I went to the Hope and Dreams Film Festival with my mom, dad and mom's friend. My mom and I had made a 15 minute documentary about the life of puppies that are raised to become seeing eye dogs, called "Blue Collar Pups." This was the only fest that accepted it. But we eagerly went to Hope, NJ to check it out.

Pulling up to the stone church/community center, I noticed the parking space would be limited (there were only a handful of spots on the tiny street), but that there were still plenty of spaces! Apparently, not a lot of people had arrived. yet. Seriously, only about 20 ppl showed up for our screening -- but that brings our grand total of ppl who've seen "blue collar pups" to about 25.

This little town was so cute. We had lunch at this house/diner down the road from the church. The festival director was so hospitable and called me to ask if I would be on time to our screening because she didnt want to start it until we showed up. We came and I got a tote-bag filled with small-town goodies like a t-shirt, coffee, tourist magazines and festival info. The director really wanted us to stick around for the filmmaker discussion and for the award ceremony -- she insisted she didn't know the winners, that this was not her decision. It was so cute!

We came for the 2pm viewing of our film along with a short animation before ours and a 1 hr made-for-tv documentary about 3 Canadian high school kids going to Tanzania to learn about AIDS in Africa. That was a pretty lengthy piece that could have been cut to maybe 10 minutes. It was a bit boring and the content was basically following kids around on their trip -- not much of a narrative, one minute they're in a village with orphans, the next they're on a safari. THe animation was absolutely hilarious.

The director asked my mom and I to come to the front after our film played and answer audience questions. One woman in the audience said she had come to the festival just to see our piece because she had a keen interest in guide dogs. People really enjoyed the film!

Then my dad was a pain and said we had to leave because he was bored. so we packed back into the car and left. I felt guilty for leaving the festival, even though I had only planned to stick around for a few hours, I feel like we should have stayed a lot longer. At 4pm when we were heading out, a crowd had gathered to watch the next batch of films.

I think we're going to submit the video to the animal planet and PBS and see if it can get some airtime. We'll see.