First work, then play

Can an exam rightfully be called a midterm if it is after only one week of class?  Apparently, yes.  This morning I had a midterm for my Italian class.  Pretty sure I owned it.  The hardest part for me is listening comprehension, which is kind of funny because I'm naturally an auditory learner, and I've been in this country listening to the flow of the language for a month and a half.  We'll see how I did sometime soon, I hope.

This afternoon, a few friends and I headed over to the Milano Film Festival and watched two groups of short films.  Some were funny, some were sad, most were just plain confusing.  Well, not plain confusing--artistic confusing, if you know what I mean.  A couple were in English with Italian subtitles, a few were in Italian with English subtitles, and several were in different languages with both English and Italian subtitles.  One of my favorite parts of the experience was after one short film about a father and a son going fishing on a lake.  There seemed to be one story being told by the voice-over, and a similar--but different--story being acted out alongside the voice-over.  Maybe the young man killed his father at the end, I don't know.  Nothing was very clear.  The director came up at the end and said how the main theme of the movie was about how when a boy grows up, he reaches a point when he has to resist the authority of his father.  After this "war" the boy is free to become mature and grow into a man.  He spoke in English because his Italian was not very good, and someone translated for him.  He asked if anyone had any questions, and a woman near the back stood up and asked a question in Italian.  I couldn't be sure, in fact I was nearly certain that I had misunderstood, but I thought that in the woman's question there was something about speaking and cats.  My suspicion grew stronger during the pregnant pause as everyone turned to the stage to see the response and the interpreter hesitated, not knowing what to say.  Finally the director apologized for not understanding Italian, and the woman repeated her question in heavily accented English.  Yes.  It was indeed something about speaking and cats.  The director started to explain how he did not like to use dialogue very much in his film and the woman cut him off to bring the conversation back to the  cats speaking.  Heads in the audience swiveled back and forth as the silence grew and everyone wondered how the director would respond.  "I'm sorry... I don't know what cats you're talking about..." he stammered.  The woman just repeated her question, repeating "the cats, the cats!" a couple times.  The swiveling heads stopped swiveling as people began to feel awkward looking at the director or the questioner.  There was another woman on stage, a mediator or MC of sorts.  She broke into what was becoming the third uncomfortable pause, thanked the director for his film, and started the applause to accompany them offstage.  As far as I could tell, the woman in the audience was entirely genuine in her question about the cats.  Maybe she was referring to a different movie she thought he also directed or something.  All I know is nobody knew what the heck was going on, and the confusion and awkwardness in the room was so thick I could've cut it with a knife.  I felt a little bad for the director, but holy smokes--it was hilarious.