Buzz Worthy: The 2015 Sarasota Film Festival succeeded by any measure

It's the end of April and Mark Famiglio is seriously wiped out. He usually is, this time of year. He feels, he says, as if he had run a marathon, and when he was done he had to run a few miles more at an all-out sprint.

"It takes its toll, it really does," Famiglio says. "You feel like you're a walking zombie."

Famiglio's the president of the Sarasota Film Festival which just wrapped up its 17th season. It takes a year to plan, and then Famiglio and other festival organizers work at full speed for the 10 days of movies, parties and events. Then festival officials have weeks of other events and meetings to wrap things up. "The festival's not over yet," Famiglipo said, almost a week after the festival was over for everyone else.

If you want to get Famiglio more energized and feel less like a zombie, all you have to do is ask him about this year's festival. He gets so jazzed that he can barely contain his enthusiasm.

"We're getting great reviews from the industry," he said. "And we got a lot of national exposure. Rachel Weisz was picked up by Us Weekly, by People magazine next week, by UK Mail overseas, and even In Style, all with pictures of Rachel at our festival and mentioning our area."

There are lots of ways to measure the success of a festival, and by all those measures, this year's Sarasota Film festival was the biggest and maybe the best ever.

Attendance was up, and it was up by a lot although it's still too early to say exactly how much.

"I'm going to say we're up 5, 8 percent," he said. "It's hard to tell because we're still categorizing and analyzing. It could be more, it should be more. We could be up 15 percent. But I think I'm safe in saying 5 to 8 percent."

That would make it the most popular Sarasota Film Festival ever.

Of course, it's not all about sheer numbers. Demographics are just as important, and Famiglio and his SFF colleagues were thrilled about that aspect

of this year's festival.

"We saw a lot of younger faces," he said.

Film festival officials are putting a lot of emphasis on attracting younger crowds, but they never want to lose their established fan base that skews a little older.

The sheer number of film choices is one way to do that, and with about 170 films this year, the festival had a lot more than ever before. That number is not likely to increase -- it's already about the same as Sundance, the country's most famous film festival, screened this year -- but there are other ways to increase audience diversity.

This year's festival had a program of webisodes for the first time, and in near future, Famiglio said, the Sarasota Film Festival will add a music component. No one's sure what form that will take yet, he said. But festival officials have mentioned South by Southwest -- the multimedia festival that help make Austin, Texas, an arts mecca -- as a model.

One other measure of the success of this year's festival is the number of out-of-towners who attended. Again, numbers are still be crunched, but it looks as though half of the people who came to the festival came from out of town. They were mostly from around Florida, from as far north as Orlando and as far east as the Atlantic coast, but a lot of people discovered the Bradenton-Sarasota for the first time.

"And of course," Famiglio said, "everybody who came here wanted to move here."

Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Buzz Worthy: The 2015 Sarasota Film Festival succeeded by any measure."