its the easy thing to do for betrayal its kind of dismissive for the people who put just as much thought into telling a creative and hopefully new story using guns as ones without.

Whether I was successful in that is up to the individual viewers though.

And I apologize to Charli if she wasn't saying that in a "cmon guns really?" sort of way, which I doubt she was, but just something I wanted to mention as I've seen a few people talk about it.

[Marlon Ladd]

I think if there were alot of guns in this fest it was because of the theme. There were also alot of relationship betrayals and I think that just goes along with the betrayal aspect. Most people probably think of betrayal in terms of somebody they love or trust doing something to hurt them. When you look at it from that perspective you have relationships involved, but then if you want to turn up the heat or the stakes in a sense, you'll have guns involved.

There were some films that used guns as a crutch, but I think that's what makes a festival and more importantly this festival what it is. Filmmakers make the stories that "they" want to make and the kind of stories that they like and in the end we get a large variety of stories and an exposure to things that we may have never even thought of before.

[Bigmagic]

Gotta go with Marlon on this one, make the story you want to make. Marlon leads in body count of course so he might be biased.

[Marlon Ladd]

Gotta go with Marlon on this one, make the story you want to make. Marlon leads in body count of course so he might be biased.

LOL!!! Looks like I'm getting a reputation around here. Hee-hee.

[AJ Brooks]

Reputations...courtesy dvxuser.com

But yes, I think the theme of this contest pushed guns into the mix more than usual.