Cannes: My new black suit

“Zac, it’s Jeremiah.” The phone rang late last Sunday night. It was the producer of the Candy Darling documentary that I’m editing. He usually calls me with bad news or when there’s a problem and most of our conversations center around what’s going on in the editing room.

“Hey Jeremiah, how’s it going?” I say, mustering all of my energy into a cheery, confident voice.

“I hear you’re going to Cannes,” he says flatly.

“Yeah, a movie that I worked on last summer is premiering there,” I answer, and pause, curious as to where this conversation is going and whether I’m in trouble for taking a week off of work.

“Is this the one that takes place in the boarding school?”

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Looking back

It is a spring day in the year 2015, and I am looking out at the garden and beyond to the creek. The swallows are just returning—a few at a time, joining the ones already here in their songful, joyous swirling flights of greeting. I think back over the last seven years, and am amazed at the distance we have come. To think, in the spring of 2008 I feared for our land. Was it to be destroyed in a terrible apocalypse of industrialization from gas and oil drilling, leaving land, water, man and animal in an unfamiliar, unfriendly, thirsty, starved sickness? How did we make it through that maze of fear, greed, deception, hope, desire and slowly revealed truths to this plateau of calm?

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