“I had four feet of water in my living room. When I got back in there, there were dead fish in my house.”
The film world has been no stranger to natural disasters the past few months — as we all know, having seen the horrific images of the Los Angeles wildfires that engulfed Pacific Palisades and Altadena this January. And Mark Famiglio is no exception.
That scene of flooding was what greeted the Sarasota Film Festival president last September when he returned to his Siesta Key home after evacuating from Hurricane Helene. In fact, his house was largely inaccessible to repair work, as his driveway had almost washed out in its entirety. As was common all over the Florida Gulf Coast, the road nearby was lined with a canyon of refrigerators and cabinets and other household items ruined by the flood waters and left out by the curb for the city to haul away. And then Hurricane Milton hit less than two weeks later.
Ask anyone else involved with the Sarasota Film Festival, which draws primarily from locals to serve as volunteers, and they were likely affected too. Senior programmer Brian Gordon, who only moved to Sarasota four years ago, had his first experience of buying plywood at Home Depot and boarding up his house. “I’ll never forget the experience of Milton’s eye passing over us and it suddenly getting calm outside,” Gordon said.
Thousands of people across Sarasota and the broader Tampa Bay area are still displaced from Helene and Milton. Hundreds of businesses still haven’t reopened across the region, or may never reopen. But only for a moment did Famiglio, a local entrepreneur who got his start in real estate, seriously consider not holding the Sarasota Film Festival in 2025. Right away, he and his team saw that staging the 10-day festival, which kicked off April 4, was more important than ever.
Can a film festival help a community rebound from a natural disaster? Sarasota is certainly going to try. And depending on the results, it could be a model for how the film community in a city ravaged by disaster can aid in its recovery.
Glenn Close-starring AFI FEST premiere “The Summer Book” and Maria Schneider biopic “Being Maria” have already played to sold out crowds at the festival, now in the middle of its run. As usual, the festival kicked off with a poolside party — and its beloved street party is set for April 11. Plus, the filmmaker who’s made Florida his canvas with a neon-tinted zeal like no one else, Harmony Korine, will be receiving the Trailblazer Award in person.
Though performing arts venues are back up and running, this is the biggest city-wide event set in Sarasota since Milton made landfall right over Siesta Key on October 9. “Doing what we normally do is what matters the most,” Gordon said. “After something like this, just doing what we normally do has even more impact than usual. I think people want to get out a little bit more, even more than in the past because people just want to get back to normal.”
For Gordon, who also programs for Sundance, Tribeca, and PBS’s “POV” after long stints at the San Francisco International Film Festival and Nashville Film Festival, Sarasota is important in another respect for the specialty market. “Some of the films that we show won’t end up on the big screen again,” he said. Though Sarasota is not a sales festival, it is a place where audience sentiment for films without distribution can be noted. Added Famiglio, “Some of these filmmakers rely on this festival and they need it not just for the networking, but just to showcase their art. It’s too important not to do.”
As usual, the festival lineup features several movies from Sarasota or the broader Florida Gulf Coast region, including the opening night film, the documentary “Marcella,” about the legendary evangelist of Italian cuisine in America, Marcella Hazan. She lived in nearby Longboat Key until her death in 2013. But even some films that have nothing to do with Sarasota have taken on a new resonance for this community in recovery, such as the closing night film “Lovers,” directed by Taylor McFadden, about a group of friends picking up the pieces after one of their own took his life.
This festival, like any festival, can be an important way for the community around it to see itself. Once again, SarasotaOut.com published a Gay Guide to the Sarasota Film Festival. In a state where LGBTQ rights have been consistently under attack (despite having the third largest LGBTQ population of any state in the U.S.), this platform can be incredibly meaningful, as it was last year for the documentary “A House Is Not a Disco.”
“I have people that are very close to me — family and close friends — some of the most important people in my entire life, that are wrestling with these sorts of issues and confronted with, ‘Do we have to run from Florida? Can we not come to Florida? Do we have to leave? Are we moving to Canada?,’” Famiglio said. “I deal with this constantly, almost daily. And I don’t know, we got to do something. And with the film festival, I think film as a form of expression is an important way where you can convince and persuade people and keep things on the menu without pushing it into people’s faces.”
Famiglio is all about having dialogues. The day after our phone interview in mid-March, he was going to have lunch with Governor Ron DeSantis and participate in a roundtable with the governor, who dramatically cut almost all public funding for the arts across Florida in 2024, including grants for the Sarasota Film Festival. You can’t address the problem if you don’t engage in conversation, right?
“Honestly, everything that was going on when California got slammed with the wildfires, propelled us to do this year’s festival even more,” Famiglio said. This is an opportunity to show that film can truly be a thing that brings a community together. Film can be a catalyst for conversations that need to happen. And it can be a much needed escape, a bit of fun for a community that really needs it.
