People often ask me why I make the trek to the Sarasota Film Festival, especially since it takes place (at least in part) at the same time as the higher-profile Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.  Deciding between the two is a no-brainer --- leave Rochester for either a colder, snowier place that's jam-packed with smarmy industry types more interested in the parties than the films, or a smaller festival in Florida where the audience is comprised of regular cine-freaks like you and me.

In its fourth year, the Sarasota fest has blossomed from a five-day, extended-weekend event to an eight-day fête that, wisely, unspools over parts of two weekends.  Unlike its bigger, more established brethren, Sarasota isn't so much a launch pad for independent films looking to be scooped up by a distributor, or studios testing the waters with potential hits, as it is a place where filmmakers hope to generate enough buzz to get into those other festivals.  Dinner Rush and Ratcatcher, two of the better offerings from last year's slate, have not yet made it to Rochester (the latter will screen February 9 at the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House, though the former is still MIA locally despite landing on a few critics' Top Ten lists).

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but the first feature I saw this year in Sarasota is exactly the kind of thing us Yankees would expect to see in a festival that takes place in a state populated by people who elected a guy named Jeb to lead them.  Mule Skinner Blues is a documentary about a rootin', tootin', trailer-park nutjob named Beanie Andrew (think Cotton Hill crossed with Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins) who was "discovered" by a film crew shooting a music video in his stomping grounds outside Jacksonville.  The crew was unable to shake Beanie off their tail and decided to make this film about him and the "creative talent" of his friends and neighbors. In addition to being gifted musically (his claim, not mine), Beanie has a strange obsession with gorillas and "gettin' down in the mud," and he badly wants to make his own horror film with the locals.  The bulk of Blues is about him trying to do so, in between binge-drinking and whatnot, so it's more than a little like American Movie.

Incredibly, Mike Schank, Movie's version of Silent Bob, surfaces in Todd Solondz's Storytelling (due here 3/1) in a table-turning role as a cameraman on a documentary within the film (take that, Chris Smith!).  Essentially a commentary about criticism, Storytelling is divided into two chapters; the first about a creative-writing student (Selma Blair) who gets down with the professor (Robert Wisdom) who blasted her latest work in front of the rest of the class, and the second featuring a shoe-salesman-turned-documentarian (Paul Giamatti) trying to make a film about teen disillusionment who stumbles upon a great subject:  Scooby (Mark Webber) and his messed-up family that might even be more dysfunctional that Lester Burnham and crew.  Solondz wrote and directed Welcome To the Dollhouse and Happiness, which should give you an indication of how dark and squirm-inducing the humor is here.

While Fairport's Philip Seymour and Gordy Hoffman were off at Sundance winning awards, Rochester native Robert Forster had two films playing in Sarasota.  The one you're most likely to see is Human Nature (4/12, limited), which is writer Charlie Kaufman's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Being John Malkovich, and, brothers and sisters, it's just as crazy. Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans and Tim Robbins play, respectively, a woman who might be an ape, a man who thinks he's an ape and a scientist whose loveless upbringing makes him terrified of apes (you can blame it all on his adoptive parents, played by Forster and Mary Kay Place).

If you've been wondering what Survivor's Jeff Probst does in between food challenges and Tribal Council, Finder's Fee (the runner-up in the Audience Award’s Drama category) will give you some indication. Probst wrote and directed this dark comedy about an everyday Joe (Erik Palladino) who, on the way home from work, finds a wallet with a winning lottery ticket worth $6 million inside.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is he doesn’t swap it with his own ticket until after he leaves a message for its real owner and, worse yet, his three buddies are on their way over to play their weekly poker game where --- gulp! --- lottery tickets are the stakes.  James Earl Jones plays the man who claims the wallet, and Forster is a cop investigating a crime in the apartment building.

Other films you'll want to keep an eye out for are Le Château (5/3, limited), the tale of two American brothers (one black and one white) who head to France to check out a château left to them by an uncle they didn't even know they had; The Search For John Gissing (the Critics Choice winner) which stars writer-director Michael Binder and screen wife Janeane Garofalo in what starts out as a London version of The Out-of-Towners but turns into a pretty decent revenge flick; and waydowntown, which I think I've mentioned in the Fall Guide, the Holiday Guide, the Winter Guide, and probably will again in the St. Patrick's Day Guide if they don’t stop changing the release date.

Here are a few to stay away from: Door to Door (July on TNT), a made-for-cable film written by and starring William H. Macy, who seems so, like, above playing a door-to-door salesman with cerebral palsy; World Traveler, Bart Freundlich's sleep-inducing follow-up to the justly ignored The Myth of Fingerprints, which stars his squeeze, Julianne Moore, and the squeezable Billy Crudup as two people who really bored me; and One-Eyed King, a Hell's Kitchen movie from Hell with a decent cast (Billy Baldwin, Armand Assante, Chazz Palminteri) but not much more.  The topper was the appallingly dopey Minimal Knowledge, which won the audience inexplicably chose as Best Drama (one of very few ways Sundance bests Sarasota --- then again, Floridians have well-documented voting problems) by bringing a huge entourage that worked the crowd and then strongly reminded them all to vote on the way out.

It's pretty rare for a festival the size of Sarasota to include films from Iran and Afghanistan, but they managed to program one of each (both were made long before 9/11).  The overrated Cannes winner Kandahar (2/15) is about a Kabul native living in Canada who returns to Afghanistan when her physically and spiritually wounded sister sends her a letter saying she's planning on taking her own life during the millennium's final eclipse (it might not sound like it, but the film is a lot like The Wizard of Oz). Iran's official Oscar entry is Baran (3/1, limited), a picture about a young Afghan boy who must take over his ailing father's physically demanding job at a construction site, which reveals his...um...feminine side.  Other foreign entries included the messed-up Japanese horror flick Audition, which just made its Rochester debut a couple of weeks ago.