They throw quite a festival in Sarasota. Great people, great movies, great parties. And oh yeah, we won the Bombay Sapphire Audience Award for Best Documentary, which was really nice and very unexpected. I was glad "La Corona" won Best Short and I heard great things about "The Pleasure of Being Robbed", which nabbed two awards. Best line of the night belonged to "Robbed" director Joshua Safdie: "I'm not really an awards speech giver, I'm usually an awards speech heckler."

At the 10th Anniversary Ball they gave awards and paid tribute to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ("The Lives Of Others"), Ted Hope (who's produced every good Sundance movie ever, from "Thumbsucker" to "Storytelling" to "American Splendor" ), Stanley Tucci and Charlize Theron. After the dinner, Dennis Lambert rocked the party with "Rhinestone/Country Boy," "Nightshift," "We Built This City," and the encore "It Only Takes A Minute." There was a lot of dancing and drinking and a lot of people who didn't get to see him perform at SXSW were there -- it was a great way to end an already terrific few days.

We arrived yesterday at the Sarasota Film Festival and so far so terrific. We ran into a lot of friends from SXSW, we met Holly Herrick and Tom Hall (SFF programmers) who couldn't be nicer or more enthusiastic about Of All The Things, finally met Michael Tully, who was one of our earliest supporters on his indieWIRE blog. After the party, we headed to the Cabana Room for karaoke, where Tom Hall proceeded to DESTROY "Hot In Herre." It was a legendary performance -- I don't know if there's a video floating around the internet, but if there is, see it. For real.

We wound up 7 of us jammed into Josh Braun's rental car, speeding through Sarasota, blasting REO's "Keep On Loving You". Could easily have ended horribly. Glad it didn't.

Today we saw a shorts program with "Kids + Money" (disturbing); "The Last Butcher In Little Italy" (touching story about the changing neighborhood); "The Guarantee" (really cool animated story about one man's decision to undergo cosmetic surgery); and "La Corona" (amazing, hard-hitting doc about a beauty pageant in a Columbian women's jail). Easliy the best shorts program I've seen at any of the fests so far.

Our 5pm screening went over really well. They put us in the big 255-seater and it looked gorgeous in HD. Huge. And loud. We got our first standing ovation and the Q&A was great. There were a few Filipinos in the crowd and everyone seemed really moved and entertained. That's all you can ask for.

Afterwards, we snuck in to "American Teen" which will be at a theatre near you pretty soon. Check it out. It's playing all the major fests (and was executive produced by Molly Thompson @ A&E Indies, another big booster of ours.)

Tonight is the Night Of A Thousand Stars party. I think we're stars 998, 999 and 1000.


Jody.