It started out in Amsterhmmmmm

This morning, I arrived in Amsterdam to attend the Himalaya Film Festival, which will host the European premiere of DAUGHTERS OF WISDOM on Saturday. Coincidentally (?) today is Losar, Tibetan New Year, and I am reminded that last year on Losar, I was in Missoula, Montana for the ‘sneak preview’ of the film at the Big Sky Documentary film festival. Makes me wonder what next year has in store, because this last one has been a helluva ride.

Amsterdam holds a special place in my life and my filmmaking career. In the fall of 1987 after I graduated from college, Amsterdam was the gateway to my 11 month + 11 day back-packing expedition through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (an adventure I am now developing into a film project). In the summer of 2000, I was here en route to Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland to shoot a segment of a film I was producing, and it was there that I joined forces with a European Co-Producer George Weiss who I had met at the Berlin Film Festival a year earlier.

After landing at Schiphol over an hour early (my good travel karma continues – Chicago? Four hour delays each way into O’Hare? A blip, a dream, a cosmic blooper) I got to the Hotel Asterisk, which miraculously had a room ready for me. I spent all day sleeping (which goes against all ‘tactics’ I’ve ever developed for surviving European jet lag, but was the natural course as soon as I saw the pillow in my hotel room). I awoke, showered in the bathroom down the hall (ah, budget European hotels!) walked out into the beautiful, canal-ed streets of this fair city, and within about ten blocks, found myself standing in front of a Nepalese/Tibetan Restaurant. Butter tea and momos for Losar! A stop into a shop for salt licorice and Droste chocolate pastilles, and the evening was complete.

Tomorrow night, I will again see George Weiss, who now runs a humanitarian NGO called RADIO LA BENEVOLENCIJA, and his partner Robin Brinster of ILLUMINA FILMS who as a result of email blasting George when DAUGHTERS premiered last summer, has now become my international sales agent. My dear friend Liz Locke, an incredible woman who has lived in many corners of the U S of A - most of them dusty – once said that she never leaves a place until she knows why she ended up there in the first place. The odd set of circumstances that led me to meet George in Berlin at the start of my film career, and eventually to Robin in Amsterdam who will shortly be making my first international broadcast sales, presents one of those “oh that’s why” moments I am certainly gratefully humbled by.

I heart Amsterdam!