Strange tools we can actually bring back to our resident countries and idle computers to apply to our characters

It's one thing to pull up to a film festival as a tax-deductible punter. You rub shoulders with industry people of whom you have little in common with beyond all your hopes and dreams. Your only guide is your uneducated assessment of what films are most interesting, which producers are most important, and which events have the free-est beer (and maybe free-est shrimp).

This is of course still fun, but it's quite another thing to be literally transported to the "City of Poets" (one of Norway's most "attractive" towns, [according to my taxi man]), to be fed and watered like an only child returning home from many years abroad and to be shown where to go and who to speak to for the best of the best, at all times.

Pitching is a stressful ordeal—a skill that we un-callistered handed people are reluctant to practice unless forced. But the program offered more than just survival tips for a loaded jury. It gave us routes to engage with our ideas in ways that often bred unexpected opportunities for depth and growth. It isn't until you're made to walk around a lakeside car-park as your own character that you realise you have no idea how she walks.

This, amongst others, are great and strange tools we can actually bring back to our resident countries and idle computers to apply to our characters, narratives and newly born ideas.

Of course there was only one grand prize, but between the genuine people, compelling films and carefully curated sessions with the organisers - un-ironically - we really truly were all winners at the end of the weekend. <3 Rory