oxford film festival

I'm always up for any movie about going cross-country. I think I'm drawn to the test of endurance and the idea of getting to know the landscape and the people just because you're going slower. Not to mention that we truly live in a vast and beautiful country. In this respect, I'm my most patriotic. A la Motorcycle Diaries.

This weekend, at the Oxford film festival, I saw two movies about going cross-country. The first was 10mph -- cross-country on a segway. It was a good, see-if-we-can-do-it, reckless-abandon-of-college-students movie.

But the second, Darius Goes West, really did capture my heart. It was a movie - a quest - of idealists. I wish you guys, Dan, Mike, Grace, didn't have class so you could have seen it: DariusGoesWest

I had come into the theatre late, so I was standing off to the side, wiping my tears away, and stealing looks to see if anyone had noticed, when I realized that those silohuettes I saw and that guy in the wheelchair were Darius and the crew! They were going around to the film's screenings to promote awareness of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which is what Darius has. They were younger than me, most of them, and they were passionate and hopeful and rather unassuming as they spoke. Hearing them in person was even better than the film.