The Florida Film Festival is bringing the best of the best to Maitland April 12-21 for its 33rd outing.
After nearly 3,000 films were submitted, around 170 have been selected as part of this year’s festival.
“Everything in this lineup is kind of like our babies,” says programming director Matthew Curtis. “We have a lot of really, really fresh movies this year and a lot of talent coming in attached to those movies which is very exciting.”
The festival will begin with an opening night party and screening at the Tiedtke Amphitheater in Winter Park April 12, and over the course of 10 days, audiences will have the opportunity to interact with celebrities, filmmakers and casts, as well as view a range of feature length films, shorts and documentaries of all genres, including many queer films.
The Florida Film Festival also holds the distinct honor of being one of only a handful that are Academy Award-qualifying in all three Oscar shorts categories: Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film and Documentary Short Subject; meaning any short film that is in competition that falls into any of the three categories and wins a grand jury prize is automatically eligible to be nominated for an Oscar the following year.
Curtis says that getting all three accreditations was a very lengthy process. One that required years of consistently good film lineups being judged by industry standard juries, a sponsorship by a member of The Academy and grand jury awards in each category. The Florida Film Festival was accredited in the Animated Short Film and Live Action Short Film categories for about a decade prior to obtaining the third accreditation in Documentary Short Subject in 2016.
Programming coordinator Tim Anderson says this is because the documentary category is an incredibly difficult one to get, as it has a very strict review process. Of the three shorts categories, documentary shorts has the fewest number of festivals with accreditation, says Anderson.
“Being accredited in the doc shorts category was kind of the cherry on top that made us one of these exclusive festivals globally that is accredited and respected in all the shorts categories,” adds Curtis.
This year’s Academy Awards saw the nomination of “Ninety-Five Senses,” an animated short that won the Florida Film Festival’s Grand Jury Award for Animated Shorts in 2023.
Curtis also shared his excitement for the Florida Film Festival to finally return to normalcy following the pandemic. Anderson says that for the first time since 2019, the juries will be watching live in the theater and the Winter Park block party will be opening the festival.
“I think that really elevates the experience, being able to watch the movie in the theater with the audience and then the filmmakers are there for the Q&A,” Anderson says.
Several LGBTQ+ films will be in the spotlight this year, representing queer themes and people in nearly every category.
“Every section has some level of queer representation inside of it, which is something we’ve done here forever,” says Anderson.
Of the lengthy lineup of films being shown during the festival, 16 feature LGBTQ+ themes. Ranging from romance and comedy to trippy-adventure and documentary, with the highest concentration being in the domestic shorts category.
Anderson says that one of the queer films he found the most interesting was “Seahorse Parents,” a short documentary following four trans men carrying children to birth.
Every one of these films is a must watch and many of them are unlike anything you’ve seen before, says Curtis.
One of the LGBTQ+ films being shown at the Florida Film Festival has even already won an award at the Slamdance Film Festival. “Edith and the Tall Child,” an animated short about gender dysphoria, won the Grand Jury Award for Animation.
“We have two of the craziest animated shorts in the festival with queer content that are just insane. One of them we debated sticking in midnight shorts,” Curtis says.
The film, “Discoteque,” will likely have a mature audiences disclaimer on it but was just too good to not include in the animated shorts competition, Anderson adds.
This feeling was a common occurrence during the screening process leading up to this year’s festival, says Curtis. With so many amazing submissions it was hard to narrow them down.
Submissions began in mid-August and continued into November. The 38 programmers, headed by Curtis and Anderson, began watching the submissions immediately and this process took around six months, running into late February.
With so many films to review, the team divides into committees for the different categories: domestic documentaries and short documentaries, domestic narrative features, domestic narrative shorts and animation, international features and shorts, experimental films, music films, Florida films and midnight films.
“The final selections meetings can go on for 10 to 12 hours to pick out four or five programs,” says Curtis. “Nobody was leaving the room so we ended up adding a fifth live action shorts program, because we just couldn’t come to a consensus.”
These five live action shorts programs will be made up of 35 total films, out of the 1,100 that were submitted for the category.
“They pretty much said the team was not going to leave the room because it was impossible to cut anymore and not be just brokenhearted,” adds Anderson.
The 33rd Florida Film Festival will be full of other firsts as well. Curtis says that this year’s music film lineup was so strong they added an extra music film in the spotlight section and a music documentary in the documentary competition, in addition to the three-film music section they normally have.
This is also the first time ever that one of the Florida shorts programs is made up entirely of documentary content, says Anderson.
“We have more world premieres this year than we’ve ever had. Especially in the competition where I believe three of the narrative features are world premieres,” Curtis says. “That’s kind of remarkable because we don’t program for premieres, we program for the best things we can program.”
This year over 40% of the live action short films are world premieres, Anderson says.
Curtis adds that typically world premieres are not as common for the Florida Film Festival because so many bigger film festivals, like Sundance and Slamdance, happen before them.
Along with its lineup of incredible films, the Florida Film Festival will also give audiences the chance to ask the filmmakers questions and even meet some of the casts.
“There is a huge number of filmmakers that come to this film festival. Last year almost 200 filmmakers were here with their projects,” says Anderson.
Among the celebrity interactions will be an event featuring Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominee Natasha Lyonne, who will be on hand for a special screening of her 1999 film “But I’m a Cheerleader.”
“But I’m a Cheerleader,” which also stars Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey, RuPaul, Richard Moll and Cathy Moriarty, is a comedy cult classic that follows high school cheerleader Megan (played by Lyonne) who is sent to a conversion therapy camp by her parents to “cure her lesbianism.”
Lyonne will not only be in attendance to watch the film but will also hold a Q&A with the audience after the screening.
This level of engagement is something Anderson prides himself on.
“The festival really tries to break down that wall between filmmakers and the audience,” he says. “It means a lot I think when the audience has come out and … when you talk to them after the movies are over about their films or ask them questions during the Q&A.”
Above all else, Curtis and Anderson both made one thing clear. This year’s festival lineup is something special. With such a strong lineup that they had to add extra films and extra categories to bring all the best films out to the community, the audience is in for a treat.
“The quality of the pool that was getting sent to us kind of forced our hand to turn and ask, ‘can we fit this in the lineup somewhere?’” Curtis said. “This stuff is so good; we have to play all these.”
You can read all about the queer films at this year’s festival here.
For more information on the Florida Film Festival, a full list of films and to purchase tickets, visit FloridaFilmFestival.com.
