Harry Potter Festival 2013

The 11th Harry Potter Festival took place here in Odense, Denmark on October 17-19, 2013. Over the years the festival has grown larger, but not necessarily better. When it first started in 2002, it was just a magic day at the local library attended by 40 kids. Then it grew to become a regular festival that lasted for a week and had up to 4,000 visitors. Three hundred of the kids went to Hogwarts each year in our old town hall where they were sorted into the different houses and tried to win the House Cup. They also had lessons in Transfiguration, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Charms, Potions, History of Magic, Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures taught by McGonagall, Snape, Hagrid and the rest of the staff. They got their wands at Ollivander's and fought off dementors and inferi and all in all it was an amazing experience for the kids. The festival also included The Forbidden Forrest, The Hogwarts Express, Hagrids Hut, The Chamber of Secrets and a two day Diagon Alley/Hogsmeade market in the town hall square. For many a Harry Potter fan, it was indeed the highlight of the year!

Then in 2010 J. K. Rowling visited the festival and Hogwarts was closed, as she needed the building to have lunch with the local notabilities. Hogwarts never opened again and as the number of visitors had increased to 10,000 the market days in the town hall square were abandoned and replaced by other activities in different places in town. This year even more visitors attended the 15 different "activities", but to be honest, the magic was gone.

The thing is that Hogwarts was always the core of the festival and with Hogwarts gone the heart of the festival is gone. Maybe that's the reason why the festival has been cut down to only 3 days and the Harry Potter activities scattered all over town. The good thing about the "old" festival was that all of the activities were situated next to each other, so when you entered the festival, it felt as if you had stepped into a magic world. Now there is no core to the festival, so you are still just in the real world with only occasional pockets of magic popping up here and there.

Oh well… What about the activities, then? Three of them I didn't attend. One was the Hogwarts Express that was sold out in advance (and limited to kids 8-12), the other a Harry Potter role-play for kids aged 8-15 and finally the Harry Potter Concert with Odense Symphony Orchestra. These three events are the same year after year and they are pretty expensive too and at least the Hogwarts Express is - according to my daughter - one of the dullest rides ever!

What I did attend, though, was the new Chamber of Secrets in the museum Moentergaarden. Here you went through a guided tour of the Middle Age Exhibition of the museum and ended up in a library with potions and clues. Then you had to follow the spiders to a cellar where you had to crush some basilisk eggs and get a diploma. The very young kids found it funny, but the rest of the visitors did not. And this is one of the problems with this "new" festival. It aims at an audience aged 3-8, much younger than the average Harry Potter fan and much younger than the age limits at the Hogwarts Express and the Harry Potter role-play too.

Anyway, I went on to the next activity: School start at Hogwarts. Now that Hogwarts is no more, Odense City and Odense Library (the ones in charge of the festival) are using the Library of Local History as a "replacement Hogwarts" so that kids are able to experience the sorting ceremony and meet Dumbledore and Snape anyway. To get there, you have to go through The Forbidden Forrest and that was quite fun, as I was attacked by a dementor, but Hagrid came to my rescue.

In The Forbidden Forrest you had to find some letters and then when you went upstairs to the Library of Local History you had to find more. On your way you'd meet moving portraits and Argus Filch with Mrs. Norris.

The Library of Local History had been turned into a kind of Great Hall where you'd be sorted into either Gryffindor or Slytherin. For some reason Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw didn't exist anymore! As I'm Ravenclaw through and through, Dumbledore and Quirrell had to put me in Slytherin along with all the other intelligent people! Oh dear! Anyway, in order to get more letters I had to meet four different challenges like play music to Fluffy and make potions for Snape. This year the "usual" Snape had been replaced by a young lad, which was rather sad. The guy was probably okay, but I always used to have a chat with the old Snape, so I really missed him! In the end I got all my letters (which spelled "Alohomora") and I was rewarded a diploma and a wand.

From there I went to the nearby Eventyrhaven (Fairy Tale Garden) park where you'd find Quality Quidditch Supplies and be able to play Quidditch and fly a broom. Not much was happening when I was there, so I went on to find the other HP activities.

I had to walk down to Jernbanegade (Railway Street) and Graabroedre Plads (Grey Friars Square) to find what was called "The Magic Market Square". Here some of the shops and offices from Diagon Alley were situated such as Ollivander’s, Eeylops Owl Emporium, Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions, Gringotts Wizarding Bank and The Daily Prophet. You could also find St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies there as well as Professor Sprout teaching Herbology, a potion workshop and unicorns!

The street and square also included 3 other "activities": a toddler area with an enchanted forest, Cáfe Hogwarts where you had to stand in line for 40 minutes to buy a sandwich and then Hagrid telling stories in the local Abbey Church. In my opinion the church should leave Harry Potter alone, so I refused to take part in this activity.

In the Funen Art Museum a little further down the road you'd find what was probably the best of the festival activities. In order to finish your education as a witch or wizard you had to answer questions and riddles in a 4 pages booklet. While doing so, you went though Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Salon and Dumbledore's office and met Professor Trelawny telling fortunes. There were both an indoor and an outdoor tea salon where you could buy tea, coffee, soft drinks, cakes and sweets using Galleons. In Gringotts you get 500 Galleons for DKK 30/£3 and that is DKK 5/50p more than last year, as the exchange rate is always DKK 5/50p more than the previous year!

In the Museum I also met Professor McGonagall and I was quite surprised to see that she was actually an acquaintance of mine! So now I can say that I've been hugged by Professor McGonagall and she also signed my diploma, so now I'm a fully qualified witch!

Anyway, you had to walk up all the stairs to the upper floor to find Professor Trelawny in a very dark room where she was reading palms. From there you could go on to Dumbledore's office and that was really great. There were ghosts in the room and it was so well done. Bravo!

Only two "activities" were left now and one was Diagon Alley. This is situated in a street called Vintapperstraede, which means "Tapster Alley". But this Tapster Alley has NOTHING to do with Diagon Alley, mainly because most of the Diagon Alley shops are situated in the Magic Market Square. Only a branch of Gringotts was there. You could also find the Mirror of Erised, where you could have your face painted, or visit the "Care of Magical Creatures" people and say hello to real snakes, tarantulas and giant snails. That was actually quite interesting.

The other activities in Diagon Alley consisted of Viola's Workshop where you could make toy owls or carve pumpkins and then a Merlin's Workshop where you could make your own wand. I found George Weasley at the back of Merlin's Workshop and to my horror I realised that they had actually closed Weasley's Wizard Wheezes this year, so George was out of a shop! We never had a Fred at the festival, so seeing George all alone in the back of a workshop that had nothing to do with Harry Potter was heartbreaking. At least he seemed quite content with doing magic tricks and I noticed that he'd got his ear back!

The very last stop on my Harry Potter activity list was to visit The Leaky Cauldron that had been relocated to a street called Smedestraede (Blacksmith Alley). The small, rundown house was perfect for The Leaky Cauldron and their butterbeer tasted great, but it was expensive: 50 Galleons per glass. After that I was ready to call it a day.

Attending the "activities" that I did took about 4 hours, where at least 1½ of the hours were spent going to and from the different "activities" and another 40 minutes on standing in line at Café Hogwarts. I really liked The Leaky Cauldron and the activities in the Funen Art Gallery, but the rest of the activities were aimed at a very young audience. Because the activities are spread out though the city, you no longer get the feeling of stepping into a magic world and you are not likely to bump into as many Harry Potter characters as usual. Some are simply not there anymore like The Weird Sisters giving concert or my friend Madam Rosmerta serving in The Three Broomsticks, as there are no Broomsticks or concerts anymore. Other characters are probably still there, but you just don't see them, as they are not at the same activity at the same time as you. I really missed Luna Lovegood, Victor Krum, Mad-Eye Moody, Madam Hooch, Rita Skeeter, Lord Voldemort, Bellatrix Lestrange and all the inferi as these characters are usually great fun at the festival, but I didn't see any of them this year.

I also missed a lot of activities and places, such as Weird Sisters concerts, the annual lookalike contest, Hagrid's hut, The Three Broomsticks, Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, Flourish & Blotts, Scrivenshaft’s Quill Shop and Snape's dungeons. And I missed SNAPE!!! I hope that the "real" Snape will back next year, so although I think the festival has started catering to pre-school children instead of Harry Potter fans, I'll probably be back next year anyway in the hopes that Snape is back as well!

Halloween in TIVOLI, Copenhagen

 

 TIVOLI is the oldest amusement park in the world and probably the most beautiful, too. It is situated in the centre of Copenhagen in Denmark and usually my daughter and I visit it at least once a year. We have been there during summer where the TIVOLI gardens with all their flowers and coloured lights are particularly beautiful and we have been there during December where the amusement park is all dressed up for Christmas. Both have been breathtaking, so this year we decided to visit TIVOLI during its third annual opening season: Halloween.

 To be honest, TIVOLI's Halloween season is not on Halloween, but during week 42 (as this is a school holiday here in Denmark) and week 43. We brought along a friend of my daughter's and we were all so excited to go, but to be honest, for the first time ever, TIVOLI couldn't live up to our expectations.

The Halloween decorations were fine, of course. TIVOLI is famous for its beautiful decorations, no matter if it is summer or winter, and the Halloween season was just as beautiful with pumpkins and scarecrows everywhere. That was not the problem. The problem was that TIVOLI wasn't scary at all!

Browsing the TIVOLI's website, you'll see the Boys Guard marching band wearing pumpkin hats instead of their usual bearskin hats. In TIVOLI they didn't. On the website you'll see TIVOLI attendants dressed up as zombies and monsters. In TIVOLI they weren't. And on the website you are told that at 5 p.m. the area called "Smoegen" will turn into a scary alley with monsters lurking everywhere. In TIVOLI it didn't. Although signs were warning people to enter "Smoegen" (not after 5 p.m. as it says on the website, but after 6 p.m.), no matter what time we were there, there were no monsters whatsoever. We were VERY disappointed!

And then there's the new Halloween ride, "Hotel Scary", a haunted house that you have to walk though. At least they had an attendant who tried to look scary, but we never got inside the hotel, as according to the attendant, the floors inside were wobbly and had holes in them, so they were not suited for people with mobility disabilities like me. It didn't say so anywhere on the website, but I wish it had, as we wouldn't have been disappointed then, that we couldn't go.

All in all I was rather disappointed in TIVOLI and in how they treated their visitors. At least if the visitors were single. My daughter and her friend tried some rides on their own and I tried some as well. But because I was single, the attendants didn't respect my place in line, so when it was my turn, they always gave my (good) seat away to couples and found a lousier seat for me. When that had happened three times on the same ride, I got really angry and told the attendant off. It didn't help at all and I still had to sit on the lousy seat, but AFTER the ride was over, the attendant offered me a better seat, should I want to go again, which of course I didn't! By then I was sick and tired of being treated as a second rate person just because I have the guts to be single!

Oh well, it isn't all bad. In TIVOLI you'll find a maze of hay, funny and kind witches, colourful stage shows and other nice things suitable for families with small kids.

And if you pay an extra 5 Danish kroner (50p) in entrance fee, you'll get a "free" meal (how can it be free when you pay 50p?). The meal, of course, consists of a fat-dripping burger or hotdog, but at least it's so small that you probably won't put on much weight from eating it!

And of course you can enjoy the many inventive Halloween displays and the beautiful coloured lights in the evening. At least these are as magic as ever, so I'll leave you with some "TIVOLI after dark" photos for you to enjoy.

For more information: www.tivoli.dk

The Library of Birmingham

 

On September 3rd 2013 the new Library of Birmingham was finally opened. To me it seemed as if the building of this library had lasted forever, but according to Wikipedia it didn't start until 2010, so I guess my forever is quite short! Oh, well. The architecture of this new library intrigued me from day one, so when I visited Birmingham earlier this month, of course the finished library was on my sight seeing list!

This public library in the city centre of Birmingham is supposed to be the largest public library in the United Kingdom, the largest public cultural space in Europe and the largest regional library in Europe. Not bad. The architect behind it is the Dutch Francine Houben. She is a founding partner and the creative director of Mecanoo Architecten in The Netherlands, the architecture firm behind this postmodern, high-tech building. Structural engineer is Buro Happold.

The architecture of this building is really something. It is 60 metres high and has 11 floors, 1 under ground and 10 over ground, the top floor being floor 9 that houses the Shakespeare Memorial Room. On the outside the building is made up of four rectangular volumes that are staggered to create various canopies and terraces. It has a sunken amphitheatre, rooftop gardens and a shimmering facade. As the exterior of the building is a reference to the city's jewellery quarter, a filigree pattern of interlocking metal rings has been added over the golden, silver and glass facades.

You enter the library from Centenary Square on Broad Street and on the ground floor you have access to The Rep (Birmingham Repertory Theatre), The Box (a booking office) and of course the library itself. On the ground floor you'll find the reception, the library shop, the studio theatre and the Library Café. The café is fairly pricey, so if you're really hungry, I'd recommend to eat elsewhere or bring your own food, as you're allowed to eat it in the library lounge areas. You'll also find a buggy park, a digital gallery and a book browsing area on the ground floor.

From the ground floor you'll be able to reach the lower floor where the children's library and the music library are situated. This level slopes out beneath Centenary Square, where a sunken circular courtyard that functions as an amphitheatre can be found.

Back on the ground floor you have access to the blue lifts (that didn't work when I was there), the stairs and the escalators to the first floor, which is called "Business, Learning and Health", because of its meeting rooms, brainbox, soundbox etc. The second floor is called "Knowledge", as this is where you'll find study rooms, a contemplation room and the impressive book rotunda. The library is said to contain 5 million items, but I'm not sure how many of them are books. I expect less than half. It's still an awful lot of books and Heaven to an author like myself!

The book rotunda goes all the way up to the third floor, called the "Discovery" floor, where there are study rooms, the BFI Mediatheque, the Discovery Gallery and a library café open in peak times only. Walking through the first, second and third floor, you realise that the metal rings on the building cast patterns of shadows onto the floors of the reading rooms, and as the seasons change, it is going to look different at different times of the year. Wifi is available throughout the building, by the way.

From the third floor you have access to the Discovery Terrace. This is an elevated garden where you can sit and read a book or just enjoy the view over Birmingham. The planting on the terrace includes herbs, fruit and vegetables and the beds are adorned with wooden animals and vegetables, making it fun for the kids too.

The fourth floor is called "Archives, Heritage & Photography" and here you'll find the Heritage Lounge and the Wolfson Centre for archival Research. It is also here that you'll find the glass lift to Floor 7. Both floor 5 and floor 6 are non-public, so you have to take the stairs or the glass lift to get to the seventh floor. At least when the blue lift isn't working… Anyway, suffering from height anxiety like I do, it is rather nerve-wracking to use the glass lift, but I did it anyway, as my health won't allow me to walk up three flights of stairs.

On the seventh floor, you'll find The Secret Garden. This garden terrace is more densely planted that the Discovery Terrace and it is supposed to be a secluded, quiet place, high above the city streets below. It was high up, alright, so I tried to keep close to the building as it was a bit too far up for me, but there were lovely views from there.

The eight floor is non-public, but the ninth floor (the golden oval thingy on top of the building) houses the Shakespeare Memorial Room. I love Shakespeare, so of course I had to see it, but with the blue lift not working, there was only one way to get there: using the stairs. There was a funny sign encouraging people to use the stairs, but it's not easy when you're disabled! Oh well, I couldn't just come back another day when the lift was working, so I walked the two flights of stairs up and I wasn't disappointed.

The Shakespeare Memorial Room was originally designed in 1882 by John Henry Chamberlain and has now been reconstructed on the top floor of the Library of Birmingham. The room is really beautiful with woodwork by noted woodcarver Mr. Barfield and brass and metal work most likely crafted by Hardmans.

The Shakespeare Memorial Room contains Britain’s most important Shakespeare collection, and one of the two most important Shakespeare collections in the world; the other being held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The collection contains 43,000 books including rare items such as a copy of the First Folio 1623, copies of the four earliest Folio editions and over seventy editions of separate plays printed before 1709. There are also significant collections from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a near complete collection of Collected Works, significant numbers of adaptations, anthologies and individual editions.

The Shakespeare collection is not the only collection in the Library of Birmingham. The library has a number of other nationally and internationally significant collections, including the Boulton and Watt archives, the Bournville Village Trust Archive, the Charles Parker Archive, the Parker collection of children's books, the Wingate Bett transport ticket collection, the Warwickshire photographic survey, the British Institute of Organ Studies archive and the Railway and Canal Historical Society Library. Apart from the Shakespeare Memorial Room, you'll also find a Skyline Viewpoint on the ninth floor, but to me it wasn't as interesting as the Shakespeare collection!

If you are visiting The Library of Birmingham, be sure to swing by during evenings as well. The library looks amazing with its flashing lights in white, yellow, green, blue, purple and red. Breathtaking! I'm sure I'll be back the next time I'm in Birmingham!
The address of the library is: Centenary Square, Broad Street, Birmingham B1 2ND, England.

Book signings in the West Midlands

Last weekend I went to the West Midlands in the UK to sign books with Don Powell. People were able to buy "Look Wot I Dun" - the authorised biography that I have written about Don - ten days ahead of the official release date. Friday we were taken to Waterstones in Wolverhampton by Matt Bourne, the National Account Manager with Omnibus Press, and it was a lovely surprise seeing people queuing all the way out into the street!

Don and I had to sign some pre-ordered books upstairs first, so we were a little late for the actual book signing, but at 12.10 p.m. it all started. For the next 90 minutes we signed around 120 books, although we were only supposed to sign books for 60 minutes! It was great seeing so many of you there and even Don's sister Carol and her husband Gerald turned up to the surprise of Don! After the book signing we did an interview with The Express and Star, which went online Monday.

After the book signing Don had a charity event at the Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton - "Afternoon tea with Don Powell" in support of the National Autistic Society - and again it was great seeing so many of you. Afterwards we did an interview to The Midlands Rocks, which I hope went well.

Saturday Matt Bourne and his wife took me to Waterstones in Walsall where we met up with Don. We signed some posters for the on the first floor and when we got back down into the bookstore, there was a long queue of people all the way through room and Don and I were happy to sign over 50 copies within 40 minutes. In Walsall many of my friends turned up too and it was great seeing them and the rest of you there. The past twenty minutes of the book signing we spent signing books for people who had pre-ordered and we signed every single copy of the book in the store so that people would be able to buy signed copies even after we had left. After the book signing we went back to the Connaught Hotel to do an interview with Classic Rock Radio - one of the few who has realised that I wrote the book and not Don! I think the interview went well and after that Don and his stepson went down to London, whereas I went back to Sutton Coldfield by Birmingham. All in all a wonderful weekend and thank you so much for your kind support!

Never Mind It

Peter is a writer in his late twenties who doesn't seem to be able to write something honest and personal. Although he has found the love of his life, he doesn't seem to be able to hold on to her either. In fact his entire life seems so absurd that it could as well have been thought up by a madman!

"Never Mind It" is a hilarious and ironic metatext, which the critics called a “Postmodern novel sparkling with narrative skills and the joy of storytelling" when in 1995 it was first published in my native language, Danish. Purposely and sarcastically it breaks every rule in writing, commenting on itself as a text and on other texts as well and testing the limits of literature. The contents of the novel is just as bizarre as its form, but behind the eccentric characters and their nonsensical problems, lies a story about love, honesty and the difficult task of expressing yourself as an author. It's crazy, it's funny and - hopefully! - deep.

I've translated the novel myself and it is available from Smashwords, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

OFF13 - Odense International Film Festival

 

The 28th Odense International Film Festival - OFF13 - took place on August 26th to September 1st here in Odense, Denmark. It's fun, it's films and it's for free and usually it's one of the highlights of my year, but not this time. You see, originally the OFF was a festival celebrating imaginative short films, animations and documentaries, but this year the imagination was gone and most of the films were rather bleak, realistic dramas, which was quite depressing. Furthermore most of the films stopped in mid-story like last year, but by now I know it is fashionable to make films that have no ending, but I'm too old school to fall for that! I'm sorry, but to me it feels as if half of the films are missing and that the filmmakers are too sloppy, lazy or unimaginative to make proper endings!

Oh well, the films were divided into 10 international and 8 national programmes. They competed in 10 different categories and the winners were:
1. The international HCA Award: "Sirocco" by Mikko Kuparinen, Finland, a short film about a shy woman who finds a baby in a dumpster.
2. The international Artist Award: "Adamt" by Zelalem Woldemariam, Ethiopia, a short film about a young drummer who struggles with a traumatic experience from his childhood.
3. The international Storyteller Award: "The Mother" by Lukasz Ostalski, Poland, a short film about a female politician dealing with her drug-addicted son and the massacred body of a young girl.
4. The Danish Short Film Award: "The painter" by Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark, a short film about an isolated artist who has to deal with an unannounced visit by his son.
5. The Danish Talent Award: "Puff Puff Pas" by Thomas Daneskov, Denmark, a man-to-man weekend between father and son, where the father has momentarily lost his mind.
6. The Animation Award: "Una Furtiva Legrima" by Carlo Vogele, France/USA, an animation about a black bass lamenting his fate from his sale at the fish market to the frying pan.
7. The ANIS Talent Award: "Cheers Viola!" by Susanne Baekby Olesen, Denmark, an animation about the little girl Viola, her drunken parents and her teddy bear Sebastian.
8. Special mention: "Goutte d'Or" by Christophe Peladan, Denmark, an animation about a pirate who enters the Kingdom of Death and falls in love with its Queen.
9. Children and Youth Award: "9 Meter" by Anders Walter, Denmark, a short film about a 16 year old long jumper who wants to keep breaking his own records in order to get his comatose mother to react.
10. Audience Award: "Puff Puff Pas" by Thomas Daneskov, Denmark. See above.

Notice that six of the ten awards went to Danish films. Notice too that there are no documentaries among the winners. I find it pretty biased when you give 60% of the awards to your own country and for the documentaries… Well, in fact I didn't see any good documentaries at all at this year's OFF and to be honest I wasn't even able to find 10 films at the entire festival that I would have given an award! This is really strange as usual the OFF has loads of wonderful films, especially when it comes to animation. But not this year. "Expect the unexpected," the festival slogan says and I sure hadn't expected that whoever picked the 2013 films had such a different taste in short films than me!

Anyway, for the International Grand Prix I would probably have picked "A Film" by Franziska Kabisch, Germany. In just 4 minutes this short film manages to visualise the difference between words and meaning and how the meaning changes although the words stay the same. A brilliant and playful visualisation of concepts and ideas.

For the National Grand Prix it would have been "9 Meters" by Anders Walter, Denmark (see above). It's a both heartbreaking and funny film and the ending had the audience screaming for more (literally!!).

Best animation for me was "Merfolk" by Rory Waudby-Tolley, United Kingdom. Although other films were better animated, this animation touched me with its talk about integration and racism. And it was funny too!

There were only two other films at OFF 13 that I want to mention. One is the very funny French short film "If You want your mother back" by Xavier Douin about a little boy who tries to blackmail Jesus. The other is the ironic Swiss animation "History of Virginity" by Sophie Haller about the female hymen, the myths about it and how men use it as a patriarchal instrument to define and control women. In my opinion these two films could easily have won both talent and storyteller awards!

As usual there was not enough room for all the people who wanted to watch the films and as usual there were not enough ballot papers. The rather small cinemas at the "Café Biografen" where the festival takes place are just not big enough, especially if one or two school classes have booked seats. Then no one else can get in. As for the ballot papers, I didn't get any for 3 of the screenings and 2 other screenings didn't take place until AFTER the award show! I suppose I'm not the only one who didn't get to vote, so the Audience Award doesn't really express the opinion of the audience. I also noticed that all of the international award winners came from the same programme III except for the Artist Award winner, which came from programme I, and it made me wonder if the jury has actually seen the programmes IV-X? Just wondering…

Like previous years there were "In Focus" programmes showing different films and short films, which didn't take part in the competition. These programmes had themes like Polish shorts, Young Docs, documentaries by American jury member Jennifer Fox, Iraqi documentaries, Super 8 films and then of course "The Old Theatre", which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. At "The Old Theatre" silent films are screened accompanied on piano by the talented and hardworking composer Lars Fjeldmose and introduced by the entertaining and insightful film historian Ulrich Breuning. This year we saw the Danish "Lion Hunt" from 1907 by Viggo Larsen, the Danish "The Abyss" from 1910 by Urban Gad and starring Asta Nielsen, the Chaplin film "Behind the Screen" from 1916 and the Laurel and Hardy film "Liberty" from 1929. "The Old Theatre" is always great fun and like all other screenings at the OFF it's free of charge.

 Among the off-screen activities this year were outdoor morning yoga, Open Air concerts, free Open Air screenings of films like "Winter's Bone" and "We Need To Talk About Kevin", stand-up comedy shows, free tango lessons and talks by directors etc. There's always a lot to see and do during the OFF festival, so although I was a bit disappointed this year, I'll be back next year anyway. See you then?