(Day One: Sao Paulo)

Hello all -

Just wanted to give you a quick sense of the show down here.

The theater is on the main avenue in Sao Paulo - like Fifth Ave in NYC - with lots of big corporate buildings all around. It's a nice theater with several screens and about 250 seats. There were a lot of people buzzing about before-hand, including several camera crews who were doing interviews with Andrea (from Go Outside Magazine), Ben Stookesbury, and me. Even one crew with French questions (interesting given my mediocre French). The most common question I was asked was how we got from Colorado to Brazil, which I explained.

They have named the festival Rocky Spirit Festival and have printed up posters, t-shirts and programs. The first night of programming (Kadoma, Killing in the Name and 180 South) went well.

(Day Two: Sao Paulo)

So the shows went well again tonight. Not a huge audience but a happy one. The general consensus seems to be that the insane traffic here scared folks away even though it was a sellout again. The theater is in a neighborhood that wouldn't seem to have a lot of Mountainfilm's audience living or working nearby, which I think might hurt attendance, but who knows as this is a crazy sprawling place with minimal public transport and no bike lanes.

Speaking of bikes, we screened With My Own Two Wheels following Spoil tonight and people really liked it. Jacob flew down here at the last minute and he is a terrific guy and deeply appreciative of everything Mountainfilm has done for him. He told me they were about to give up on fests but since their screening in Telluride, they have been accepted at Flagstaff, Port Townshend and a bunch of others, plus the TV deal and other good stuff has happened to them since Mountainfilm. Jacob told me that when he was born, his parents - both schoolteachers - took him and his brother home from the hospital in a bike carrier and they rode across the country when he was 14 and his brother 12 ... wild. He contacted some local riding group here and we are going for a group ride around the city tomorrow and found a bike for me from a dude who was at the screening and is loaning us one. When we were walking to this guy's place tonight, it was several hours after the screening and we were many blocks from the theater and we walked by some cat who said, 'nice film man, I really liked it.'

People also seemed to really like Happy, which was nice. One guy told me he cried during the film and he gave me a cd of his music which he said we could use for anything. I am listening to it as I write this and I don't think it is intro music but it is fun. As I told you all, the intros were their own music set to a lot of the edits already done, including Ben Knight's Telluride one. One of them ended with the picture below, which was fun - if not odd - to see.

Some other photos - Ben Stookesberry being interviewed last night.

Apparently, Ben and Chris went out dancing till dawn last night. I was asleep - WTF? The famed Brazilian beauties are not as prevalent here as they are in Rio, but along with Jacob's arrival at the hotel a bunch of young women who were models - or aspiring models - arrived. It was a little odd. There was a gaggle of them, all long and lanky in short shorts wobbling on top of high heels around the lobby. Weird scene.

Speaking of, Jacob and I wandered through a street market that had been set up here and found this local delicacy:

Sao Paulo has crazy luxury here as well with all sorts of expensive stores. While you can't really read it, this is a Ferrarri/Maserati dealer, which makes sense since you rarely go above 20 mph here. Sensible.

Anyway, that gives you a sense of the scene down here. Tomorrow is the outdoor screening, which should be cool. I will update you afterwards, but am crashing because we have biking tomorrow morning and I still need to find a helmet in the a.m.

Later,
David

Want more adventures? Read about Sao Paulo: Day Three or host your own Mountainfilm on Tour show.