2010 Film Fests (Part Two): Taking Another Look at Hot Docs, Sarasota and LAFF

Yesterday, we wrote about two of our top film festivals for documentaries that we traveled to for the first time in 2010.

Of course, traveling to fests isn’t just about the new discoveries.  Our visits this year to several other top festivals re-ignited our thinking on their top status.

At #4, Hot Docs is such an obvious and easy choice that it might be hard to be impressed (this year was our third trip in a row).  But something about returning to Toronto in the spring once again reminds one of just why the festival works so well.  One can’t help but be wowed by the programming - a truly thoughtful selection of international titles selected by Sean Farnel - and the way in which the festival is constantly trying to rethink the long-tired panel templates. 

This year, we were also struck by the ease of seeing both films and a global coterie of docu heavyweights.  This latter point might be our own process - for some reason Toronto is a city that took us a long while to find our legs in - and maybe this is the year that everything seemed to click.  But attending Hot Docs this year felt somehow cozy and, it goes without saying, Toronto's docu-loving crowds just cannot be beat.

Sarasota (our #20), on the other hand, might be easier to overlook – but overlooking Sarasota would be a huge mistake.  Sarasota is, in our minds at least, a kind of perfect festival: a terrific and nearly completest look at the best films of Sundance and SXSW (the latter selected by Sarasota prior to their potential breakouts in Austin) as well as a handful that either premiered earlier or had been neglected by the bigger “name” festivals that preceded it.

As is the case with many of our favorite festivals, there are travel issues (and hotels near the main festival venues are few and far between – most folks were lodged in airport hotels) and there’s going to be some considerable walking involved (unless you get smart and ride some of the free bikes the festival secured), but Sarasota remains one of the big American “experience” festivals, the kind of place you tell stories about months and years later: like when a group of (nameless) documentary filmmakers feared they might have left another (nameless) documentary filmmaker to drown in the Gulf of Mexico at 2 AM; or when the bar of the (nameless) resort hotel opened back up after closing at 1 AM when the owner realized that several (nameless) indie film stars were boozing in the lobby with hula hoopers and drag queens; or when Patti Smith belted out “Gloria” five feet in front of this (not nameless) filmmaker in a small restaurant bar.

We’re no stranger to Sarasota and trust us when we say that these kinds of stories come along every year.  And its fair to say that – in the past, at least – these kind of stories were one of, if not, the main reason to find yourself on the Florida coast in early April.  The older local audiences, it should be said, hadn’t quite caught on with what was going on here (although they loved the celebrity events).  But this year, it was clear that a sizable contingent of local Sarasotans was prepared to pack theaters (on a Saturday afternoon, no less) for some of programmers Tom Hall and Holly Herrick’s wildest ideas.  Granted, much of this love was for narrative films (but not all – films like GASLAND packed them in) – but that’s part of what makes Sarasota such a joy for docuphiles like us: a chance to catch up with today’s great narrative indies like TINY FURNITURE, WINTER’S BONE and COLD WEATHER, even if you hadn’t made the trek to Park City or Austin.

For these reasons and more, we think Sarasota’s an essential stop on the spring festival tour.

Finally, we need to offer a few words about the latest incarnation of the Los Angeles Film Festival (which came in this year at #10), which switched venues (trading Westwood for Downtown) and programmers (film critic David Ansen stepping in after Rachel Rosen decamped for San Francisco – although Senior Programmer Doug Jones stayed aboard).

Now, we went on record earlier this year critiquing the Spirit Awards' (handed out by LAFF’s parent organization Film Independent) move to Downtown: we hated it.  The event felt corporate, poorly produced (newly tackled by dick clark productions) and altogether missing of the “spirit” that made the beach venue such a success.

And further, we were on record four years in finding the Westwood location pretty smashing.  So our hopes?  Not especially high.

But the fest completely upended our expectations.  Somehow, the LAFF crew made downtown feel like the closed village that it once had in Westwood (especially since last year felt like the festival was happening all over the Westside) and it made exceptionally good use of the mall-like space near Staples Center (taking over a whole floor of the massive Regal Cinemas and filling nearly its theaters to capacity with surprising regularity), the experimental RedCat theater space at Disney Hall, the Downtown Independent as well as some of the grand old theaters on Broadway. Events at the Downtown Standard hotel rivaled those at the Westwood W Hotel for a tinge of indie glamour.   And the festival hub – set up on a parking lot space next to the still-standing tent that hosted the doomed Spirit Awards – still managed to be somehow warm and inviting.

Most of all, this version of LAFF felt like the future.  The festival was embracing the still-developing, still-exciting idea of what downtown Los Angeles could become.  If the previous editions of LAFF reminded of a time when going to the movies meant heading to the big mega-theaters of Westwood and Century City, the 2010 LAFF suggested that there might be an indie heart in the city after all.  Not a studio-dependent indie, either.

Whatever went wrong with the Spirit Awards (we still hope it moves next year – and please ditch dick clark productions, even if they did give us our first jobs in Los Angeles), if the Spirits were the test run that sparked this year’s successful re-birth of LAFF, all is forgiven.

Comments

[Learnfilmonline]

Question do you guys know whats the deal with CineVegas film fest in Las Vegas?