Valerie Weiss

FILMS GONE WILD: Singing the praises of the truly great Florida Film Festival: Claire Carré ; doing the jury thing and talking to Billy Crudup for an hour

that attention to detail and/or the prioritization as to where that attention to detail should be focused routinely comes from the top. And this is where I have to give a big nod to Executive Director David Schillhammer, Programming Director Matthew Curtis, and Programming Coordinator Tim Anderson. Those positions are fraught with epic headache-inducing crises and tough judgment calls, and thankless task after thankless task. And David, Matthew, and Tim, managed to both do whatever they had to do to command their film festival ship and heard the cats that are the filmmakers, jury members, patrons, sponsors, film fans, etc. quite obviously have good film programming chops, and also display poise befitting Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island.”

FILMS GONE WILD: FESTWORKS.COM covers regional fests and film discoveries that happen there. Do you even give a damn about that?

We don’t need more Clooney, Kidman, Lawrence, Adams, Streep, Cruise coverage. Monkeys can do that by this point. We need to find the new talent in film, and TV, and VR, etc. We need to give the new voices a forum to discuss their work. We need to help people find the golden film needles in the haystack of VOD titles we scroll past on Amazon and Netflix now.