Florida Film Festival 2026

What to expect from the 35th annual fest

A chat with Programming Director Matthew Curtis

Exclusive to MeierMovies, March 28, 2026; updated March 31, 2026

“There’s nothing new in human experience,” Paul Giamatti’s character tells one of his students in The Holdovers.

With respect to Giamatti, who is one of the Florida Film Festival’s celebrity guests this year, his curmudgeonly movie character is wrong and will be proved so by 10 days of cinematic celebration. There undoubtedly will be something new under the Florida sun, at least on the Enzian and Regal big screens.

The 35th annual festival will run from April 10 through 19 at Maitland’s Enzian Theater, Regal Winter Park Village and various party locations. In addition to Giamatti (who will screen Sideways) and Judge Reinhold (who will screen Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the fest will offer 161 movies total (49 features and 112 shorts) from 31 countries, including some that are rarely represented, such as Cuba, Kenya, Morocco, Vietnam and Guatemala.

The movies were picked from 2,729 submissions from a record 122 countries. One hundred and forty films will make their Florida debut, 66 will get their East Coast premiere, and 24 will receive a world premiere, according to Programming Director Matthew Curtis, with whom I had a lengthy festival conversation.

“I just think our programming this year is, just dynamite,” Curtis says. “Every year we say, ‘Oh, this is probably the best year ever,’ [but Programming Manager] Tim [Anderson] and I are so excited at what we’ve been able to put together.

“There’s a lot of really high-profile arthouse stuff. There’s indie films that are just amazing. There’s Sundance favorites and some stuff from South by [Southwest]. And … every shorts program (domestic) has a couple of world premieres, a couple of North American premieres. … There’s one shorts program that has four world premieres in it. … These are incredible films.

“We’ve got 40 returning alumni this year. And we’ve got 40 films that have Florida connections also. So literally a quarter of the programming are alumni, and another quarter all have Florida connections.”

 

Opening film

The festival will open on the evening of Friday, April 10, with a party at the Tiedtke Amphitheater and Belvedere at Winter Park Events Center on Morse Avenue in Winter Park. And Carolina Caroline will be shown twice, at Enzian and Regal, with director Adam Rehmeier in attendance for a Q&A session at each screening. (He won’t need a doppelganger, as the showings are staggered, Enzian at 6:15 p.m. and Regal at 7:30 p.m.) Tickets can be purchased at FloridaFilmFestival.com/films.

“We’ve been opening with Florida features for a number of years, Florida-themed films,” Curtis says. “[But] we just didn’t have the right one to do that [this year]. Tim [Anderson] saw [Carolina Caroline] at TIFF [Toronto International Film Festival] and absolutely loved it. [Director] Adam Rehmeier did Dinner in America. And [Carolina Caroline] is, like, a really terrific couple on the run, Bonnie and Clyde type. So what starts out as a small-time con grows into, you know, bank robberies, and it’s fairly sexy and thrilling, and the actors are great.”

Centerpiece film

The biggest addition to the festival this year is the Centerpiece film, which will be Over Your Dead Body, an outrageous, dark, violent comedy directed by Jorma Taccone (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, MacGruber and the tenderly touching Brigsby Bear), who will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A session. But, as Curtis, explains, it took some creative maneuvering to get the movie.

“[It was tough] to get the film and Jorma Taccone, who’s, you know, part of the Lonely Island comedy group with Andy Samberg that produces all the great SNL shorts. … IFC [Independent Film Company] was only giving it to festivals if they made it the opening-night film, the centerpiece or the closing-night film.

“So we’re like, ‘Well, it’s not gonna be the opening-night film.’ We had already committed to Carolina Caroline. Plus, it’s … a little on the ultra-violent side for an opening-night film. So, so we … just decided, ‘Well, let’s create a centerpiece film.’ We’ve never had one before. It allows us to do the closing-night retro [75th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train], which we always love to do.

“But it’s one showing only. It’s an incredibly crazy film with wild performances, and it’s an awful lot of fun. It’s like The Roses taking it to an extreme level. … It’s right in the smack in the middle of the festival [April 15, 9:30 p.m., Enzian]. So it’s, it’s centerpiece literally, chronologically, as opposed to centerpiece thematically or philosophically.”

Paul Giamatti

Acting icon Paul Giamatti will be the main celebrity guest and will participate in a Q&A session following a screening of Sideways (Alexander Payne’s 2004 wine-themed buddy dramedy) on April 12 at 8 p.m. at Enzian.

Marisa Tomei was scheduled as the second celebrity and was expected to attend a screening of My Cousin Vinny but cancelled. On March 30, Judge Reinhold was announced as her replacement. (He will screen Fast Times at Ridgemont High and participate in Q&A session on April 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Enzian.)

“It was a challenge” to get Giamatti, Curtis explains. “That’s been an extended negotiation. … What made it happen is the fact that he is filming in St. Petersburg the new Tom McCarthy film, The Statement, with John Turturro and Paul Rudd. … It worked out nicely, and we’re psyched.

“To me, he’s a giant.”

Tributes

As usual, the festival is honoring musicians who have recently died by naming the five domestic shorts programs for those musicians’ songs. Shorts #1 is “Many Rivers to Cross,” for Jimmy Cliff; Shorts #2 is “The Other One,” for Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead; Shorts #3 is “Can’t Get Enough” for Mick Ralphs of Bad Company; Shorts #4 is “Everyday People,” for Sly Stone; and Shorts #5 is “Don’t Worry Baby,” for Brian Wilson.

“We also named animated shorts [“Personality Crisis,” for David Johansen of the New York Dolls] and midnight shorts [“Crazy Train” for Ozzy Osbourne],” Curtis says. “There were seven people being honored this year by shorts program titles.”

The festival is also remembering one of its own who passed away last year, local cinephile and filmmaker Brian Quain.

“There’s a dedication to Brian in the program,” Curtis say. “He started out as my programming coordinator and filmmaker liaison. And then he was on committees for all those other years. And he also did Brouhaha [Film & Video Showcase] with me. … He was part of the festival family and part of Enzian for 13 years. … I miss him a lot.”

 

Long shorts

It might be an oxymoron, but long shorts dominate this year’s festival.

“We have less films this year because we have more longer shorts,” Curtis explains. “Even midnight shorts, [which] normally has 12 to 15 pieces in it – it’s only seven films. So we have two half-hour shorts anchoring both international live-action shorts programs. … Almost every category has less shorts than normal because we just had too many longer shorts that we couldn’t part with. … So that’s why instead of in the 180s this year [total number of films], we’re in the 160s.

Speaking of shorts, one program that is always an adventure is Sunpots: New Visions of the Avant-Garde, which showcases experimental films. But this year the shorts program is joined by a feature.

“There’s our first Sunspots feature after eight years of our experimental shorts program,” Curtis says. “It’s called The Man Whom the Trees Loved. [It has] experimental aspects to it, and … there’s parts with very little dialogue and things like that. And it’s a little on the trippy side. So, yeah, it’s a really interesting film.

“It is actually co-directed by Tehben Dean, who won our Grand Jury Award for All I’ve Got and Then Some a couple of years ago. And it is adapted from a supernatural novella by Algernon Blackwood about a landscape painter, who is played by the co-director, Woodruff Laputka. He becomes mysteriously and wildly drawn to the Florida fauna while on vacation with his wife. And it’s got this lush soundscape and a real kinda ghostly mix of atmospheric filmmaking and forces kinda beyond normal comprehension. But it’s got a mix of black-and-white and color photography. It’s, it’s a very interesting film.

“It was shot in Central Florida, and that’s a world premiere, so we’re excited about that.”

 

Building a shorts program

Structuring a block of short films is part art and part science, part objectivity and part subjectivity. And, frankly, it’s a process that most festivals simply don’t understand. Whether or not one likes the individual shorts at the Florida Film Festival, one usually must admit that the festival does a fine job of forming the blocks.

“The best way to describe that is … we are picking from a pool of shorts. And sometimes, like with a midnight-shorts program or an animated-shorts program, that’s a finite group of films you’ve selected, so you’re not then moving them into other programs.

“[But] when we program the [main blocks of] competition shorts, you’re … taking 120 to 150 films that are on the board and whittling it down to the, you know, 450 minutes of programming. And then once you get that set and you’ve got those, let’s say, 35 films, then you’re starting to divide them into, into programs.

“So there’s two different processes. One is pick the films for one program and then figure out how to order them. And then … pick the films for a whole section of the festival and then decide what’s going where. So in both cases, you know, we look at what are natural openers and closers. We know kinda what we’d like films to feel like when we’re opening a program and closing a program.

“Often the longer pieces: Those are the best slots to either open a program or anchor a program ‘cause you … rarely wanna do, like, a 20- to 30-minute film in the middle of a program. So the best slot [for a long film] is to open a program or close with it if they’re strong enough or appropriate enough to do that. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes we open with something, like, short and then go into the longer piece and play it second. But more often than not, a longer short will open or close a program.”

Has Curtis ever thought of mimicking other festivals by simply grouping all short films by genre: comedy, drama, thriller, etc.?

“I’ll cut you off,” Curtis interjects. “I knew you were gonna ask that question. … No, no. That’s, that’s kinda just not what we’re about.

“First of all, comedy’s tough. And it seems to be much tougher than drama in these times as far as filmmakers making quality films. So, generally, there’s less comedy making up the programs than dramas. So if you stuck all the comedies in one or two programs, it wouldn’t leave much elsewhere. So we just, we like to have a balance of films within each program and have some type of thematic continuity if there’s any way possible, maybe not for all the films but for a lot of the films.

“We also like the program to have some momentum, you know, a narrative momentum to them where it kinda builds to a certain point. Or if something’s particularly intense, maybe we have a more chill film to follow so that we’re not, you know, it’s not overwhelming for the audience – to go from one emotional, you know, wreckage film to the next.”

Surprisingly, the film blocks are set first and the song title applied later.

“We don’t name the programs [immediately],” Curtis explains. “We’ll come back, you know, a day or two later, and Tim and I will look at the board. And, you know, we still use post-its, and we’ll say, ‘OK, these are the musicians we’d like to honor. These are some of their songs that they’re most associated with. What works where?’”

 

AI

The only question that got Curtis slightly riled was about the use of generative artificial intelligence.

“We have a very specific question, you know, on the Film Freeway … submission form: ‘What AI was used in completion of your film and where?’ And then we decide. I mean, usually, it’s three strikes. You know, that’s it. So we really try to avoid it at all costs.”

The festival wants to showcase “filmmakers’ vision and originality and creativity,” Curtis says, “not, you know, how well they play on the computer.”

 

It should not go unmentioned that Curtis and Anderson’s work would be impossible without the tireless contribution of the festival’s selection-committee members, Enzian staff and festival volunteers.

For more information about the festival, including film descriptions, showtimes, party and forum-discussion information, and prices of the various passes and tickets, visit FloridaFilmFestival.com. For reviews of feature films, go here, and click here for reviews of shorts.

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