Things are changing again on the local film front, and where it'll stop, nobody knows.
The recent demise of Old Hyde Park's Sunrise Cinemas has created an enormous void in the Bay area movie scene, putting local film lovers in a tizzy wondering where their next high quality cine-fix is going to come from and sending longtime Sunrise-sponsored film events and festivals scurrying out into the night in search of new homes.
Sunrise's corpse wasn't even cold yet when one local venue, Channelside Cinemas, pledged to take up the slack — devoting one or two screens to independent, art and foreign films — although plans are still extremely fuzzy about how and when any of this may come to pass. There's also a little bit of irony attached to this latest turn of events: Local film buffs with long memories will recall that when Channelside first opened, some six years ago, the theater briefly dedicated itself exclusively to "movies outside the mainstream" before biting the bullet and going the purely commercial route.
And there you have it, small comfort though it is. The more things change, at least in Tampa Bay, the more they stay the same.
At any rate, it does appear that many of the festivals made homeless by the passing of Sunrise will land at Channelside. The refugees start arriving as early as next month, beginning with The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, followed later by the Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival, two long-running events that also screen films at other venues, primarily Tampa Theatre (which, when it comes right down to it, remains our one last bastion of movies that matter).
Another long-time Sunrise resident and one of the prize jewels of the local film scene, The Tampa International Film Festival, will also likely wind up relocating to Channelside, although TIFF's future is itself a bit shaky. After changing its dates from April to February (in order to avoid overlapping with the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image), TIFF now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being jammed up against yet another similar festival — The Gasparilla Film Festival, a fledgling event that decided to schedule its debut for this coming February (also, as if you couldn't guess by now, at Channelside).
Channelside dips its toes into the alternative cine-streams (or, if you prefer, re-dips them) this very week, with The 2006 Independents' Film Festival, an award-winning collection of feature films, shorts, animation, documentaries, student work and other auspicious indie projects from around the world. The Tampa Educational Cable Consortium has been organizing this popular showcase for aspiring and up-and-coming filmmakers for the past 12 years, and this year's lineup of non-name-brand cinema looks to be one of its strongest yet.
This year's IFF kicks off at 7 p.m. on Fri., Sept. 15, with a Best of Fest program at Tampa Theatre. An awards ceremony, a panel discussion with the filmmakers, and nearly three hours of films and clips will be featured, including the riveting docu-slice of nostalgia for sleaze gone by, Tales of Times Square, and the Brazil-era Terry Gilliam meets Delicatessen-era Jean-Pierre Jeunet short, Intuitive Mind. And any student filmmaker worth his or her salt should make a point of checking out what can be done on a limited budget in Fields of Mudan, a brief but intensely affecting glimpse into the lives of Asian children forced into prostitution.
IFF moves to Channelside the next day with a free noon presentation of the Junior Independents' Fest, a 90-minute program of student films created by 6-12th graders (hailing from everywhere from Temple Terrace and Tarpon Springs to Australia). A free workshop on creating sound for film follows at 3 p.m., presented by Mike Barnitt at the Education Channel (703 N. Willow Ave.). The festival concludes at Channelside on Sun., Sept. 17 with a 7 p.m. screening of the whimsically cerebral what-am-I-doing-with-my-life opus, Wil, winner of the Best Feature Film award at this year's IFF. Director Jeremy Weinstein will be flying in from his native Australia for the screening and the Q&A that follows.
Incidentally, you can also check out this festival and never leave the comfort of your living room. Through Oct. 1, the Education Channel (Ch. 18 and Ch. 32, Tampa) will be broadcasting all the winning IFF films and much more every Friday and Sunday beginning at 9 p.m., and every Saturday beginning at 8 p.m. There's nothing like the buzz and clatter of a good film festival with its real live screenings complete with filmmakers and audiences madly interacting. But IFF offers the best of both worlds and, should you be so inclined, all you need is a cable-ready TV and you're good to go.
Still more changes that aren't exactly changes are in store this week, when another much-admired film event returns: The International Cinema Series at Eckerd College. This remarkable, free weekly series kicks in after a summer hiatus with what curator Nathan Andersen assures us will be a fall season filled with "beautiful, provocative and intelligent" films, most of which have never before been seen around these parts.
Even more intriguing, Andersen promises that the second half of the upcoming season will focus on what might be loosely called global westerns, including Spaghetti Westerns from Italy, the Western-inspired samurai films of Japan, and even the inverted "Red Westerns" of Communist East Germany, where the manifest-destiny-craving cowboys always wear the black hats and the Indians are the good guys.
The series takes place every Friday evening at 7 p.m., beginning Sept. 15 with Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien's extraordinary Three Times, a complex trilogy that uses the same actor and actress to illuminate mirrored stories taking place in 1966, 1911 and 2005. Things heat up the following week in a decidedly political way, when the series presents My Country, My Country (Sept. 22), filmmaker Laura Poitras' up-close-and-personal documentary about Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. The International Cinema Series closes out the month by getting tres artsy with Matthew Barney's maddeningly enigmatic Drawing Restraint 9 (Sept. 29), a visually lush but weirdly mushy-headed abstraction in which Bjork (Mrs. Barney) sprouts additional appendages and likes it.
October's schedule includes a take-no-prisoners double bill of Werner Herzog's sci-fi cautionary tale Wild Blue Yonder and Neil Marshall's thinking-woman's horror flick The Descent (Oct. 6); Son of Man, which resets the Gospels in contemporary Africa (Oct. 13); and Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle, a 19th-century marital drama based on a short story by Joseph Conrad.
Factor in the upcoming appearance of those promised bizarro-westerns, and you've got yourself a Friday night destination of choice for the foreseeable future. There's still lots of room for improvement on the local film front — and undoubtedly more changes to come, not all of them good — but events like the Independents' Film Festival and the International Cinema Series sure help ease the pain of life in a post-Sunrise Tampa Bay.
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2006.