The Simple Pleasure of Existence

Today I finally finished evaluating films for a festival we're hosting next week as part of Women's History Month. We decided to make submissions easy by using Film Freeway, a free online service for festivals. The new submission method worked very well---so well that we received 864 submissions! I was feeling rather overwhelmed at the numbers, but after honing according to our criteria, I found that we could work through the short films more quickly than expected. The due date for our evaluations is Friday, but we finished today, two days early.

This year we're showing these winning films along with two features: Fish Tank  and Mosquita y Mari. Last year, though, we showed Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a film that highlighted Japan's interconnected relationship with insects. The film inspired this poem:

the simple pleasure of existence

two men hunt insects

pulling beetles from a knothole

one stamps a tree trunk

crickets with weak wings cannot cry

dragonflies:

strength

courage

bravery

fireflies:

unrequited love

we learn from insects

their numbers are much fewer now

the world is being destroyed