If you’re a regular CL reader, then you know I’m usually writing about gallery shows. Video doesn’t often come to play at these shows, but things are changing in 2020. It began with Amanda Poss’s mini-retrospective of Kalup Linzy’s work—much of which is video and still on view at HCC Dale Mabry’s Gallery 221 until March 5—where Poss brought out four television sets for the event.
Then came the University of Tampa’s “Film, Animation, and New Media” at Scarfone/Hartley Gallery (which closes on Feb. 28); Department Chair Dana Plays said the show was the UT Film Department’s first faculty exhibition; the program is only three years old.
Gasparilla International Film Festival
March 17-22. Various locations
Downtown Tampa, Ybor City, Tampa Heights, Seminole Heights
gasparillafilmfestival.com
Around the same time video inundated Tampa’s art galleries, news from the second annual Dunedin International Film Festival (DIFF) and the fourth annual Sunshine City Film Festival (SCFF) dominated my Facebook feed.
Dunedin Fine Art Center Curator Catherine Bergmann announced she’d be a judge at DIFF 2020, where Gulfport filmmaker Victoria Jorgensen had an iPhone movie workshop with Fabiana Lowe. Soon after, SCFF honored Jorgensen with a L.I.F.E. Ladies in Film & Entertainment Achievement Award.
It was as though the universe was screaming “film,” and I had no choice but to listen. Is Tampa Bay’s film scene growing? Is it time we pay more attention to movies made in Tampa Bay?
We talked to six Tampa Bay area filmmakers to tell us what’s special about the local film scene. UT’s Plays, Jorgensen, Gasparilla International Film Festival (GIFF) Executive Director Monica Varner and GIFF co-founder Pete Guzzo all chimed in along with Hillsborough County Film Commissioner Tyler Martilolich and Pinellas County Film Commissioner Tony Armer.
Film festivals were among the first things Plays mentioned. Tampa Bay hosts about a dozen film festivals throughout the year, including four international film festivals, a Latin film festival, a Jewish film festival, a gay and lesbian film festival, an environmental film festival, an experimental film festival, a horror film festival and an underground film festival. You get the idea, and here’s a rundown:
The Tampa Bay International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (TIGLFF), happening in October each year, is the Tampa Bay area’s longest-running film fest.
“The Tampa Bay International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival has been [around since 1990],” Jorgensen told CL. “I remember a time when if you went to this festival, you did so under threat of bomb scare. It was terrible. There were people with microphones in the streets telling you [that] you were going to go to hell and all this stuff. So the people that held that together and the people that came were very courageous, because there were people that were abusive, and they still showed these films.”
The Sunscreen Film Festival, happening in St. Pete every April, has its share of fans, too. Plays is particularly fond of Sunscreen because it’s shown UT student films. Jorgensen refers to Sunscreen—now in its 15th year—as a real “filmmakers film festival,” rife with great educational opportunities for filmmakers. Added Jorgensen: “You go there to learn, you go there to meet people, and you go there to watch good films.”
“One of the big niches of Sunscreen is the educational programming,” said Armer. “One of the things that, being a filmmaker myself, I thought was really important, was, ‘How do we help the community and help the community grow locally?’ So it’s become really well-known for the quality of the workshops and year-round educational programming. We just did a 12-week film school in the fall where 20 adult students basically learn from industry professionals. At the end, they shot their own short films.”
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And then there’s the whole reason for killing a tree to print this page: the Gasparilla International Film Festival happening this March.
GIFF traces its beginnings to 2006, when the Hillsborough County Film Commissioner asked filmmaking brothers Pete and Paul Guzzo if they’d be interested in starting a film festival. They agreed and recruited their officemate, Varner to join the effort.
“[Before GIFF, Tampa Bay] wasn’t getting a lot of movie premieres,” Varner told CL, adding that GIFF’s original mission was to give Tampeños a chance to see movies that were only being premiered in L.A. and New York City. She wants locals to come to a theater to see the films on the big screen and interact with directors and filmmakers who attend the screenings and do talks before a film’s final release. “It’s an interactive experience. I know a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I’ll just wait for on-demand,’ but it’s not the same.”
Sunscreen and GIFF are the main film festivals in St. Pete and Tampa, respectively, but there’ve been several newcomers in the past five years. In January 2019, north Pinellas got its first film festival—the Dunedin International Film Festival (DIFF). For one week, Dunedin bars and restaurants hosted screenings and educational workshops. “I think Cameron Campbell has done an amazing job with Dunedin…This year she had 175 different films… It’s a unique film festival, and it’s like the whole town gets involved,” Jorgensen told CL.
In October 2019, St. Petersburg-based online publication iHorror hosted its first film fest at Ybor City’s Cuban Club. The one-day horror movie marathon included a panel with Daniel Myrick, who wrote and directed1999 cult-classic “The Blair Witch Project” and is filming a web series titled “Black Veil” in Plant City.
The Sunshine City Film Festival, founded in 2017 to inject diversity into our local film scene by providing more opportunities for African American filmmakers, expanded from four to 10 days in January 2020.
When it comes to annual film festivals in Tampa Bay, we could go on and on. A few more that come to mind are Warren Cockerham’s experimental film festival, Flex Fest (stylized "FLEX," which moved from Gainesville to Tampa last year), December’s six-year-old Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival, the two-year-old Tampa Bay Latin Film Festival and the 24-year-old Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival, which merged with GIFF in 2018. A pair of 22-year-old fests—Eckerd College Environmental Film Festival and Sarasota Film Festival—happen in February and March, respectively.
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There’s a group of Tampa Bay filmmakers gathering in an old Channelside building semi-regularly to share their latest short films. It’s called Film Review Tampa, and “you can show anything you want outside of porn,” Pete Guzzo says at the beginning of the group’s first meeting of 2020.
The warehouse at 211 N. Meridien Ave. is a little rough around the edges, but soon it will be Tampa’s newest creative co-work space and studio. For now, Film Tampa Bay hosts its quarterly meetings in a makeshift TV room the group fashioned from an 8-foot tall corner of drywall, a laptop desk, a TV stand, and about 50 folding chairs, most of which are occupied by Tampa Bay area filmmakers and actors who gather to collectively elevate Tampa Bay’s film scene through collaboration.
“There’s an incredible, large amount of talented people [in Tampa Bay] that don’t get the work they should because of where we are, so they end up collaborating,” said Jorgensen, who invited me to the meeting. “I’ve collaborated with some amazing individuals, who if I hadn’t collaborated with them, I would never have made some of the things I’ve made, or had the opportunities that I had.”
Pete and his brother Paul started Tampa Film Review in the early to mid-2000s.
“The reason we started Tampa Film Review, originally, was because we discovered outside of film festivals, if your movie doesn’t get into the theaters or DVD distribution, where do you show it? How do you get feedback? How do people tell you, ‘This is what I like. This is what I don’t like’?’’ Pete told CL. “[Tampa Film Review] kind of turned into an honest way of improving upon your skills and your traits as a filmmaker. That was the major reason we did it. In film festivals you get judges and you don’t know who they are—either you get five stars, you get two stars, or you get a one-star—but you don’t really know what you need to fix.”
The group went on hiatus for a while due to demanding work schedules, but now it’s back, as Film Review Tampa. “What we’re trying to do is keep people here by showing them they don’t need to travel to L.A. or Atlanta to meet other like-minded people who want to create great work,” he added.
The January meeting started with local cinematographer and director Curtis Graham of Greyhouse Films, who Pete describes as someone who showed that you can be a filmmaker anywhere and make it work. Graham showed a video featuring Chris Medina’s “What are Words,” with a series of images set to the music. There was no actual dialog in it. Graham—who’ll discuss more during a Sunscreen workshop in April—was trying to make the point that visuals are more important than dialog in filmmaking.
After Graham, more Tampa Bay area filmmakers shared their recent projects. I saw a suicide-prevention video starring Spider-Man, a short film about parenthood (“You Don’t Have to Save the World”)—plus trailers for an LGBT short called (“A Reason to Celebrate”), a new feature-length horror film shot in Florida (“Deathcast”), and one for “WDED Dead in the Morning,” a feature-length zombie film inspired by the '80s horror/comedy genre. It was a fun, free night of short films and professional networking that Pete hopes to repeat every three months or so.
“Every time we have a different event, I want to bring in somebody who has an entrepreneurial spirit, whether it’s in the ad agency world, the commercial production world, or like Curtis Graham, the independent film production world as a director and [cinematographer],” Pete added. “We have these young guys in the audience who are watching, listening and going, ‘Oh yeah, I can stick it out here. These guys are making it work; so can I.’”
Film Tampa Bay and FilmSPC are the organizations responsible for facilitating movie-making in Hillsborough and Pinellas, respectively. Take a look at their websites, and you’ll see all the motion pictures filmed in Tampa Bay over the past 30 or so years, from “Cocoon” (1984) to Hallmark movies “Love in the Sun” and “True Love Blooms” (both from 2019.) Although some great—and some not-so-great—movies were filmed here, convincing people to film in Tampa Bay hasn’t been easy since Florida abandoned its film incentive program.
“The film industry at large—and that would include everything from features to TV series, commercials, web videos, anything digital-oriented—it’s extremely competitive. Lots of states that have huge advantages as far as marketing and recruiting films via their tax incentives,” Hillsborough County Film Commissioner Tyler Martinolich told CL. “Georgia comes to mind immediately; they give 30%. If you film in Savannah specifically, you can combine that 30% with an additional 10%, and all of a sudden you’re getting a 40% tax break. Louisiana offers a 30% tax break. That’s pretty normal. I think 31 or 32 states have a form of a tax rebate program… Florida used to be one of the leaders in that. We had a very robust film incentive program, going back almost a decade. Unfortunately, it was written to sunset in 2015 and actually ran out of money in 2013.”
As Florida ceased to be marketable as a filming location, Hillsborough and Pinellas film commissioners realized they had to come up with incentives to lure filmmakers to Tampa Bay.
[We had] to figure out how strategically we could place ourselves as Tampa Bay, having our own identity,” Martinolich added. “We could no longer shop or market the state as a whole because we didn’t have that umbrella program anymore.”
“[Hillsborough and Pinellas] were among the first counties in the state to create a localized incentive,” Martinolich told CL. “Our markets do it slightly differently. Pinellas County has a marketing grant approach whereas ours is economic development. But essentially, we both give about 10% back in a rebate to local productions.”
“Having that 10% seems to be just enough to get people in the door here,” Martinolich said.
“In the $8M and below price-point, for most feature films, we can still be somewhat competitive.”
It was these incentives that brought National Geographic’s “Secrets of the Zoo” to ZooTampa and those two different Hallmark films to Safety Harbor and St. Petersburg in 2019.
“Instead of getting one small movie a year, now you’re able to get four, five, six, seven or eight of these films,” Armer, Pinellas’ film commissioner, said. Plays, UT’s film department chair, loves the film commissions help give student filmmakers and valuable experience.
So if it seems like there’s a lot more filming happening in Tampa Bay lately, it’s probably because more people are coming here to make films. At the same time, local filmmakers are collaborating to produce better independent films in Tampa Bay as a whole. All of this is good for local moviemakers and watchers alike.
“We have a really cool independent film scene. I think that’s what attracts people to this area,” Guzzo said.
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This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2020.