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Film

Festival puts art in motion

There's a lot more to experience at the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image than films.

By Marty Clear
Published April 19, 2007

It's called the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, so most people consider it a film festival.

They're not wrong: Film has always been the centerpiece of the festival, which each year offers screening of adventurous and inventive movies that local audiences probably wouldn't get a chance to see otherwise.

But David Audet, the festival's director and co-founder, said the title was carefully devised to be more artistically inclusive.

"It's about images that move, but it's also about images that can move people emotionally," Audet said.

So, aside from a full schedule of short films, features and documentaries, the fifth annual Ybor Festival of the Moving Image also includes music, performance art and site-specific installations.

Among the nonfilm highlights this year are premieres of works by composers Paul Reller and Gustavo Matamoros, an outdoor installation by artist Shahreyar Ataie and two performances by famed New York performance artist Pat Oleszko.

Audet screens all the films himself, choosing only the best (or at least his idea of the best) of the growing number of films submitted to the festival each year from around the world.

For visual and performing artists he takes a different tack. He commissions them to create site-specific works, gives them some general guidelines and lets them take it from there.

"I don't even know what to expect myself," he said. "All I told them is that it has to have something to do with Ybor City, past, present or future. That's all I said."

But he knows the artists and their works, so he's confident of the spirit and the quality.

Audet has presented Oleszko several times in the past, including her appearance at the Festival of the Moving Image a few years ago. Her performances usually combine sculpture, film, outrageous costume and what she calls "unrepentant punning."

She's deliberately vague about what audiences can expect to see during her two performances. This evening from 6 to 10, during the free opening festivities at the El Pasaje arcade, she'll perform a piece titled O-Let's Go Puff Patty and the Six Cigars. At 9:30 p.m. Saturday she'll be at the Cuban Club with a work called Innuendo and Out the Other.

"That's a larger piece with overblown props," Oleszko said. "It's based on the idea of a lector in the cigar factory and the stuff that he would go through in the course of a day. But it also deals with Kafka and Napoleon and some events in my life that have caused me anguish and illumination."

The film offerings range from documentary short subjects to features with - for lack of a better word - an experimental bent.

"I'm the one who picks all these films, and I certainly have a preference for experimental work," Audet said. "But I hesitate to use that word experimental. Some of them are quite conventional, certainly in the narrative. But there's always something about them that's different."

One of the film highlights promises to be Robert M. Young's Human Error, which features live actors against computer-generated backgrounds. Young will be on hand to introduce the film at 7:30 p.m. Friday in the Cuban Club Theater.

Preview

Festival details

The Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, through Sunday at various Ybor City locations. For a full schedule and ticket prices for various events, go to www.ybor filmfestival.com.

[Last modified April 18, 2007, 11:26:03]