David Audet looks like he hasn't been sleeping much lately.
His big, bear-like frame slumps a little in his chair as he sits sipping coffee in the corner of a noisy little Ybor restaurant. The familiar twinkle in his eyes is losing the battle to a red-rimmed glaze, and his hair and beard display a few streaks of gray that don't seem to have been there just a few short weeks ago.Audet is in the process of organizing a film festival. A big, complicated one. But then again, aren't they all?
"I keep telling myself it's worth it," he says. "You have to have hope."
Conventional wisdom tells us that Tampa's a city with plenty of hope but not much room for the sort of spirited, unconventional cultural shindigs that Audet specializes in. And then there's the whole, historically problematic relationship between Tampa Bay and film festivals.
For what it's worth, the Bay area is home to two long-established film festivals — The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival — although there's an argument to be made that these are both to some extent "specialty" events primarily catering to built-in audiences. A smattering of smaller, semi-regular film series have also appeared and, in most cases, disappeared over the years.
For the most part, though, film festivals of genuine substance and scope have had a ridiculously tough time gaining a foothold in the Bay area.
Now, suddenly and mysteriously, they seem to be springing up all over.
Audet's festival is one of two ambitious and extremely promising film events scheduled to arrive over the next few weeks. Don't expect Nicole Kidman or Denzel to show up at either of these festivals, but what's actually in store might just turn out to be considerably more interesting.
The event Audet is organizing in conjunction with Hillsborough Community College is called The Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, and it runs from March 31 through April 5 at various unlikely sites around Ybor City. Moving Image promises to be both playful and arty (i.e.: lots of spontaneity, parties and odd behavior), unabashedly experimental and just a wee bit subversive. The festival will focus on new and nontraditional approaches to filmmaking, throwing live performances, digital sculptures and site specific installations into the mix, along with plenty of works-in-progress. This will likely be a very personal, hands-on affair, with audience members encouraged to hang out and interact with the filmmakers, most of whom are expected to attend.
The other festival making its debut is a much different deal, and, potentially, a much bigger one.
The Tampa International Film Festival may in fact just turn out to be that Great Missing Film Festival that everyone's always known this area was capable of and deserved, but could never quite manage to make happen. Some 20 important films — 20 really good important films — will be screened over the course of the 10 days of TIFF. Most of these movies are brand spanking new, come highly recommended by international cognoscenti, and were culled from prestigious film festivals such as Toronto and Berlin. The majority of the screenings will be Florida and even Southeast U.S. premieres, inevitably positioning this festival as the most important event of its kind ever produced in the Bay area.
Okay. Hyperbole aside, it's the first and only event of its kind ever produced in the Bay area.
In an act of synchronicity so smooth it's hard to believe it wasn't plotted, The Tampa International Film Festival dovetails perfectly with the Moving Image festival, beginning on the very day that Moving Image is ending. TIFF runs from April 5-13 at Tampa Theatre, Channelside and the University of Tampa.
In case there was any doubt about it, that's a whole lot of movies coming our way.
Discourse is Discourse, Of Course, Of Course
Rob Tregenza is someone who isn't afraid to use a word like "cinema," never mind that the syllables smack of elitism or flat-out pretence to all too many moviegoers these days. Far from being embarrassed about it, Tregenza practically rolls the word around in his mouth, savoring the sound and weight of an expression that, to some of us, still conjures up the grandest triumphs and most exciting possibilities of a century-old art form that is America's real favorite pastime.
Tregenza is the director of the Tampa International Film Festival, and after several weeks of working the phones, making deals, haggling for films and fundraising, it's a wonder he's not as frazzled as David Audet. What probably saves Tregenza from a complete breakdown is the fact that he's got a small but efficient team of programmers working with him, whereas Audet is basically a committee of one.
In addition to his duties running the festival, Tregenza is also a highly respected filmmaker in his own right, as well as a professor of film studies at the University of Tampa. He's a man who loves film as passionately as he loves words and ideas, and any conversation with him is going to necessarily be peppered with terms like "discourse" and "formal possibilities." Academic-speak comes with the territory, apparently, but Tregenza is basically just a fellow who wants to share something he finds beautiful with other people.
"I don't have this idea of art having to be painful in order for it to be art," he says with a smile. "Cinema is a broad range of experience, and it's always been an international language. It's a crossroads, a place where different ideas and cultures come together. That's one reason I think Tampa is a good place for a festival like this."
Tregenza notices the raised eyebrow I'm momentarily unable to suppress. As an active follower and chronicler of the Bay area's film scene for over 12 years now, I've heard more variations on film festival proposals than I care to remember. Over the years, I've politely nodded as one well-meaning crusader after another explained his or her grand (but ultimately fruitless) design for a major international film festival that would inevitably put Tampa on the map. After all, Miami has one and Orlando has one. Even Sarasota has one, sort of.
So why not Tampa?
Everyone seems to have an answer to that question, but none of those answers are definitive: bad timing, lack of funds or follow-through, an audience that wasn't "ready" yet for something so different. The bottom line is that, of all the brave souls who have dreamed of that great Tampa Film Festival in the Sky, no one has ultimately had the wherewithal to pull it off. The critical difference between then and now is that Tregenza and his crew seem to have the expertise, the connections, the funding and the passion to actually make this thing work.
"I was surprised when I came here that there wasn't an international festival," says Tregenza, who moved here a few years ago from what's generally seen as the more cultivated pastures of Washington/ Baltimore. "It seemed like such a logical thing that one should be here, because Tampa is a port city, with a tradition of different points of view from different peoples and cultures. You have all sorts of indigenous ethnicities here that are long established."
Tregenza thinks it's not only possible but inevitable that an international film festival will thrive here. He's well aware that the festival will have to be designed, promoted and nurtured in exactly the right way, and that the films will have to be carefully chosen: new and challenging stuff, certainly, but not to the point that the films completely alienate tender local sensibilities. It's a delicate proposition.
"I could see it being difficult to have a festival like this in a city that's not an international city," he muses, pausing for a moment to reflect on where he is and the task ahead. "Maybe Tampa has an identity crisis about whether or not it is an international city."
The Dream Merchants
As edgy and ambitious as the Tampa International Film Festival promises to be, Tregenza's plans look positively shy and retiring compared to what David Audet is cooking up over in Ybor.
Audet is no stranger to the unconventional. Since 1979, Audet has been a prime mover in such legendary local displays of organized anarchy as the Artists and Writers Balls, Seminole Heights' Still and Moving Gallery, the Cuban Sandwich Show, and, perhaps most significantly of all, University of South Florida's Chinsegut Film/Video Conference, which he co-directed during the early 1980s.
"That's where I was introduced to the whole notion of unusual presentations," Audet recalls. "I remember the floating film shows on the water, wandering through the woods and coming upon an image being screened, with text that made it all so much more mysterious. You stayed up till dawn and when the sun came up, you took a little rest and you started showing again."
Stories of artistic abandon and general craziness abound from those early Chinsegut days — tales of early morning mushroom picking, mid-afternoon movie marathons, and late night wanderings directly into the paths of sex-crazed bulls in heat. Chinsegut was less about the films than the experience of it all, the process. Some of it was brilliant, some of it was a mess, but even when it was a mess, it was a memorable mess. Audet cut his teeth on Chinsegut, and then put that experience to work throughout the years.
It's hard to overestimate the influence of Chinsegut and its anything-goes aesthetic upon what Audet is doing with the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image. Several of the artists featured at the festival are in fact veterans of Chinseguts past, and there will even be a bit of overlap between the image makers appearing at Audet's Ybor festival and those showing up at the Chinsegut event being resurrected this year March 28-30 by original guiding light, Charles Lyman.
Audet has nothing but fond memories of Chinsegut, but he also remembers all the back-breaking work and organizational headaches — so when HCC originally asked him to help organize a film festival, his initial answer was a flat "No." Audet finally relented but wasn't sure what the festival would or should be, other than "a good one" — and that it would not be devoted to feature films.
"I love feature films," says Audet, referring to films that more or less tell a story and conform to a standard running time of 90 minutes, give or take, "but I don't have a real connection to them. You know, everybody sitting in a chair facing a blank wall, and then you turn out the lights and up comes the dream. We're having some of that (in this festival), but …"
Audet leaves the rest of the thought to our imagination, which is appropriate because that's where the bulk of his festival will take place. Even the choice of words in the festival's title is significant — moving image as opposed to film — one more blow to tradition in an event in which many of the artists aren't even working in celluloid. "These are artists who understand there are ways to do things other than the expected way," says Audet. "So when I say I got a really interesting room in a really old building in Ybor, they go, 'Oh yeah, cool,' rather than 'What the hell are you talking about?' They immediately understand."
That flexibility can be at least partially attributed to the fact that most of the artists showing up for Audet's event loosely qualify as modern renaissance men and women, used to working in a number of different disciplines, often simultaneously. Santa Fe artist Mariannah Amster, whose computer-animated films resemble gracefully moving paintings, is a former biologist whose work reflects her fascination with microscopic universes. Frank Ragano, Amster's partner, is a maker of digital videos, whose skills as a dancer, sculptor and installation artist figure heavily in his work. During the early '90s, he also studied at The New School for Social Research in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program.
Ragano and Amster are only the tip of an eclectic iceberg that includes an assortment of Miami artists organized by Charles Recher, Vermont experimental filmmaker Ted Lyman, Chinsegut veteran Nancy Yesecko and Mindbomb, a multimedia group that includes local film scene fixture Philip Harris. Many of the filmmakers will be presenting brand new works created specifically for the festival, and several of the film/video pieces will incorporate elements of live improvisation that could take things to all sorts of unexpected places.
For Audet, all of these artists embody the best parts of Chinsegut — "that sense of growing, of developing a new way of looking at things." There's not a single "calling card film" at this festival, no product specifically designed as a career stepping stone. The aim here is personal satisfaction, equal emphasis on both words.
Audet claims that the miniscule budgets of these films only makes them more special. "The artists aren't making money at this," he declares. "In fact, for most of the people coming to this festival, it's gonna cost them. These are people who do it for the love of doing it."
Build It and They Will Come?
Elizabeth Coffman is a filmmaker and University of Tampa instructor who serves as one of the programmers for the Tampa International Film Festival. She's also a native Floridian. Coffman grew up in Jackson and describes herself as "one of those people who didn't hang out at the beach, who fantasized about moving to a cold place like Boston, who dreamed of smoky coffee houses where everyone talked intellectual talk and smoked cigarettes."
After many years of putting up with what she perceived as the "bland Florida culture" all around her, Coffman finally got her wish and moved to New York. Eventually, though, she came back to Florida for graduate school, found solace in a small but committed group of like-minded people, and wound up staying. That was 15 years ago.
"I've come through a period of hating and rejecting (Florida), back to loving it," Coffman explains, "trying to see it for what it is instead of what I wish it was. So I feel more like a pragmatist about this festival."
Like Tregenza, Coffman is cautiously optimistic about the upcoming film festival, and is particularly interested in the idea that foreign films can be a way to reach out to the diverse communities that exist in the Bay area. There will be Cuban films for the Cuban community and Asian films that will, hopefully, attract the Asian American community. Coffman knows that a lot of work and word of mouth will be required to make this thing happen, but she feels the result will be well worth the effort.
"When you bring these other world views in," she says, "we see ourselves differently as well."
Coffman looks at cinema, and the upcoming festival, as a particularly useful way of getting young people interested in world history. She pays careful attention to her UT students and insists that, after a virtual lifetime of being bombarded by reality TV and Michael Jackson specials, they're ready for something more meaningful.
"Our college students are ready to recognize there are more serious issues to talk about," Coffman maintains, "especially with the state of the world right now. They realize that it's actually not so cool to watch Joe Millionaire. Our students don't know world history, but they want to know it. They see why it's important to know it now, and they're embarrassed that they haven't been taught it."
The Tampa International Film Festival isn't going to help anyone solve the Mid-East crisis or figure out what to do about North Korea, but it does provide a window on the world the likes of which most of us have never been afforded. From the economically devastated, working class Spanish neighborhoods of Monday in the Sun to the post-post-punk Scottish youth of Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen, there's a treasure trove of rarely glimpsed global perspectives waiting in these films. TIFF was not specifically designed as a "political" film festival, but it's impossible to ignore politics or history when you're watching proto-KGB thugs systematically slaughtering enemies of the Soviet state in The Checkist, or taking in Coffman and Ted Hardin's Bosnia documentary One More Mile. In one of the festival's more unique offerings, Peter Watkins' La Commune, we spend the better part of six hours (!) immersed in a postmodern but defiantly passionate simulation of class warfare erupting in the streets of 19th century Paris.
"To me," says Tregenza, "if you're going to bring international films in, they are going to bring their politics with them.
"The real concern, though, is that the films are engaged with cinema as cinema," he insists, "not just cinema as politics. Obviously cinema has to have a political element to it, but that's not the real focus. The real focus is to do films that engage and talk about what cinema can be and what the world can be."
Coffman agrees, adding what may just be the final word on the subject. "Being committed to foreign films in this country is a political commitment in itself," she says. "I think most of the films we're talking about are simply vistas, and some of the most beautiful cinema ever seen. That's one of the reasons to have a film festival — to show these films up on the big screen, the way they need to be seen. These films are just breathtakingly beautiful."
This is Only a Test
David Audet still looks like he isn't sleeping much, but he looks happy. And excited. "If this festival's wonderful, that's great," he grins, "and if it's awful then I'm also gonna accept that. This is the first year, so it's all a test."
HCC wants the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image to be an annual event, and Audet is already making preliminary plans for next year. But plans are made to be broken, especially in a festival like this one.
In Audet's mind, this year's festival is a test not just for the festival, but for the viability of its Ybor location, for HCC, and for Tampa in general.
"Ybor either embraces it or it doesn't," he says. "If it doesn't want it, we can take it over to the campus next year and not mention a word about it to the public. We can just have it all inside, which is how so much goes on in this world anyway."
There's little time for defeatist talk, though. Right now, Audet is more concerned with deciding how to position the screen for the "drive-in style" outdoor presentation of Gary Bass' digital film Radiopaque that will open the festival. The plan is for viewers to sit in their cars in the El Pasjae parking lot, next to Weekly Planet's Ybor office, watching the film projected on a gigantic outdoor screen while listening to the soundtrack on their car radios. WMNF will provide the broadcast, and a massive party will follow in the courtyard of the former Café Creole.
The films and events for the Ybor festival are almost all in place, and Audet is scurrying about, plugging holes, taking care of last-minute details. He's particularly happy at the moment because it looks like Muvico Centro Ybor has agreed to host a few extra screenings of Unseen Cinema, an acclaimed series of early American avant-garde films curated by Bruce Posner. Posner will be on hand to personally introduce these gorgeous, fairytale-like rarities, some of which date back to 1893, and anyone lucky enough to see them is almost certain to be astonished.
"I want this festival to be provocative," says Audet, "and I want it to be, well, fun. All the filmmakers that I've invited have that sense, and they want to share that in their work. When we all get together I'm hoping for that synergy where something will happen that's somewhere between love and creativity. Where people will go, 'Wow, I didn't know you could do that!' or 'I never saw something like that before!'
"That's what's exciting to me," he says, looking up at the balcony from where a screen will hang in a few days. "There's a chance of failure, you know, everything from the technical end to the artistic, and that's what makes it exciting. We are not just saying that this is edgy. It is edgy. I'm trusting everybody to do the best they can and I trust that they're going to do something good."
Meanwhile, across town, a team of programmers including Rob Tregenza and Elizabeth Coffman puts the final touches on the Tampa International Film Festival and waits to see what will happen next.
Tregenza, in a rare moment of down time, tells me a story about sitting in a café some years back, having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, for those unfamiliar with him, is one of the original French New Wave filmmakers, acclaimed almost universally by critics and cineastes as one of the greatest artists who ever lived. At the same time, his work almost never plays in places like, well, Tampa, because he is just the sort of challenging, exceedingly cerebral artist who drives the unwashed masses at the megaplexes crazy.
"So Godard said that if he had 10,000 people in the world that really loved his work he'd be a happy man," Tregenza tells me. "This is Jean-Luc Godard saying he'd consider 10,000 people enough of an audience."
For Tregenza, the statement is as absurd as the thought of Michelangelo returning to Earth and finding a broom closet full of admirers perfectly sufficient to make him a happy camper.
"Now, Godard has a very mischievous side to him, and I'm not saying he actually means that," explains Tregenza, "but he does say it. He also says that he awaits the end of cinema with optimism."
For Tregenza, Godard's typically cryptic comment is good news. It's a statement that looks forward to a future that can't be predicted, and that reaffirms the need for film to continually transform itself. "That's part of this festival," offers Tregenza, "to find out what is cinema for a new world."
"I think we have to redefine what cinema is going to be," he continues. "If it's going to survive, it's going to have to be more of a dialogue, more of an event. It seems to me that a film festival creates an opportunity for the art form to continue and to flourish. It may be in a different way, it may have to be a different type of setting, but we have to create that opportunity for it.
"The thing is to be optimistic."
That seems to be the word of the week, optimism. It's certainly the word on everybody's lips as these two very risky film events prepare to descend upon a barely suspecting Tampa Bay, and everybody holds their breath.
"There's no telling what's going to happen," says Coffman. "Some nights we may have 20 people in the audience and not even break even. But hopefully, we'll start to build up some following, and by next year we'll have a reputation for bringing in unusual cinema, beautiful to watch, that's global in perspective and that teaches us something about the world."
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
For highlights and reviews of the individual films featured at this year's Tampa International Film Festival and Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, see Lance Goldenberg's Film column. For more information on the Tampa International Film Festival, visit the website at http://tampafilmfest.ut.edu or call 813-253-3333 ext. 3425. For more information on Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, check out the website at www.yborfilmfestival.com or call Carolyn Kossar at 813-253-7674 or David Audet at 813-935-9232. For information about Chinsegut Conference on the Moving Image, visit www.atlanticdv.com or call 813-248-0402.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2003.