Travel Blog

Caipirinhas were flowing and small globes of pao de queijo disappeared from trays at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival party in the courtyard of Chima last night. Parties are a big part of film festivals, and FLIFF is no exception, devoting an entire page of its program to a list of them. What distinguishes Fort Lauderdale's festival - and art movie house - from all the others in the world is that, for the most part, the young stay away. (Their distaste for reading must extend to subtitles, though this year's films are predominantly - disappointingly - American.)

I got in a line that extended from the bar and, just as I was about to order, a septuagenarian in heavy make-up tried to butt in front of me. With my caipirinha in hand, I moved to the middle of the courtyard, where a tall, elegant woman introduced me to her "surrogate" daughter, one of the few people present under the age of 40 and the only one in a denim mini skirt. She told of the first time a boyfriend talked to her about a pre-nup.

A man who looked familiar introduced himself as the director of one of the documentaries, a film about newspapers in South Africa and how they are covering things that our newspapers aren't. He suspected that he would get angry letters from local editors. I didn't tell him that local editors are so South Florida-centric that it would never occur to them to be indignant at unfavorable comparisons to foreign media.

I saw two local musicians I sometimes play doubles with, and they introduced me to a friend, a violinist who used to play with an orchestra in Sweden. On hearing what I did for a living, the man's wife, a Swedish journalist, asked if that meant I traveled a lot. I told her I don't travel as much as I used to. She wondered if, in that case, I couldn't just take my old articles about places and freshen them up. The thought had never occurred to me, though it did give me the idea for a new documentary.