To All Tampa/St Pete/Sarasota Film Radicals:
The Tampa Bay Area really needs a film discussion group that has a little more meatiness than showing up for the popular films and talking about whatever afterward.
For those around here that aspire to see the better films and have been hoping for some place to focus your love of quality cinema, this group will hopefully be your thing. Originally dreamed up by me hanging in the art film Mecca of Sarasota, I think we will have more interest if we spread out to the whole of Tampa Bay area.
My current strategy is that we start with the idea of monthly meetings, one month in Sarasota and the other in St Petersburg. The Sarasota sessions will be centered near the Sarasota Film Society’s Burns Court and the Sarasota Film Festival’s Hollywood 20. St Petersburg meetups will focus for now on the wonderful Baywalk 20 Gallery theatres.
Obviously I am very flexible getting things going, but I would like to have the meetings be topic not individual film driven. Being very egalitarian by nature I would love participants to come up with the topics similar to another group I am helping, The Tampa Bay Thinkers, a philosophy group that is seeing some films as part of our regular efforts. In fact we have a meetup for the Cronenberg Freud/Jung drama this coming December.
The first meetup will be a warmdown following the always great CineWorld Festival put on by the Sarasota Film Society. I will let you know about that effort when more becomes known later this month.
Please consider joining. Since I am bankrolling everything, you just have to bring your film aesthetics along with you and a desire to get into talking about what makes great films great.
Anyone with ideas should email me at dalefried@aol.com. When we get enough critical mass in the group going, we will use the Meetup forum to move things along.
I hope to meet you in the future. For the more adventurous, you can probably run into me at the 10 day run of CineWorld. You can’t miss me. I’m the tall, dorky, old, red-headed guy you often see lurking around the better films hoping for inspiration.
Dale Friedley
2800 58th Cir S
St Petersburg, FL 33712
727 742 1589
dalefried@aol.com