Michael Tuckman, the artistic director for Key West Film Festival, joined Good morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the festival.
The Key West Film Festival 2025 will kick off on November 12 with the film Eternity.
Tuckman said, “This is something where it’s great to open with a very crowd pleasing film, two movie stars and Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller, who can do nothing wrong, and just a real fun film to kick off, all about everlasting love, and who can complain about that?”
This is the 14th annual Key West Film Festival.
Tuckman said, “These are films that distributors are very selective about where they can play on the film festival circuit before they open. So it’s really a recognition of what the audiences in Key West bring to the festival when they look at these places where they’re playing Toronto, Chicago, Philadelphia, and then they decide, oh yeah, we’ll let audiences in Key West show it as well. So it’s really a tip of the hat to the great culture in Key West, and we’re really happy bringing these films down there.”
What are the Golden Key awards?
Tuckman said, “We’ve given the Golden Key awards to some incredible guests over the years, Burt Reynolds, Chris Cooper, Marissa Tomei, and sometimes in Burt’s case, who lived in Florida, and Chris Cooper, who was in a Florida film adaptation, but we’ve never had someone who currently lives in Key West to be honored and to honor the legendary comedian and stage actor Billy Connolly is just a huge moment for us to be able to look at someone who chose to adopt Key West as their home and honor them for their incredible international career. While Billy Connolly had a huge role alongside Judy Dench in Mrs. Brown, we do things a little differently at the Key West Film Festival, we decided to showcase his talents in the dirtiest joke movie ever made, the Aristocrats and and we’ll be having a really incredible screening on Friday night, November 14, at the Williams Hall, where Billy will be there in person to accept the award. That’s a big thing for him, given his health, to make it out there and accept it in public. And then everyone will be able to really celebrate with with non stop laughs as the Aristocrats celebrates its 20th anniversary.”
The Excellence in Documentary Film Making will be screening All God’s Children and the most recent short film, All the Walls Came Down at the festival.
Tuckman said, “Ondi Timoner grew up in South Florida. We showed her film three years ago, Last Flight Home, about Air Florida that her father ran and just an accomplished documentary filmmaker for over four decades now, and her film All God’s Children is the Jewish community in New York and the African American community trying to come together, to find things that connect them. It’s really a hopeful film that shows that we can get past differences and find common ground and get together. She’ll be here in person to be able to have a Q and A afterwards. Again, that’ll be it at Williams Hall on Saturday afternoon, November 15.”
The festival takes a lot of planning.
Tuckman said, “As soon as November 17 happens, we start to work on the 2026 festival. Passion meets paradise doesn’t just apply to the festival, but to the entire staff that puts the festival on. And it’s only made possible by the incredible residents of Key West and those who travel from around the world to come in for the festival, not just audience members, but also filmmakers that we’ll be bringing in from a number of different states and countries. That’s really what’s great about the fest, is you can be walking along Duval Street and meet up with an international filmmaker that’s just in town showing their film. It’s just the small town community that you don’t see at the Toronto Film Festival or New York Film Festival. It’s it’s only here in Key West.”
There will be a new section of programming this year.
Tuckman said, “Florida Docs is great in this was something where we always put a section for Florida features, but it was clear that the films that we looked at and were submitted, that the documentaries just rose to a level above. We’ve got the world premiere of the film The Outlaws of the Everglades. That’s going to be happening on Sunday afternoon. There’s already tons of people from the Gulf Coast coming down for it. This is a story of when the Everglades were shut down for commercial fishing, the choices that some of the fishermen had to make about how to do their new way of living that weren’t necessarily the most legal of means, and just exactly like the title says, they became outlaws delivering things up and down the coast that probably shouldn’t have been doing, but it was a situation where, what are you supposed to do now? The directors will be coming to town for that. Some of the featured members in the cast will be there as well. That’ll be great. And the day before, on Saturday, a crazy film called The Python Hunt. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the annual Python hunt at the state of Florida, so this is a doc that followed about eight different folks who came in for it, one being a tech bro from San Francisco who wanted to live the outdoor life, and another being a recent retiree from Phoenix whose only goal as an 85 year old great grandmother was to mash the brain of a Python once it was dead and hire someone to go kill her one so that she can do the actual brain mashing. That’s how you kill them. The thing about the film that’s so great is it’s not just, the auspices or that it’s supposed to eliminate this predator nature of these pythons, but there’s 20,000 of them out there, and maybe a couple hundred get hunted down. So it is a bigger question of what’s going on here? What’s the purpose of all this? Is it just a stunt that’s being done? And how much good is it actually doing out there? So it does have bigger environmental questions as well, and not just a sensationalist film. It’s really a pleasure just to talk about these incredible films, and the more spotlight we can put on them, the better, including a lot of our shorts films that come in. Saturday afternoon is our annual Florida filmmaker short showcase, student filmmakers that afternoon, and then Florida student on Sunday morning. It’s great for these filmmakers to come into town, meet audiences, but they also get a chance to meet some of the top critics in the country who are attending. It’s an annual thing we do to make sure that the top critics in the country are coming to talk about the films, present films, give context and give someone to talk to afterwards. Maybe they’re talking to you at General Horseplay over an old fashioned later, but that’s how you want to talk to someone, not just raising your hand in a Q and A and that’s it. It gives such a great ability to have casual conversations in Key West.”
For more information, click here: https://keywestff.com/