The Bay area is home to a lot of different film festivals, each with its own unique vision. We have the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and also the Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival, each featuring movies reflecting aspects of their respective communities. Then there's the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, which adds some lively experimentation to the mix. There's also Tampa Bay's original forum for the not-quite-ready-for-primetime crowd: the long-running Independents Film Festival (full disclosure: it's produced by The Education Channel, where my wife is gainfully employed). And, until just recently, we had the Tampa International Film Festival, probably the most consistently vital showcase of global cinema this area has ever produced.
And now there's a new kid in town. The Gasparilla Film Festival rolls into Tampa this week, from Feb. 28 to March 4, with an eclectic assortment of offerings in tow. Unlike the Bay area's other film events, there's no specific focus to GFF — something bound to annoy those already complaining that there are too many local film festivals — but that by no means translates into a lack of ambition.
If anything, the Gasparilla Film Festival is more ambitious than those other local film events, and its lack of a single, unifying approach is its very raison d'etre: This is a fest that means to do everything those others do and then some. Even before its first film was screened, GFF was enthusiastically promoting itself as the one-stop-shopping destination for all Tampa Bay's film festival needs.
It's a strategy that's worked for others, and very close to home. GFF organizers might well be drawing inspiration from the success of the Sarasota Film Festival, an event that from the very beginning promoted itself as a major festival, even when the movies themselves were somewhat less than dazzling. Over the years, the quality of the Sarasota festival's film programming eventually caught up to its hype, and GFF might just be hoping that a similar build-it-and-they-will-come approach will pay off in Tampa.
And for what it's worth, there is reason to be hopeful. Although the schedule clearly reflects a festival finding its way, most of the movies at this first Gasparilla Film Festival are at least better than the ones shown in the early years at Sarasota (when SFF seemed to specialize in made-for-cable projects on loan from Showtime). And even if the actual content level doesn't quite measure up to the razzle-dazzle (there are parties aplenty here, with a soiree planned for each night of the festival), be assured that some careful navigation through GFF's line-up of films will likely yield thoroughly satisfactory results.
The fest kicks off on Wed., Feb. 28 with Fay Grim, director Hal Hartley's belated sequel to his 1998 opus Henry Fool. I haven't yet seen Fay Grim, but it would be less than honest not to point out that the film has been getting some pretty terrible buzz on the festival circuit, even from hardcore Hartley fans — but hey, it's got Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum in it, and even Hartley's worst films are usually worth a look, so why not live large and take a chance?
The screening takes place at 7 p.m. at Tampa Theatre, followed by an opening-night bash down the street at Fly Bar and Restaurant, complete with open bar and other goodies. Admission for the whole shebang is $75 per person, but if that's too rich for your blood, 10 bucks gets you into the film by itself.
Thursday's line-up all happens at Channelside Cinemas (where most of the festival's screenings will take place), beginning at 2 p.m. with An American Opera, a documentary on the plight of pets displaced by Hurricane Katrina, followed by selected music shorts (4 p.m.) and short films produced in Florida (5 p.m.). At 7 p.m., there's Motherland Afghanistan, Afghani-American filmmaker Sedika Mojadidi's documentary about her father's return to his devastated homeland, where he struggles as a doctor under appalling conditions. The film is a bit too polite and dispassionate for its own good (it tosses around charged words like "martyr" without comment, and diplomatically dismisses mullahs whipping women nearly to death as "cultural problems"), but the material largely speaks for itself, and the overall experience is a fairly engrossing one.
The other selections for Thursday are also worth checking out. The Romanian import 12:08 East of Bucharest (7:30 p.m.), inexplicably pigeonholed in the festival's "Fun and Fear" section of horror movies and comedies, is really neither. A meticulously deadpan take on a ragtag group of Romanians trying to make sense of their Revolution many years after the fact, 12:08 Bucharest is a small, strange study of faulty memory and worse behavior.
An even more curious effort follows at 9:30 p.m., with the independent film Callback offering up the alternately amusing and unnerving tale of an aspiring Hollywood actor vigorously falling off the deep end. Callback's production values reflect the film's limited budget, but the script is sprinkled with clever bits and pieces, and the lead actor's performance makes it all work. The evening ends with a meet-the-filmmakers party at Splitsville in Channelside.
Friday's line-up takes place partially at Ybor City's Cuban Club, where documentaries about Cuban politics and culture (including one on Cuban hip-hop) will be screened beginning at 4 p.m. Meanwhile, at Channelside, the festival's Latin American showcase continues with Maroa (6 p.m., also Sunday at 4 p.m.), a Venezuelan production about the redemption of a young street urchin. The other Friday selections at Channelside are a mixed bag, with Al Gore's ubiquitous An Inconvenient Truth showing up at 7 p.m. and an 8 p.m. screening of the ramshackle but oddly compelling Say I Do, a faux-doc Planes, Trains and Automobiles meets Blair Witch Project in which a young couple's wedding day goes straight down the toilet. Surprisingly strong (and, apparently, largely improvised) performances again raise this one a notch above your standard low-budget indie.
On the other hand, don't blame me if you decide to take a chance on Dark Corners (10 p.m.), one of the most pretentious and annoyingly incomprehensible horror/art/whatever films I've sat through in a very long time. Thora Birch stars in this ludicrous head-scratcher that dutifully regurgitates every half-decent idea David Lynch ever had and then dutifully rolls in it.
You'll need a nice, long bath after Dark Corners, but a party might do the trick, too, and Friday's festivities take place on board the SS American Victory ship. Then again, would-be revelers might just want to start their evening at the 6:30 "happy hour screening" at Gaspar's Grotto (of the B-movie spoof Monster of Phantom Lake) and then just continue their celebrating there.
Saturday, March 3 is officially Student Day, and the festival kicks off at 11 a.m. with a collection of shorts from budding filmmakers, some as young as 9 years old. Highlights include 14-year-old Celeste Davis' Purgatory House, and Third Monday in October, a documentary on 12-year-olds competing for the presidency of their school's student council. There are other kid-friendly events going on today, too, the highlight being a free outdoor screening of Spielberg's perennial crowd-pleaser E.T. in Hyde Park Village at sundown.
Saturday's schedule also includes a couple of potentially interesting non-screening events, including an 11 a.m. panel discussion on screenwriting (featuring Murder at 1600 scriptwriter Wayne Beach and Say I Do's Ron Vignone), followed by a 2 p.m. panel on motion picture distribution, with HBO programming director Leslie Cohen sitting in. Both discussions will be held at the Cuban Club and are free and open to the public.
We've saved the best for the last. The remainder of Saturday's line-up consists of Memories of Underdevelopment (7:30) and The Host (10:30), a pair of movies completely unalike, but the two must-see films of the festival. Perhaps the most complex and artistically accomplished Cuban film ever made, 1961's Memories of Underdevelopment rethinks classic European existentialist cinema (think Antonioni and that bunch) within a distinctly Cuban context, through the story of a wealthy, alienated intellectual who detests what his country has become but can't bear to leave it. The main character moves through the streets of Havana as if surveying the ruins of a vanished civilization, while director Tomas Gutierrez Alea informs every frame with elegance, irony, subtle humor and heart.
At the completely opposite end of the spectrum there is the South Korean cult classic The Host, one of the grooviest horror flicks — although it's more than just that — in a very long time. The set-up is simple: An enormous amphibious monster crawls out of a polluted river to terrorize Seoul — but the smartly written script seamlessly blends social commentary, character study (of a dysfunctional Korean family that might be the new poster boys and girls of Sundance) and slapstick comedy to create something uniquely entertaining. And at the root of it all, of course, is that unmistakable B-movie essence generated by a giant mutated tadpole with an appetite for humans. Now that's entertainment!
There's more going on during the festival's final day, although it's mostly downhill after The Host. Sunday's big draw is likely to be the 2 p.m. screening of The Immaculate Misconception, but the movie doesn't really offer much beyond a polished look and a few broad gags. A comedy about a high school virgin who thinks she's pregnant, Misconception comes off like some slightly hipper, ruder after-school special, filled with typecast ethnics (hard-drinking priests, Italian mobsters, feisty Puerto Ricans and eccentric Irishmen) and a sense of humor almost entirely dependent on colorful obscenities spewing from the mouths of babes, geezers and nuns. A slighter better bet might be Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures (7 p.m.), a road movie about an ex-patriot German and his poor Brazilian companion driving semi-aimlessly around rural Brazil. Not much happens here, and what does happen happens very, very slowly, but the film is worth seeing for its artsy, bleached-out look and a rigorously minimalist aesthetic that might make Jim Jarmusch envious.
The festival's dabbling in Latin themes carries on into its final night, with a black-tie-optional "Night in Havana" awards ceremony and wrap party at the Cuban Club. And in a festival where as much attention seems to be concentrated on the parties as on the films themselves — not necessarily a bad thing; never underestimate the value of a healthy social scene to a film festival's longevity — this might just be the party to beat. Whether the Gasparilla Film Festival proves to be as important an event as it wants to be remains to be seen, but cigars and mojitos at the Cuban Club sounds like as good a way as any to bring it all home.
For more information, complete film schedules and to purchase tickets, visit gasparillafilmfestival.com. Click on Festival and Events and choose to view the festival selections either by movie (under FILMS) or by date and time (SCHEDULE).
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2007.