THE A-LIST
A still from Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, this year's Sarasota Film Festival Closing Night Film.
Image courtesy Kathryn Kennedy
HOW THE SARASOTA FILM FESTIVAL IS MAKING A NAME FOR ITSELF
IN THE NATIONAL INDEPENDENT FILM COMMUNITY
By Cooper Levey-Baker
Associate Editor
Alicia Van Couvering compares watching a
film she's produced with an audience for the
first time to dropping off your kid at daycare.
"I love him," she says. "I think he's wonderful.
He's a little weird. I hope people like him. I
hope he doesn't get beat up."
"I could see that this was a really fun world,"
she says. "It's profound. All these other people
like the same stuff I do and we're all here at
11 a.m. after partying the night before to see
the same movie."
That thrill, of finally sharing a labor of love
with a smart audience, is one reason Van
Couvering keeps coming back to the Sarasota Film Festival, now in its 15th season. Van
Couvering calls Sarasota audiences "so ready
to see good films." She first came to Sarasota
in 2008, when a shoot in St. Pete went bust
and she was looking for investors. Instead,
she found a community.
Van Couvering's story is a common one — one
you hear again and again during conversations
with indie film professionals, most of them
based in New York. Van Couvering mentions
a recent Hollywood Reporter story documenting "The Rise of New York's Next Big Filmmakers." Nearly all of the names named have
appeared in Sarasota at some point: from newly crowned Girls star Lena Dunham (whose