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RiverRun provides opportunity to let go
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Published: May 5, 2008
We put on a film festival last month, and a whole lot of people came. We sold thousands of tickets. Attendees really seemed to enjoy themselves. I was congratulated often and effusively as the person who brought RiverRun to Winston-Salem.
So why am I writing about this? Because this year I felt kind of guilty about accepting the praise. I didn't really deserve it.
The RiverRun International Film Festival has a wonderful staff, incredible volunteers and so many members of the community who make it the outstanding event it has become. But I didn't have much to do for the festival this year, other than enjoy it as a moviegoer.
This was the year I had to let go, and letting go is a very interesting process. No one told me I had to do this, and I didn't let go completely -- I introduced some classic Hollywood films, and had a great time interviewing the actress Pam Grier, which mostly consisted of my getting out of her way as she verbally drove down the nostalgia highway at about 90 miles an hour.
My taking a big step back was important to me, and probably to the festival too. I didn't pick any of the movies. I didn't even see any of them prior to the festival. I didn't attend the weekly staff meetings, I didn't get involved in the minutiae of planning and scheduling and cajoling. I didn't even have to run the board of directors meetings myself, since I have a very capable co-chair to do that.
This turn of events, self-motivated though it was, left me with a mixture of relief and regret. My life was far less stressful, but I also felt more like the little kid looking at the brand-new train set in the toy store window. For the first time, I was an outsider.
The same feeling occurs whenever important parts of our lives come to an end. We all feel much the same way as our children graduate from high school, then from college, then move away. We're still involved in their lives (at least we think we are), but from a far greater distance.
I seem to be in a perpetual stretch of letting go these days. Two years ago I left my job as the dean of the film school at the N.C. School of the Arts, where I am now just a plain old faculty member (something I'm very proud of, by the way). It's strange to be sitting in the audience when the dynamic and visionary new dean addresses the faculty and students.
Wait a minute, I find myself saying to the only person who cares about this internal conversation. That should be me up there. That should be me introducing every other film at RiverRun. That should be me still producing movies, or writing about Hollywood.
But it's not. It's someone else, and it should be someone else, because there comes a point where you have to step off the stage and learn to live with yourself. That is really what letting go is all about -- letting go of ego, of inflated self-image, of the necessity to be "on" all the time.
Now I'm "off," and I'm learning how to enjoy the feeling. I read somewhere that letting go means no longer allowing something from the past to influence your current life, or define it and its boundaries. I don't feel like Jimmy Stewart in his crisis of personal confidence in It's a Wonderful Life -- I'd like to think I made a difference in other people's lives, which I'm both proud of and satisfied by.
But now, frankly, like most of us as we get older, I'm more concerned with my own sense of inner peace and well-being. It's about learning how to take greater pleasure in the small anonymous things we can do to make things better, and making sure that we take the time to fully appreciate our mundane and magical world.
Jimmy Stewart needed an angel to tell him when to count his blessings. My wife does much the same thing, but she's a lot prettier, and she doesn't ring that damn bell.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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