I ended up attending the CineCHEF event which was really cool. The only film that I knew that a chef based his small platter on was Pulp Fiction where the chef made hamburger sliders – which, if you have seen Pulp Fiction, you know that those sliders are featured in some pretty ridiculous scenes. My favorite station was the street tacos and the desserts, I’m maybe the only person in the world who doesn’t like Crush orange soda, so I wasn’t a fan of the Crush Orange soda scallops dish, but I thought it was incredibly creative, as I would never think to cook with Orange soda. It was a fun event with great food, great drinks and a sophisticated atmosphere. I would recommend the event.
I attended two films at BIFF. I saw ‘Meet the Patels’ and ‘Hip-operation’. Both films truly blew my mind and were wonderful. ‘Meet the Patels’ was basically the Indian indie film version of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’, but it was way better! It was hilarious. Basically it was about this guy named Ravi whose Indian parents are constantly bugging him to get married. He ends up on this crazy adventure traveling all over to go on dates with nice Indian girls. In the end, he realizes that it was a mistake to have broken up with his goofy American girlfriend and they get back together. It’s just definitely a film everyone should see.
The other film I attended was ‘Hip-operation’ which was about old people hip-hop dancing in New Zealand and making it to the hip-hop world championships in Vegas. It was hilarious and also had a really great message behind it. The two films were the best films that I have seen in awhile and had so much more depth behind them than the usual Hollywood produced movies. I would recommend the film festival to anyone because there is so much diversity in the films shown and I think that there are great messages and hidden depths to all of the films. I laughed so much at ‘Meet the Patels’ that I skipped my ab workout for the day.
Overall my experience at BIFF was better than I had first imagined and has inspired me to be a consumer of more independently produced films. Because as they say at BIFF, “You are what you watch, make it something good."
Being a college student, I often find myself living in a college bubble consumed of Starbucks, never-ending midterms, and friends. Before having the opportunity to intern for Wildstory Public Relations, I had never even heard of Boulder International Film Festival. The first picture I had in my head of the event was a bunch of people wearing berets, sipping espressos, watching movies that were all in subtitles. That was the stereotype I had of a film festival. After interning a bit and learning about the films that would be at BIFF, such as the one about National Lampoon ‘Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant’, my misconception about film festivals subsided and I realized that this truly was an event that could interest a broad audience, including students like myself.
