Temecula Valley Welcomes Signs of the Time

Signs of the Time was selected to be screened at the 15th Annual International Film and Music Festival on September 9-13th in Temecula California.
Temecula Valley is located in Southern California’s beautiful Wine Country just north of San Diego. Don Casper, Caroline Manard and myself (Anne Mills) were all very lucky to be able to attend the festival this year.

Caroline Manard, Don Casper, Anne Mills at the TVIFF Opening Night Party

We arrived on Wednesday to the Opening Gala Party which was something like I’ve only seen on TV at festivals like Sundance and the Toronto Film Fest. All filmmakers were escorted in antique cars to a red carpet welcome! There were Marines and local pagent queens lining the red carpet, flash bulbs going off and they even announced our movie and the filmmakers names as we walked the red carpet towards the theater. Local media were interviewing the film makers and taking our photos in front of the huge TVIFF banner.
WOW was that my fifteen minutes of fame?

Signs of the Time played the next day (Thursday) at 3:00 and received very good reviews.

The whole week we saw many features, documentaries, animations, and shorts. Some of my favorites were “Love Hurts”, “White on Rice”, “The Ranch” and “Chicory N Coffee”.

Jim Rothman, Anne Mills, Don Casper

My favorite short movie was  “I’m Not Matt Damon” – directed by and starring Jim Rothman who is real actor in Los Angeles. His dream of making it big in Hollywood has one big problem..he happens to be a dead ringer for Matt Damon and no one will cast him. See Don Casper and myself having dinner with Matt Damon (I mean Jim) at the awards banquet.  I am planning on telling all my friends it is really Matt Damon, and that him and I hung out all week.

One of my favorite events was on Thursday night. A film festival supporter from Temecula hosted a party at his home for the filmmakers and musicians. The house, or should I say estate was probably 10,000 square feet, had a pool, tennis court, media room, fountains and was entirely done in marble, both inside and out. As I sipped my drink, ate his wonderful food by the pool, I suddenly wondered, how long could I live in his home before someone found me?

Signs of the Time played again on Friday night at 5:00 and again was followed by lots of praise and questions of how they could purchase the DVD!

Caroline Manard and Lucas Grabeel

Saturday night, we attended a music festival at the La Cereza Winery. This was a beautiful winery with a spanish architecture.  There was a stage where several muscians performed and there was even a Hot Air Balloon! Again I was listening to more music and drinking more wine..Hey, that’s what you do when you are in Temecula, drink Wine!  It was a great opportunity to listen to up and coming artists like The Bayliens, The Souljourners and Lucus Grabeel from Disney’s High School Musical. Lucas not only performed several times that week, but was submitting his own music videos to the Festival as Executive Producer.  Caroline made sure to have her picture taken with Lucas for her daughter Abby.

Finally, Sunday night was the awards banquet and dinner. “Earth, Wind and Fire” were being honored with a lifetime achievement award and it was really fun to see them. Unfortunately, they did not perform, but gave us a few of their “cool” dance moves on the way off the stage. I was hoping they would perform my favorite songs, “Boogie Wonderland”, “Let’s Groove Tonite”.  But alas, I had to sing those songs myself. Until Don asked me to please stop singing Anne.

Anne Mills and Don Casper at TVIFF

We had an awesome time the whole week and met alot of other filmmakers.  Jo Moulton, who runs this film festival did a tremendous job and made it lots of fun. I would recommend any filmmaker to attend this one next year if given the chance.