Fort Myers Film Festival founder offers fizz and fun
Fort Myers Film Festival founder offers fizz and fun
Eric Raddatz’s job is viewing short films, then discussing what he’s watched. Our role as his audience, increasingly, is discussing him. Raddatz runs the Fort Myers Film Festival, a venue for moviemakers/writers to screen their independent films. His intelligent hosting of first Monday showings at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in downtown Fort Myers often draws a boisterous audience. There’s plenty of pre-show buzz on what Raddatz will bring to the evening. “Eric,” says Gina Birch, a sometimes film festival panelist and writer, “runs a really good ship. He’s a showman, but he encourages participation and he banters with the crowd. It’s good-natured, edgy―and always entertaining.”
Select short films―profiles, drama and comedy―are screened through Raddatz’s film festival team and shown at the Davis Art Center. With accelerating technology, the world is flush with filmmakers and their cinematic ideas. Hundreds arrive each season, Raddatz says, many from Floridians. A handful play to a Fort Myers Film Festival audience on first Mondays, the T.G.I.M. (Thank God for Indie Mondays) series that Raddatz hosts through season. A red-carpet event selecting an overall best film for the sixth year is in April at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall. Many of the moviemakers advance to bigger opportunities with a thumbs-up at the Fort Myers Film Festival, Raddatz says.
But the enjoyment outside of the films on Mondays is the pre-show murmur, and then Raddatz’s fizz and fun with the artsy audience and the celebrity judges. He is clever and smart, reflecting on one weird film as an “intergovernmental mission to Mars,” or riffing on Viagra, chocolate milk or “little army men.” The vibe is agreeable―and centers on Raddatz’s dialogue with an engaged audience, his snark for the occasional stinker film.
He’s the comic and perspiring ringmaster, looking back at us from under a lone spotlight. “It makes me smile to see other people’s dreams come true,” says Raddatz, who is 44.
His career in film has evolved, says Raddatz, a native of suburban Chicago. He started as a minor player in movies with actors such as Kevin Bacon, morphed into doing graphics for newspapers, and founded an indie-film event in Naples that ended sourly, he says, declining to elaborate. Fort Myers Film Festival launched in 2010 in the refurbished Davis Art Center. Mike Donlan recalls Raddatz as always on, a back-office hoot when the two men worked for a Florida newspaper. “Eric has always been funny,” says Donlan, tonight one of four celebrity judges sharing his opinion on the films shown. “He’s doing what he should be doing―entertaining.”
Indie movies often are low budget and made outside conventional filmmaking. There are other indie-film events in Fort Myers Beach, Naples and Bonita, but the Fort Myers venue attracts the best and most diverse independent filmmakers, those visiting each festival say. “It’s the best,” says Randy Thomas, the first woman announcer to introduce the Academy Awards broadcast and a Fort Myers Film Festival regular. “And it’s all Eric.”
Although some Fort Myers Film Festival entrants are clunkers, most are thought-provoking, and still others move into mainstream consciousness, some picking up salutes from the film industry. Writer/ director Tim Ritter has screened his work at Fort Myers Film Festival, for example, and is complimentary of the event.
The Fort Myers area has a “real appreciation for intellectual and independent films,” Raddatz says. “If anything, I’m a small part of that.”
Scheduling and details for the sixth annual Fort Myers Film Festival April 7-10 are at fortmyersfilmfestival.com.
“The Fort Myers area has a “real appreciation for intellectual and independent films.” —Eric Raddatz