Guest blogger Bart Weiss, Director of the Dallas Video Festival and president of Video Association of Dallas.

If you have been keeping up you know that last Sunday was do-or-die day, and indeed the sun came up on Monday and the schedule for the Dallas Video Festival was together. Well, mostly. There were a few things to chase down. Somehow, there are always some titles that I mark to inclue, but that never make it into a box. And somehow, a program is listed twice. So there is a bit of adjusting. We also have to hope that the run times are always right. Every year we get a few titles that are listed as one run time and the dub we get is longer. I am very excited about the schedule, and hey you can go and see it for yourself. There is so much to see.

In the days ahead, AC and I will write about some of the videos we’ve chosen. Also we are going to try something new: since so many people want to know what I think of the work, or why I picked it, we are going to shoot some pod-like video of us talking about the work and we’ll post it on the site. It seems like we should have thought of it years ago. But before I talk about what I am showing, let me give some props to some things I will not be showing.

My friend Mark Birnbaum and KERA blogger boy Manny Mendoza make a really great film called Stop the Presses about the decline in newspapers and what it means to our culture. The films points are amplified almost daily. It really is a great film but with less than half the slots to fill, it is hard to show something that had 3 very successful screenings at the AFI/Dallas fest. (I know they were successful – I was at them all.

Along the same lines, The Fragility of Seconds is a great feature by Matthew Tompkins. If it hadn’t shown at AFI, I would have made room for it, but I would rather show work that you otherwise would never get a chance to see.

There were several other dramatic feature that I wish I could have fit in somehow, in particular Jason Ward’s Between Heaven and Hell and Jon Racinskas’s The Name of God. Both show so much promise, have things to say and include good performances… if I had 4 rooms to program, instead of 2…. I hope they find a way onto a screen somewhere soon.

A very cool doc is Buskers about street performers. Don’t go “yuck, haven’t we seen this?” It is a student film cliche, but this is made by a street performer, so you get a real inside look and it was made over so many years in so many places, it does what good docs can do: bring you into a sub culture otherwise unseen. If this is what you won’t see at the festival, imagine what you will see.. Stay tuned ….