Editor's Note: For more coverage of GIFF, check out Mitch Perry's story on festival entry Full Signal, Joe Bardi's expanded Q&A with festival President Chad Moore and reviews of some of the films playing the festival.]
The 2010 spring film festival season in Tampa Bay gets off to a rousing start this weekend with the Gasparilla International Film Festival (GIFF), which invades the Tampa Theatre, CinéBistro in Hyde Park and the Muvico Centro Ybor starting on Thursday. In coming weeks the Suncreen Film Festival, the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image and the Sarasota Film Festival (among others) will light up screens across the region. But in the current economic climate, where funding for the arts is often the first thing cut by governments and patrons, we shouldn’t take our film-related bounty for granted. GIFF, for example, almost didn’t happen this year.
“We thought seriously about taking a year off,” says Chad Moore, president of GIFF when he’s not living a double life as a lawyer and family man, who spoke to me a week before opening night. The economics of putting on the festival, combined with the massive amount of work involved in screening films, negotiating with venues and raising money had the organizers thinking it was too big a task this year. “Like most arts organizations,” Moore continues, “we were dramatically affected [by the recession]. The largest supporters we have as a non-profit is corporate giving, and corporate giving is down dramatically.”
Read more about the Gasparilla International Film Festival and see video of my interview with Chad Moore by clicking below …
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2010.