It is September! Congrats! You made it another month, and I'm glad you're still here.
A few years ago one of my internet acquaintances had an idea to do on online film festival. But not a normal film festival in the way that people submit movies and a jury selects them and then other people buy tickets or passes or whatever. Ideally it would push people to explore new films they wouldn't have seen otherwise, and maybe discover something new and interesting. Not unlike a real festival. But it's hard (impossible?) to find a bunch of movies that nobody has seen, so this film festival allows each participant to program their own slate of movies.
So he started with a list of prompts, and then everybody who participates would fill their list with different, but related movies. And we would all spend the month discovering and exploring films together. I think it was a great success. Not a huge number of people participated, but I was one who did, and I loved finding new movies and talking about them(mostly on Mastodon and Letterboxd) with other people doing the same thing.
The original author (a guy who goes by Derek_G) only planned to do it one year, but with his permission, I took up the mantle the next year. And now it is September again, so once again, I have created a list of prompts for people to fill with movies. There are 30 prompts and 20 days in September, but since the goal is one of exploration, nobody is required to watch them in any particular cadence or even watch everything. Some folks started a couple weeks ago to get a head start, and some folks will just use the list as an inspiration to decide what to watch. I'm gunna try to watch one every day, but I already "cheated" and watched a couple early (It's not really cheating if you don't have rules)
If you'd like to participate too, feel free to do so, or even just use a single prompt to help find a movie you might not have watched otherwise. You can find the list of movies I picked here on Letterboxd, or just grab the list right below.
1. Movie that won an Oscar for best sound 2. A movie with someone’s first name as the title 3. A movie with at least six words in the title 4. A movie with Dick Miller,M Emmet Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton 5. A movie with Judy Greer,CCH Pounder or Margo Martindale 6. The oldest movie in your watchlist 7. The movie that’s been in your watchlist the longest 8. A movie your teacher might throw on when they’re having a bad day and don’t want to teach 9. A legacy sequel (legacyquel) double feature (minimum 15 years between movie & sequel) 10. A legacy sequel double feature (part 2) 11. A movie based on a book 12. A movie based on a TV show 13. A movie made at least 100 years ago 14. A movie made in a country with land south of the Tropic of Capricorn 15. A movie directed by an LGBTQ+ filmmaker 16. A movie directed by an Indigenous filmmaker 17. A movie directed by a non-white non-male-identifying person 18. A movie with a 112 minute runtime 19. A movie by a director who had a film at SXSW in 2024 20. A film directed by Lotte Reiniger 21. A Wuxia movie 22. A movie from 20 essential disabled life films 23. A non-Christmas/non-Halloween holiday movie 24. A movie where they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don’t stop to think if they should 25. Capitalism is the bad guy! 26. A movie from country you have never logged 27. A movie from a year you have never logged 28. A movie mentioned in a Criterion Closet Video 29. A movie made by/featuring someone picking movies in a Criterion Closet video 30. A movie shot in CinemaScope
Have fun watching movies!
This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Man Nap
