Tampa Film Fan

two weeks til the tampa international film festival

The countdown has begun…13 days until the start of the fourth annual Tampa International Film Festival on February 3. I’ll try to keep this blog from turning into a Film Festival Fan blog, but right now I’m living and breathing the Tampa International Film Festival. Not because I’m weirdly obsessed, mind you, but because somewhere in between two blogs and my Real Job, I serve as Assistant Director of the Festival. (An unpaid labor of love…I gotta figure out how to make money off of this stuff!)

TIFF has gotten some publicity lately, which tickles me to no end. We’re included in a list of local film festivals on page 80 of Tampa Bay Illustrated magazine’s story about the local film scene. TIFF made the front page of the local Indian newspaper Khaas Baat and has a full-page color ad in the new bilingual magazine Premiere Crossover.

The festival got national coverage this week by being included in the Movie News section of the Turner Classic Movies website. I did an interview with the film critic of the Sarasota Herald Tribune this week, and I know the festival director has spoken with the film critic of the Weekly Planet, so I’ll post those links whenever those stories run.

The Education Channel has finalized the list of films for their sidebar on American independent cinema, and I’m one step away from finalizing the list of forum panel members for the two film forums the festival is having at MOSI. So there will be plenty more posts about TIFF coming up, film fans!

If film festivals aren’t your thing, you won’t offend me by skipping those posts. If film festivals are your thing, I encourage you to come to Sunrise Cinemas for the Tampa International Film Festival from February 3-11. In addition to the interesting and entertaining films, you can watch me run around with my clipboard like a crazy woman overseeing the volunteers and handling the occasional cranky movie-goer and multi-tasking like mad. It’s quite a show.