The Cinema Politica Ad

Well I’ve been silent on this site long enough: we’re home! We’ve been back in Montreal for almost three weeks and it’s been three weeks of scrambling to catch up on our insane lives that we put on hold while in Europe. We’ve mostly been working on Cinema Politica, a big enough chore in itself.

For those who haven’t heard the great news, we got funding approval for a second year in a row from the Canada Council for the Arts. That’s not the end of the story though, the Council called us this week to let us know some of the feedback from the committee who oversaw our application. They say it’s extremely rare that when the committee is given the task of highlighting the “negatives” and “positives” of the project, that they do not put one single point down in the negative column. The committee had incredible things to say about Cinema Politica, not the least of which is that we should be a model for other groups applying and that the Council should continue to fund us annually.

This, as you can imagine, was the best news we’ve heard in a long, long time. It comes after years of hard work and it gives us that extra umph we need to keep CP alive and kicking! We’re at 50+ locals in Canada and at least 40 of them appear to be active. There’s also the handful in Europe and Asia and Australia. Svetla is working around the clock on running the network (along with a TA job and a union-drive job) and I’ve been doing my usual job of programming new titles, negotiating for rights, and getting our incorporation papers in order.

But we have funding for another year!! The trick now is to not let CP consume us at every level. We’ve both fell behind in our academic work, and tonight I went for the first time in a long time and studied. We run CP out of our home and we’ve realized that we need to get out to do school work. So I went to the National Library tonight and got three hours of reading in. I’ll need to pump that up to six, then eight per day if I’m going to finish my PhD in the next 20 months, but it was a good start.

That’s it for now, we’re swamped as usual. Svetla’s grandma is here for a month from Bulgaria and the woman is a reading machine!! She reads and read and reads!! Talk about inspiring for a PhD and Master’s student…

• Cinema Politica