Too Nice to Be Inside: Live at the Florida Film Festival
By John Oak Dalton • Mar 16th, 2004 • Category: EditorialsThe Florida Film Festival in Orlando is all that you would want in a film festival and then some, more than 100 features and shorts spread out over almost two weeks’ time. It is a real clash of cultures and ideas; as well as the odd sight of seeing people longing to go inside on beautiful clear sunny days, one is also treated to Hollywood players rubbing elbows with college-aged auteurs and PR-hungry student “street teams,” DV epics screened right alongside the new Nicole Kidman movie, and more.
The strength of this festival is its genre-busting, all-inclusive vibe and its embracing of very diverse themes. Documentaries, foreign films, “midnight movies,” classic films, student projects, Hollywood indies, all have a place at the fest. And the main venue is especially nice–the Enzian Theater, a coffeehouse-styled space with a big screen, crisp sound, and an attached restaurant and bar. The Enzian also sports a nice little stage, which was used to provide Q&A sessions with filmmakers after everything that I saw at the festival.
Probably the most fun was hanging around outside the Enzian between programs, and seeing the filmmakers meet and converse with each other and the festival’s patrons. The audiences were eclectic and enthusiastic and the filmmakers receptive. The Enzian featured a nice outdoor area that encouraged conversation, and I wondered what synergies might have been born on those warm flagstones as I overheard the various discussions.
The negatives were that the price point for some of the events seemed pretty high (although I saw people from what seemed to be all walks of life everywhere) and that transportation was not provided between the locations. The Regal Winter Park Village, a twenty-screen venue in an attractive shopping area, was used for some of the screenings but was some distance away down a busy main thoroughfare.
Although there was some issue with venue accessibility, the filmmakers were very accessible, and there were so many different types of movies that even the most insatiable viewer hungry for content would go away sated.
The Florida Film Festival is a dynamic, engaging event with moviegoing experiences for everyone.
For more information about the festival, visit: http://www.floridafilmfestival.org/
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John Oak Dalton is a Community Television Station Manager by day, and a DIY acolyte by night. In the 80s he made Super-8 movies and his own basement mix tapes. In the 90s he hosted a cable-access show and made his own zines and minicomics. In the 21st Century he began working with grassroots video and microcinema and writing b-movies, and has more than a dozen projects on the shelf, on screen, in development, or in production.
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