The Portland International Film Festival is finally over, and though I’m exhausted from the arduous schedule I kept (I saw every film I could - 70 features and 4 collections of shorts), I had a great time — even better than last year, largely because of the wonderful collection of people I met during the festival.

One of the best perks of Silver Screen membership at the Northwest Film Center (which puts on PIFF) is the ability to attend the press screenings that begin a couple of weeks before the festival’s official start: seeing the two press screenings each day opened up a lot of slots during the official festival. A nice side effect was that there were a bunch of other die-hards who attended most of the press screenings too, and since we’d all seen the same things already, we tended to make the same choices of festival screenings as well.

I also met several people who introduced themselves as users of FestivalFanatic.com, the site I created to manage my own schedule. It was also nice to see strangers carrying printed schedules produced by Festival Fanatic (note to those folks: improving schedule printing is near the top of my to-do list!).

Incidentally, the schedule for San Jose’s Cinequest festival is up on FestivalFanatic.com now, for my Bay Area friends who’ll be attending.