Making Connections

I just heard from a woman I met long ago in my adolescence when we were both slumming in Paris. She was from Holland and I was from Vancouver and we both came to the most glamorous city in the world to work under the table as "filles au pair" - a very classy sounding French term that roughly translates as, "domestic slave girl".

Anyway, a mutual friend we met during those months in Paris stayed in touch with each of us separately over the years, but the Dutch girl and I quite quickly lost our connection when we both went home.

Until Dolly did Holland, that is!

My long lost Dutch friend contacted me this weekend from Utrecht to say:

Today, your movie was on Dutch TV. Our TV-guide rates movies and yours was given 4 stars, which is real good and looking through the rest of the tv-guide does not happen that much. (5 is the maximum by the way)
Besides the short notice about the movie-story it also says: Heartwarming movie, noticably made with love [about an 11-year old girl......]

She then went on to tell me about her life, her two beautiful children and sent me a picture of the whole brood!

And this morning, another Dutch connection came from a screenwriter I met at the Lucas film festival last fall:

Hi Tara,

Tijs here, from the festival in Frankfurt, Holland, and facebook.
The year Dolly parton was my mom was on tv yesterday in Holland.
I just checked and 173.000 people watched the movie. Thats great for Holland in the middle of the sunday.

And then Tijs went on to tell me about his latest project and how we could possibly work together ...

These two unexpected connections coming out of the film's visibility in Holland gives "going Dutch" a whole new - very rewarding - meaning!

And then there's France. Aaah, France. Despite my turn in Paris as a humble babysitter/underwear ironer, I have very fond memories of my time there. So when I met not one but two French women at different functions during the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, I naturally gravitated toward them. Turns out both had come to the screening of our film and both had liked it so much they were talking about promoting it to festivals and distributors back home. To wit, click here.

Very exciting stuff - especially since France is one of the major European countries that hasn't seemed that accessible to us up til now.

If our film does get picked up there somehow, I would dearly love to go back, if only to see that magical, maddening city of my youth -

Paris, France - where I learned to iron little boy's underpants.