Sundance

February 8, 2021

Sundance

Like most everything else that has been scheduled during the past almost year now, The 2021 Sundance Film Festival was severely impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike many events and activities, the festival was not totally canceled, but had to come up with a creative way to go on without being able to hold large scale, in person events and activities where the spread of the virus would be possible. They came up with an innovative solution that involved on-line screenings, combined with a number of smaller scale satellite locations.

This worked to the advantage of our local art house cinema, the Tropic Cinema who through the work of the staff and a couple of our board members successfully lobbied to have our cinema as one of the few off-site locations of the prestigious Utah based festival. We were given a select number of films to screen and tasked with figuring out how to screen them safely. With only a very limited number of seats available in the Tropic itself due to Covid restrictions and safety concerns, we opted to transform a couple of spaces into more or less outdoor screening locations.

The first was the warehouse at Manley Duboer lumber company where we lifted the projector up using a fork lift and a portable screen and showed films to the socially distant attendees, this facility was utilized the most, but we also were able to make use of the Key West Lighthouse thanks to the Key West Art & Historical Society as an outdoor venue. This was really cool as we were able to take advantage of the lighthouse grounds and able to ascend the steps to the top of the lighthouse just in time to see the sunset before the film was shown.

Both facilities as well as the limited use of the Tropic enabled us to host a successful and interesting event where I was able to see about a dozen of the films screened for Sundance including a couple that were really excellent like “Summer of Soul” which documented an awesome concert series held in Harlem in 1969, a documentary about film legend Rita Moreno, “Luzzo” about a Maltese fisherman which was excellent, “Life in a Day:2020” and “Cusp”. 

It was a great week and so nice to be out again and to see and interact with others and to feel active in spite of the fact that the virus continues to spread with new variants being introduced into the country and infection rates continuing to outpace the dismal vaccine distribution across the country, but especially here in Florida.  There have been 26,766,430 confirmed cases in the US with 459,185 deaths. Here in Monroe County the numbers are 5,455 confirmed cases with 2,676 of those being in Key West and 41 deaths to date.

In addition to the film festival, we have been busy navigating the Covid world of Key West, taking bike rides, going to see the sunset, hosting a few visitors at the house in our yard and spending time on Zoom meetings and facetime with family and friends, all the pandemic activities that we have grown accustomed to since last March.

In some exciting news, a friend, Dantiel Moniz, released her first book this week, a wonderful book of short stories that is gathering rave reviews including in this Sunday’s “New York Times” , called “ Milk, Blood, Heat”. Dantiel was the winner of the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award at the Key West Literary Seminar a few years ago and we have been excited to watch as she has gone about fulfilling the potential that the seminar saw in her. We watched a Zoom book release event of her in conversation with fellow Florida writer Lauren Groff that was just terrific. It is so exciting to witness a young writer achieving their dreams, especially when it is someone we know. Congrats and continued success to Dantiel.

Now we will just be waiting patiently to be informed that we are eligible to get the vaccine, who knows how long that will be, but at the current rate, I certainly don’t expect it to be anytime soon. In the meantime, we are going to be extra vigilant as nobody wants to be the person who gets the virus after a vaccine has been found, but prior to actually receiving it 

https://www.sundance.org/

https://www.dantielwmoniz.com/