Tara Reid to appear at next week’s Sunscreen Film Festival

Actress Tara Reid (American Pie, The Big Lebowski, Sharknado) will visit St. Petersburg Friday, April 25 for the 20th annual Sunscreen Film Festival. She’s coming to premiere her latest, the psychological thriller Dr. Quarantine. It’s directed by White Cross.

Reid and members of the filmmaking team will take part in an audience Q&A following the screening.

She plays a psychiatrist under a shelter-in-place order during a global pandemic, attempting to help her family stranded abroad, and calm her patients via video chats “while her own neuroses boil over.” The actress is also a producer of the film.

Scheduled to appear Saturday is Jim O’Heir, with his short film El Rebote. The character actor’s best-known role was as Jerry Gergich on the sitcom Parks and Recreation.

Presented by the nonprofit St. Petersburg-Clearwater Film Society, Sunscreen (April 24-27) features approximately 200 independent films (50 narrative features and documentaries, along with 150 shorts) at the Sundial AMC 12 theatres in downtown St. Petersburg.

Twenty years ago, “there wasn’t a mainstream, major film festival here, in the entire Tampa Bay area,” Sunscreen founder and director Tony Armer said. “Gasparilla didn’t start until a year of two after Sunscreen. People just had an appetite. And then we started growing on a year-to-year basis.”

Guesting on a recent episode of the Arts Alive! podcast, Armer said approximately 7,000 attendees are expected for the 2025 edition. “A decent percentage,” he said, will be aspiring filmmakers attending the myriad industry workshops and panel discussions.

“Or if you’re just curious about this industry, you can go, you can learn, and you get to meet the filmmakers. You watch a film, and then you see the Q&A afterwards – you can walk up to them and say ‘I really liked your film. How did you do this, how did you do that?’

“So the environment of a film festival is so much different than watching something on Netflix, or YouTube or TikTok or whatever it might be. Because you actually get to interact with people and have that communal experience.”

The appearance by Tara Reid notwithstanding, Armer said that Sunscreen – which has featured drop-ins by the likes of Billy Dee Williams, John Travolta, Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley, among others – has never been totally “about” celebrity sightings.

“For a while, it became ‘Who’s coming next year?’” he explained. “So there was that pressure to figure out who are we gonna bring?

“But then we said you know what? Here’s what we’re gonna do from now on. We’re going to concentrate on having the best films that we can have, and the best workshops that we can have … and if there are celebrities that are a part of these films, and they’re going to come to the festival, great.

“And honestly, since we’ve taken that approach, the festival has really grown.”

In as way, Sunscreen has outgrown the bay area. “We have people traveling from all over,” said Armer. “Not just from the U.S., but from Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe. We’ve had filmmakers from Korea, Japan, Australia over the years. It’s really become a great international event.”

Among this year’s highlights: Four Down, a documentary about the 2009 boating mishap that took the lives of two NFL players 70 miles off the coast of Clearwater; only Nick Schuyler survived. Produced in collaboration with companies owned by Mark Wahlberg and Snoop Dogg, the documentary uses news footage and dramatizations to depict Schuyler’s dramatic rescue by the U.S. Coast Guard after 43 hours in the water. Four Down screens Thursday and Sunday (details are here), with director Steven Cantor in attendance.

Screening Saturday is the British science fiction comedy Time Travel is Dangerous!, in which two women, owners of a London “vintage” shop, discover a way to travel back in time to retrieve items they can sell. The filmmakers will be in attendance. Screening is Saturday; info is here.

For the full Sunscreen Film Festival schedule, visit the website.