The Florida Film Festival: An Oasis for Creative Souls | Festivals & Awards

Every April, artists and art supporters gather at the 40-year-old Enzian Theatre in North Orlando (and a nearby multiplex), a place of great comfort in troubling times. It’s tempting to call the beloved Florida Film Festival an oasis, given the increasingly anti-art era in which we find ourselves in the 2020s, but one should really consider the meaning of that word. It’s not just a comfortable, safe space in a desert—it’s a place that gives visitors sustenance and the ability to survive outside it. Florida has that vibe without underlining or highlighting its obvious importance. It is powerful through action, not words, through the manner in which it amplifies voices and values creativity.

I was asked to serve on the shorts jury for 2025 and wanted to share a few words on the best films I saw this year in the Sunshine State, along with a few standouts from other programs that you should watch out for once they’ve left the oasis.

With a pair of fantastic fellow jurors—actress Alisha Wainwright (“Raising Dion”) and Magnolia executive Adam Brook—I watched over five dozen short films in Orlando, picking winners in the narrative and animated categories now eligible for the Academy Awards next year. The overall quality of the shorts programming at FFF was remarkable, an array of genres and themes that flowed from one effort to another across six programs (five live-action and one animated).

Our narrative award went to Elizabeth Rao’s “The Truck,” a film that works in both the micro and the macro, telling a story of two teenagers (Shirley Chen & Daniel Zolghadri) trying to obtain a morning-after pill in an area of the country where that’s becoming increasingly difficult. Beautifully shot and tenderly performed, it’s a special short, but it wasn’t the only one. We also gave a special jury award for Courageous Voice in a Time of Great Need to Syra McCarthy’s “After What Happened at the Library,” a story of a performer being terrorized by conservative parents during a library drag story hour appearance. It’s sharply edited and timelier than we ever hoped it would be.

A few other films I’d particularly encourage fans of the form to track down include, alphabetically, Jean Liu’s “Corpse Fishing,” Fiona Obertinca’s “Dandelion,” Ethan Kuperberg’s “Paper Towels,” Christopher Scamurra’s “Portland is the New Portland,” Sam Davis’ “The Singers,” and Daisy Friedman’s “Unholy”. They’re all excellent in their own way.

The animated program contained a nice blend of heavy hitters and new filmmakers, including new works by a Disney animator (Aaron Blaise’s Audience Award-winning “Snow Bear”) and the legendary Bill Plympton (“Duckville”). Still, the best of the bunch was the daring and inventive “Voyage of the Red Rabbit,” Sam Gualtieri’s debut short, premiering at its first film festival. Gualtieri blends what looks like rotoscoped footage of one of his older relatives that seems recorded almost without his knowledge, as the man discusses life and a rabbit he had in childhood, with wonderfully rendered imagery of a rabbit space traveler that recalls ‘50s sci-fi. It’s so original and mesmerizing, and I love that it could now break through even with the Academy.

To get a fuller picture of the fest, I also screened a few films cited by juries other than my own and wanted to note a few standouts:

Mimi Wilcox’s brilliant “Bad Hostage” is one of those documentary shorts that illuminates a subject that I hadn’t considered but becomes so obvious in retrospect: the inherent sexism in the very concept of Stockholm Syndrome. Wilcox tells three parallel stories as she details the hostage crisis that spawned the concept in Sweden, the saga of Patty Hearst, and a very personal story of Wilcox’s grandmother being held captive in the ‘70s. When a pair of gunmen burst into her home, she faced a crisis, after which she wasn’t “gracious enough” to the cops who nearly got her family killed with the way they handled the case. Wilcox makes a convincing argument that Stockholm Syndrome basically surfaces every time a woman doesn’t play the damsel in distress, and she does so through personal filmmaking against a backdrop of international storytelling. It’s great, and I’m hopeful it gets expanded into a full feature.

The doc jury chose Kimberly Reed’s “I’m Your Venus,” a worthy winner even though, of course, I didn’t see the competition. Reed’s film tells the story of Venus Xtravaganza, a captivating subject from Jennie Livingston’s essential “Paris is Burning,” who was murdered before that landmark work was even released. In the decades since, the people who loved Venus, led by her brothers, have endeavored to reshape her legacy, including details like removing her deadname from as many places as possible, including her tombstone. Reed’s approach is not a simple true crime story. Of course, justice matters, but it’s a film about carrying on a legacy and honoring a victim more than solving a crime. It’s a powerful study of how far we’ve come and how very far we still have to go.

The standout of the narratives I hadn’t (and probably wouldn’t have) seen without the encouragement of Florida is Joe Burke’s “Burt,” the winner for Best Screenplay at this year’s fest. A micro-budget charmer, “Burt” was executive produced by David Gordon Green, and made for about $7k on a 7-day shoot. It stars a real LA singer-songwriter named Burt Berger, an absolute charmer living life with Parkinson’s, who is confronted one day with a man claiming to be his son. It’s a delicate, clever character study about two very different people bouncing off each other and coming out differently on the other side. It’s funny and empathetic to outsiders, people trying to jump the hurdles that life has placed before them, and not always making it. I eagerly await what Burke does next.

Finally, it feels worth noting some of the fest darlings that played Florida, just to give you an idea of the overall programming, including “On Swift Horses,” “40 Acres,” “Mr. K,” “The Ugly Stepsister,” “The Legend of Ochi,” “The Wedding Banquet,” “The Surfer,” and “The Shrouds,” among others. They also programmed several special events, including conversations with Christina Ricci after a screening of “Now and Then,” and one with Mia Farrow after a screening of “Rosemary’s Baby,” moderated by RogerEbert.com contributor Tomris Laffly.

The range of experiences at the Florida Film Festival, from a legend like Mia Farrow to a new personality like Burt Berger, is what makes it special. In a time when common ground seems increasingly difficult to find, we stood on it in Orlando for a few days in April.