Make Way for The Sarasota Film Festival

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Tuesday, 26 March 2013 02:31

Written by Matt Oakes

Held on the banks of the Gulf of Mexico in the Sunshine State since 1999, the Annual Sarasota Film Festival is entering its 15th year and has over 222 films to show for it.  Featuring a slew of world and US premieres, the SFF has quickly become one of the prodigious and prestigious film festivals this side of the pond.

Rising from the ashes of the Sarasota French Film Festival that ran annually in the same city until 1996, the SFF has garnished even more positive attention and glowing reviews from the masses and was even called "the acme of regional film festivals" by Variety magazine in 2012.

This year’s festival runs from April 5-14 and will be bookended by event opener Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish and closed out by Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha.

Blackfish documents the much-publicized 2010 killing of an orca whale trainer at SeaWorld. It premiered at this year’s Sundance Festival, poising poignant questions about the tactics and ethics of this multinational but predominantly corporate aquarium.

Following up on a pair of sobering and darkly comical critical darlings, Greenberg and The Squid and The Whale, Baumbach takes his distinctive touch to Frances Ha, a “quirky romantic comedy” set to the backdrop of New York City which is already winning the critics over in droves.

Although these two films won’t be vying for the win within the competition, the fact that these features couldn’t be more starkly different in subject matter or approach speaks volumes about the scope of SFF.

Some notable entries to the competition portion of the festival include:

• Tom Gilroy’s latest is set for a US premiere with The Cold Lands, his first feature film since 1999.
  
  
•  Spotlighting the hardcore music scene in war-torn Angola, Jeremy Xido’s Death Metal Angola has been called “a cult class in the making” by Huffington Post and will also receive it’s US premiere at SFF.
  
  
• The world premiere of Soft in the Head by Nathan Silver, which was aptly labeled as an “ode to anxiety and New York”.
  
  
• Drifting somewhere in the midst of the drama, sci-fi and horror genre, The Oxbow Cure is an enigmatic independent sure to dazzle.
  
  
• Writer/director Gregory Collins brings his attention to a stay-at-home-day dad crumbling under his lack of success compared to his wife with A Song Still Inside.

For more information on the festival, ticketing and schedule visit the SFF official website: http://www.sarasotafilmfestival.com

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