Attorney Alan Dershowitz leaves federal court, in New York, on Dec. 2, 2019. A documentary on Dershowitz took home a top award at the Floating Film Festival.Richard Drew/The Associated Press
The Floating Film Festival, a high-seas event started by the late Toronto International Film Festival co-founder Dusty Cohl, announced the winners of its 17th edition this week, with the culture-clash comedy No Name Restaurant and the headline-rattling documentary The Trials of Alan Dershowitz taking home the top awards.
Once labelled the “most prestigious and least pretentious film festival in the world” by Roger Ebert, who co-founded the event with fellow critic Richard Corliss and Cohl in 1991, the Floating Film Festival has become a sought-after stop on the awards circuit. Since 2004, the event has been overseen by Canadian documentarian Barry Avrich, with the Canadian film and television producer Mark Selby joining the organization in 2023 as senior programmer.
The biannual event charters 100 cinephiles and filmmakers across the Caribbean on a luxury cruise liner with 20-plus films attempting to distract them from views of St. Lucia, St. Bart’s, St. Thomas and San Juan.
This year’s programming included such highlights as directors Stefan Sarazin and Peter Keller’s No Name Restaurant, which follows the budding friendship between an ultraorthodox Jew and a Bedouin man in Alexandria, Egypt; Canadian documentarian John Curtin’s The Trials of Alan Dershowitz, tracing the controversial career of the Harvard professor and lawyer; the OIivia Colman-starring comedy Wicked Little Letters; and the German drama The Teachers’ Lounge, which is nominated for Best International Film at next month’s Academy Awards.
Meanwhile, Broadway and screen legend Tony Roberts (known for his collaborations with Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, among many others) was celebrated on-board, receiving the festival’s 2024 Icon Award, which has been previously awarded to Elliott Gould, Gena Rowlands and Peter Fonda.
Barry Hertz