Few film festivals are as indelibly entwined with the personalities of their programmers as The Ybor Festival of the Moving Image. David Audet is a veteran of the legendary Chinsegut Film Festival, The Artists and Writers Balls, and various other proto-boho events that shaped the cultural landscape of the Bay area over the past few decades, and he’s someone who likes to mix it up. On one hand, the guy is a staunch supporter of the arts, the more challenging and thought-provoking the better; on the other hand, he’s just subversive enough to want to pull the rug out from underneath anything giving off the slightest whiff of high-mindedness or pretense. Audet’s an extremely political creature, loading his festival with hard-hitting documentaries on African genocides and the bungled War on Terror, but he’s also fond of playful and proudly apolitical approaches that might involve someone dressing up in feathers and plastic hoops and running through the aisles of one of his screenings squirting ketchup on the crowd. The result is a film festival that’s as experimental as it wants to be, crossing borders and boundaries with abandon while incorporating everything from performance art to cine-installations (fusing digital projections with painting, music and sculpture) to — gasp — actual film. The Ybor Festival of the Moving Image will take place April 1-5, 2009 at various locations on and around the HCC campus in Ybor City, Tampa. For tickets or information, call 813-516 9267 or visit yborfilmfestival.com
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.
