Lunch with Ernest

Falling in love with film

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Rob Tregenza loves a movie that can take him to a place he has never been, teach him something he didn't know and stimulate him intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

The University of Tampa film professor and acclaimed moviemaker has found foreign films best fill his cinematic desires, so that's why he is one of the driving forces behind the Tampa International Film Festival: Cinema for a New World.

Over Italian dishes at UT's Vaughn Center - those college kids eat well - we talked about his love of teaching, his 1998 film Inside Out and his home, a 41-foot sailboat anchored at Little Harbor in Ruskin.

ERNEST: Did you grow up loving the movies?

ROB: I fell in love with international films, foreign films, when I was a freshman in college. Before that, I really wasn't that interested in film at all. When I started looking at international film, it opened up a whole new world for me.

What is it about international films that have piqued your curiosity?

How does the foreign film industry's approach to moviemaking differ?

Every country has commercial cinema, but every country has a small branch of people who are interested in film as art, in film as a way of talking about things that matter: theology, morality, ethics, politics. That kind of cinema is usually more concerned with how the story is told, how it's shot, how it's lit, how it's done. It's more concerned about film as a form of cinematic art. In the process, they tell different kinds of stories and open up windows to different possibilities of thoughts. To me, an American film tends to be very formula driven, star driven, predictable.

I know this may be difficult, but can you list two or three of your all-time favorite foreign films?

I like films that make you think, and a film that would make me think back in the '60s wouldn't be a film that would make me think now. My interest in film has changed as I've changed. But I like movies made by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Dodard, and he's constantly changing as well. His cinema is constantly stretching and growing. In fact, his most recent film will be in the film festival April 9 - Notre Musique.

Tell me more about the festival.

It's put together because there was no festival that showed just international films. When I came here 3 1/2 years ago, I was shocked. We have an international city; why don't we have an international festival? It just seemed like a huge gap in our culture.

In 1998, you made Inside Out and it was well received at the Cannes Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. Tell me about it.

It was about American institutions and institutionalized people and how we can be free even inside the structures of those institutions if we understand the nature of the tyranny of those systems. So you're inside, yet you're outside structures you're in. Part of the story takes place in a hospital in the 1950s, but that's more or less a metaphor for American society.

Tell me about living on the boat. I mean, you can't exactly have a house party.

What do you like about living on a boat?

I love just going to sleep and listening to the waves. I love getting up in the morning and see the manatees come into the marina. We have porpoises, a bald eagle, osprey. I love the simplicity of it. You can't have a lot of stuff. My wife still has a farm up in Maryland, so when it gets too tight and cramped, I just get on the plane and go up there.

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