The first decade of the Sarasota Film Festival was a heady time. Academy Award winners, Emmy and Golden Globe recipients and rockstar musicians flocked to the warmth and beauty of Sarasota for the glitzy spring gathering, hanging out at the beach by day, walking the red carpet at night and enjoying the free-flowing wine and high spirits at raucous late night after-parties held at exclusive venues like the Sarasota Yacht Club and the Longboat Key Club. It was as much an event for star-gazers as cinephiles.
“Believe me, we were caught up in the glamour,” recalls Mark Famiglio, who has been on the board of the festival since its inception in 1998. “We were pursuing a model of a big, wonderful film festival with guts and we were trying to be everything to everybody.”
By contrast, the 2026 festival, which runs April 10-19, is a more restrained affair, with greater emphasis on the films than famous faces. Though there are still parties to open and close the 10-day event, the most notable name on the visitor list is Julian Schnabel, who is probably as well known as a painter as he is as a film director. Schnabel’s feature, “In the Hand of Dante,” which follows a disillusioned author into a violent underworld quest to authenticate a manuscript believed to be Dante Alighieri’s original Divine Comedy, is the festival’s closing night film on April 18…