Big Stone Gap hits the big screen

It's easily one of my favorite assignments so far -- go to a film festival, interview movie stars and then watch a brand-new movie with about 1,100 other people.

What.

"Big Stone Gap," a movie directed and written by Adriana Trigiani, who wrote a book series by the same name, premiered at the Virginia Film Festival yesterday. The movie, made in Virginia, by a Virginian about a Virginia town kicked off this year's festival to a sold-out crowd. Here's the story.

Luckily for me, my sister lives in Charlottesville, so I attended the premiere, the pre-premiere presser and post-movie Q&A, and then crashed at her house for a few hours before driving back to Southwest Virginia.

If I may get into reviewer mode here, the movie was fantastic. Trigiani did a good job translating the book onto the screen (which makes sense, as she'd actually written the screenplay first) and it was pretty surreal to see a town you know -- Big Stone Gap, just 20 minutes from where I went to college and about an hour away from where I live now -- on a movie screen.

It was also cool to hear the actors -- Ashley Judd, Jenna Elfman, Patrick Wilson, etc. -- talk about their experiences filming in Big Stone. Some highlights: they liked being fed all the time (hello, peanut butter pie) and they enjoyed the hospitality offered to them by local folks in the way of laundry service, a place to stay and cars to drive in the movie.