Blog post written by Sarah Lockwood, Cinema & Photography '15, FLEFF Intern, Blairstown, New Jersey

The crowd swells in anticipation. Whispers, conversations, coats rustling, the uncertain glances around the theatre. When will the film start?

I settle further into my chair, and then freeze. I blink. I take a breath.

The director, Lavinia Currier, stands five feet to my right. Her film, Oka!, mere minutes away from screening.

She glides past me on the way to center stage - I am but one of hundreds of faces in that packed theatre tonight. Yet simultaneously, I feel a sense of individualism. Of importance. Of connection.

The film screens, and once again Currier breezes past me, this time on the way to one of two wooden stools set up in front of the stage. The crowd buzzes with pleased admiration, of anticipation of the question-and-answer session that will follow.

My mind buzzes at the closeness. My first encounter with a director, an artist, the creator of a work of art whose screening occupied the last ninety minutes of my life, that stole it and transported it to the forests of Africa and the passions of a man for whom oka - a word meaning listen - was a command.

The creator of such a vision stood only moments ago, a foot from me. A pleasantly nervous fidgeting overcomes my muscles, a vaguely intimidating sense washes over me.

However.

Lavinia Currier is just a woman. An artist. A filmmaker.

An ordinary person.

An ordinary person, however, from whom we are able to learn so much.