SILVERDOCS 2009
SILVERDOCS is finally over! For the past eight days, I’ve been managing the day-of ticketing for AFI/Discovery Channel’s documentary film festival. Although I was dreading the festival as it approached, I had a great time and think it was really successful.
As several moviegoers commented, I was essentially glued to my seat at the ticketing table in the lobby. After eight 15-hours days of customer service for the festival, I’m beat!
I’ve been doing this for the past 2 1/2 years, and each year, I’m constantly asked the same questions at the day-of ticketing table: “Do you have any tickets available for ____?”, “What’s it mean for a film to be ‘on standby?’”, “What are my chances of getting in?”, “So I buy my ticket now and then wait in the standby line?”, “You don’t have just one more ticket?”, “I can stand in the back. Are you sure you can’t let me in?”, etc.
For anyone who works in ticketing, the answer to all of these questions is obvious, but they are still legitimate questions for other people. Even so, it’s so difficult to maintain composure after being asked the same set of questions hundreds of times each day, sometimes by really aggressive people, sometimes by dense people, sometimes by multiple people simultaneously, sometimes while trying to quickly sell tickets to people in a standby line before their film starts.
Before the festival started, I wasn’t sure if I would have the mental energy to put up with all of this again. But once the festival began, I remembered all of the fun of the festival. There are such wonderful people. The festival staff is fantastic, and there are always such interesting people who attend. Everyone is so energetic, and all of us – festival staff and filmgoers alike – go through the journey of the festival together. Like a good story, there is an arc to the festival, and we each travel through it; sometimes our stories converge, sometimes not.
Will I be back next year? Assuming I’m asked to return, it largely depends on how many of my friends return, especially Lucia, who so expertly manages the standby lines. And it depends on how well I remember the positive aspects of the festival next year! For now though, I’m just basking the success (and recovering from the exhaustion) of SILVERDOCS 2009.
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