Last night I enjoyed my first visit to the Rochester Film Salon.

We watched and then chatted about Alice in the Cities. This was quite a moving film following the journey and purpose of one character that finds himself looking after a girl and trying to get her to her grandmother. It’s a beautiful film that shows how chance meetings can give real purpose and spoke to me poignantly about being open in my pioneering role to what purpose there may be in the chance encounters I am involved in.

I met a few cool people here and we shared how the film left us feeling good and yet the whole basis of the film seems to come from the horrendous life of a mother, who we know and see very little of. What we do know is that she is in a bad relationship, which turns out to be so bad that she leaves her 8 year old daughter in a hotel room with a stranger leaving them to fly together from New York to Amsterdam and wait fort her. She does not show which results in the search for the grandmother to take Alice to. The desperation of the mother in leaving Alice in this way is quite a disturbing theme which the film does not seem to explore at all.

This was a great event with a little bonus at the end in that I won 2 tickets to the directors chair next Wednesday at the Odeon – can’t be bad!