SEDONA FILM FESTIVAL

Hi folks...I'm writing to you from beautiful Sedona, Arizona. It is absolutely gorgeous here! We arrived Thursday night after a long trip and had our first screening Friday morning at 8:15am. Woke up to an orange sun and the red rocks that surround the town. You'd think 8:15 would be way too early for a film screening (especially during the week) but the theaters were packed. We had a great audience and a very enthusiastic Q&A afterwards. There are a lot of questions raised by this film and people wanted to know as many answers as they could get. The Sedona crowd is amazing. They are mostly retired or close-to-retirement age and they love to come out and support the events in their community. The support for the Sedona festival is enormous. It feels like the whole town comes. This is what film festivals should be like and other festival organizers will hopefully notice this...it's a festival put on for the people who live here. Our second screening on Saturday afternoon was sold out and was followed by a very lively Q&A. For the first time, a North Korean sympathizer stood up and began to accuse us of being biased against North Korea. We have prepared for this for a long time so we began to discuss all the issues that concern many Korean people about the history between Japan and North Korea. But to our absolute surprise and shock, many members of the audience began to defend the film erupting into an intense and interesting debate about the politics in the region. This is very good and it's what we hope would happen. Dialogue, even in the form of debate, is always good. We expect this will happen as we continue on the film festival circuit where there are more diverse populations with differing points of view. We're back on Monday and won't be at the next festival until Cleveland on March 18th. Hope to see some of you there!