New Sarasota Film Festival program director Michael Dunaway is a long-time fan of the festival
Michael Dunaway has been publicly praising the Sarasota Film Festival for years. Now it's part of his job to do that.
"I'll tell you that as a journalist and as a filmmaker, for years Sarasota has my favorite festival to come to," Dunaway said. "I'm on record saying that from way back."
Dunaway is a long-time filmmaker. He's co-written and co-directed documentaries about Richard Linklater and Quentin Tarantino, and he has written, produced and directed several other documentaries.
He's also the film editor for the daily online magazine Paste.
So he's had lots of opportunity to attend the Sarasota Film Festival and all the other major film festival around the world. Coming to Sarasota has always been special, he said.
Now that he's signed on as the Sarasota Film Festival's creative producer and programming director he gets more opportunity than ever to praise the festival.
The 2015 festival, the first that Dunaway has programmed, begins Friday.
People who pay attention to the festival every year may notice some differences, he said.
"There's a lot more West Coast influence," he said. "I think it's safe to say it's a more geographically diverse, at least within the United States."
Festival president Mark Famiglio has said that the festival's programming in recent years was New York-oriented.
Dunaway said it's a mostly new team of programmers that has put together the festival.
"I'm very proud -- I'm very, very proud -- of the program we've put together," he said. "I really think that it has not just my fingerprint on it, but the fingerprint of our entire programming team."
The other members of the team are Derek Horne, a Sarasota native who has worked for Sundance and several other major film festivals; Maggie Mackay, the former programming director for the Los Angeles Film festival; and Caley Fagerstrom, who has programmed the Sarasota Film Festival's short films for several years. Horne and Mackay are both new to
the festival.
There are a few things that make the Sarasota Film Festival special, Dunaway said, and the new team isn't going to change any of those elements.
It's always placed a lot of emphasis on filmmakers, and especially women filmmakers, so they love having their films in this festival.
This year, he said, the festival is housing all the filmmakers in a single hotel, creating what he called "an Olympic Village for film."
"It will be a familial, collegial community of filmmakers," he said.
Girl power
The Sarasota Film Festival has helped launch the careers of several women filmmakers, and he said most women filmmakers around the United States would rank the Sarasota festival as one of their favorites.
But the emphasis on women filmmakers hasn't been a conscious decision and hasn't come at the expense of men who make films. Sarasota has just offers a nurturing experience for filmmakers and a lot of women have responded.
The relatively unknown documentarian Gabriela Coperthwaite came to the Sarasota Film Festival two years ago with an then-obscure film called "Blackfish." Josephine Decker chose the Sarasota Film Festival to premiere her film "Thou Wast Mild and Lovely," and shortly afterward Richard Brody of The New Yorker has called her one of the three directors who seem "not to inherit styles but to invent them." (The other two were Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson.)
The Sarasota festival "is known as one of the strident supporters of women in film," Dunaway said. "I love what Mark Famiglio says about that. He calls it 'the unintended consequence of doing things right.' Only Sundance has as proud a history of supporting women in film."
A lot of the credit for the Sarasota Film Festival's lofty reputation among filmmakers comes from the community itself, Dunaway said, not from festival officials.
"The film-loving community of Sarasota, of course they love to meet the stars," Dunaway said. "I love to meet the stars. I'm excited about shaking hands with Rachel Weisz and Richard Gere, if he comes.
"But the film-lovers in Sarasota, they're star-struck by the directors. They love to come up to the directors and have substantial conversations about their films. As a filmmaker myself, I can tell that's like catnip."
Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-707-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.
This story was originally published April 5, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "New Sarasota Film Festival program director Michael Dunaway is a long-time fan of the festival ."