Shades of Tarantino and tiredness

As I sit here in the Hotel Victory, I’ve now been awake for, oh, a full 24 hours. OK, I did take a couple of five-minute catnaps on the flight from Spokane to Denver, same for the flight from Denver to D.C., from D.C. to Vienna and on the final leg into Pristina. But nothing that really resembled actual sleep.

And I’m committed now. The film festival I’m helping jury starts tomorrow, so I’ve got to get this jet-lag problem fixed from the beginning. None of that going to bed at 11 only to wake up three hours later, wide-eyed through dawn, etc., for days on end.

So while the television blares in the background — the characters mostly those indecipherable (to me) sounds of Albanian — I sit here and write, full of enough caffeine to cure even Rip Van Winkle of narcolepsy.

I was picked up at the Pristina airport by Blerim Gjoci , the Kosovar actor/producer/director who I just saw as I looked up in time to catch a television ad for the festival. Arriving on the same flight was one of the other jurors, Victoria Lucaj , who actually has IMDB credits. There with Blerm to meet us was Victoria’s brother, Mark Lucaj , a filmmaker/actor who also can be found on IMDB (both have worked with none other than Quentin Tarantino).

So, yeah, this is Kosovo, not Cannes. But I hail from Spokane, not Hollywood. So I tend to be impressed by anything that is even tangentially touched by greatness. This experience gets more and more interesting.