Are you a Festival Fanatic?

They've added one screening of Habanastation on closing Sunday, February 26th, at 10am in the Whitsell; I've added it to the schedule here.

It didn't get updated on PIFF's website until after the screenings, but it's official that Cairo Exit's screenings were replaced with Grandma, A Thousand Times. I've updated those screenings here for those keeping track at home.

The remaining Encore Screenings for Sunday, February 26th have been announced (and added to the schedule here) - in addition to Man Without a Cell Phone and Goodbye, you've got additional opportunities to see Gerhard Richter, Patagonia, and Unfinished Spaces. (I heartily recommend the latter!)

Paul Sher's been wearing a stylish baseball cap emblazoned with the PIFF 35 logo for the last several days. We're told that if they get enough serious interest, they'll order more -- and serious means 40 hats or so. I'm down for two, but don't tell Gina.

(I took a picture of Paul in the hat, but my phone seems to have misplaced it. It's light olive green, with the yellow and black PIFF logo from the cover of the program, or that T-shirt you already bought, stitched into it.)

If you're interested, let Kristy or the folks at the advance ticket window in the Mark Building know right away!

One of the new-for-this-year features are film ratings: after you see a film, you can go back to the Priorities page (where you'd ranked your films) and give the film one to five stars. At first, this feature was only for you: you could sort that priorities list by rating to help remind you what films you really liked; a few days ago, I made those stars appear on the grid too.

Just now, though, I rolled out another new thing: you can now easily share a link to a page listing all your rated movies. The main use for this is for when people ask you "What have you seen that you really liked?". Feel free to post your link to social media sites like Twitter (and don't forget the #piff35 hashtag).

Click on the picture to see my ratings page. You'll find the link to yours at the bottom of the instructions on Your Festival Schedule page. Let me know what you think about this!

Just got word (thanks, Laura!) that PIFF announced two more cancellations, and I've updated the schedule here:

• Jean Gentil replaced with Restoration, Saturday, 2/11 at 1pm,Lloyd Mall 5
• Las Acacias replaced with A Cat In Paris, Saturday, 2/11 at 8:30pm at Cinemagic

The press screening updates that came out today have been merged into the schedule... The problem that led to the "oops" message some of you saw has been fixed... and the schedule grid now shows your star rating for each film you've rated (in place of the priority, which doesn't really matter once you've seen the film, amirite? Don't forget that you can go back to the priorities tab and sort the film list by your own ratings as often as you like, to see your top-ten (or top 98!) list.

One more thing: I talked with people at the press screenings today about two different strategies for dealing with press screenings here, if you're planning on attending essentially all of them.

One idea is to prioritize them normally and let the Schedule Assistant schedule you for them; it should choose press screenings over regular-festival screenings automatically. This is what I do, and it works well as changes happen to the press-screening lineup.

Someone else suggested a different plan: give press screened-films the lowest "I don't want to see this" priority, and either uncheck the "include press screenings" box or manually select those screenings yourself.

Whatever way makes the most sense to you is the best way - I'm really trying to make this thing work for the way you think about your schedule, and not to force you to think about it my way. Seeing how different people approach the scheduling challenge is a lot of fun for me, and if you've got other ideas, I want to hear them!

We heard today that tomorrow's press screenings will be swapped: we'll see Tales of the Night in the morning, and Patagonia in the afternoon.

Yesterday's press screenings got shuffled because Bullhead didn't arrive in time; also, it looks like Habanastation isn't coming at all, but we gained a Where Do We Go Now? screening. All these updates have been made here.

(Note that if you're like me and frequently rerun the Schedule Assistant to rebuild your schedule "from here on", and you went to the press screenings yesterday, you might have to manually select those press screenings so that the Assistant knows you've seen them already. Never manually tweaked your schedule? Just click on the screening in the grid, then choose See this Screening.)

There have been a few PIFF schedule changes announced, and I've updated the schedule here: the rest of the press screenings have been filled in, and there have been a bunch of added regular-festival screenings; they've also removed a all of the screenings of Man Without a Cell Phone and Goodbye, but added screenings of them on Sunday, 2/26.

I'm still working on changing the automatic scheduler to try to keep you at the same theater for consecutive films when possible (the travel-time changes so far only consider the time between screenings), but even without that feature, my own schedule includes 80 of 99 films (that counts each shorts program as a film, and I'm seeing four of the six shorts programs!)

I just fixed a couple more typos, but I heard that there'll be several schedule corrections coming from the Festival folks tomorrow.

I'll make the changes as soon as I get them, but I figured I'd remind you that if you're using the Schedule Assistant here, you can always go back and regenerate your schedule "from here on out" — it'll keep all the screenings you've seen, discard all the future screening selections, and use your current priority settings to rebuild your schedule. (I do this over & over, especially when the festival gets going and I hear more about films I should've prioritized higher!)

Also, I'm still improving the Assistant's ability to keep you at the same theater for more than one movie when possible; I should be done by this weekend, so if you can wait, you'll get a better schedule. Go ahead and enter priorities for your films now - those won't need to change!

If any of this isn't clear, find me at a screening and I'll explain what I mean. Of course, if you've got suggestions on making any of this more understandable or more useful to you, let me know!

...Bryan

Festival Fanatic hasn't changed much since last year: the biggest change (in honor of the passing of the Regal Broadway) is that travel time influences the automatic scheduling mechanism: I'll have more details about this shortly, but the goal is to to give you time to get there when you have to get to a different location (that part works now), and to reduce the chances that you'll have to move between theater locations between movies (which I'm still working on). As with most of the changes around here, the travel-time thing is an experiment, so I hope you'll let me know how it works out for you. (To their credit, the good NWFC folks who orchestrate PIFF have left more time between all the screenings this year, so I really think moving between venues won't be much of an issue.)

Silver Screen members, I hope to see you at the press screenings, starting Monday! ...Bryan

Updated 1/29 noon — Fixed a couple of data-entry errors: I'd missed a screening of José Y Pilar on 2/19, and gotten the time wrong for Pelotero on 2/25.