After five hours of working the crowd, Jody Kielbasa finally relaxes and lets his colorful silk tie has slithered free from its once-tight knot.

Kielbasa, executive director of the Sarasota Film Festival, has just presided over a glittery Longboat Key Club party introducing the lineup of films and stars expected to appear at the eighth annual festival. With supporters gone, off to dream of desperate housewives in Sarasota (actress Felicity Huffman was among the invitees), Kielbasa is still out on the lawn of the Harborside Marina, informally meeting with the festival's PR agency and members of his staff. A local media company that is a sponsor of this year's festival will not be running the launch story as expected, and Kielbasa is incensed. It is too late to make a call, but Kielbasa wants a discussion first thing in the morning.

Such is the life of 48-year-old Kielbasa, who has spent the past eight years gunning his engine on all cylinders with only one goal in sight: to make the Sarasota Film Festival one of the preeminent film festivals in the Western Hemisphere. "From the day I started here, I told the board of directors that I wanted to paint on a larger canvas-larger locally, nationally and internationally," he says. "And to date, we've been successful on all of these levels."

In 2005 the film festival had its coming-out party as a big player. Total tickets sold surpassed 40,000, making it one of the largest in the southeast United States. In May 2005 the organization chartered a 438-foot luxury yacht, the Seabourn Legend, and sailed with 100 of Sarasota's most well-heeled supporters to the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera. While there, they hosted three nights of parties and erected a Sarasota Film Festival banner on the building immediately across the street from the world-famous red carpet, leaving an impressionable mark on everyone who glanced upwards. Then, Screen International, a leading film industry trade magazine, named it one of the top 20 film festivals in the country. (Close to 800 film festivals take place in the United States annually, with Sarasota actually airing four: UNIFEM, the Jewish Film Festival, Sarasota Film Society's Cine-World and the Sarasota Film Festival.) "Since they published," Kielbasa notes, "one of the festivals has gone belly up, so we're at least number 19 now!"

The growth and success of the Sarasota Film Festival has been a turnaround for some of its organizers-and the community-after the French Film Festival shut down in 1996, following a sometimes maligned eight-year run in Sarasota. "They never entirely captured the imagination of the local population," recalls Kielbasa, "and as it was a showcase for just French films, they could only draw from a very limited audience."

Dr. John Welch, one of the original founders of the French Film Festival, refused to give up on the idea that Sarasota could support a vibrant, annual celebration of film. With this in mind, he began an early retirement with a pilgrimage across the country to audit as many film fests as he could and formulate a potential new model of success for Sarasota.

Gathering together a culturally astute group of French Film Festival holdouts as well as new board members, Welch and his associates formed the nonprofit Sarasota Film Festival Inc. in 1998 and began their search for an executive director. That July, they hired Kielbasa, an FSU/Asolo Conservatory graduate who had recently returned to southwest Florida after spending nine years acting and producing plays in Los Angeles. Upon his hiring, Kielbasa was given a bank account with $1,000 and told that he needed to put together the first festival in six months.

"Because of the history of the French Film Festival in the community, we were conscientious that whatever we did, it had to be a 180-degree turn in the opposite direction," Kielbasa says. "At the core of the new festival, then, there had to be American films. America continues to dominate film and screen as an art form. When I went on my honeymoon to Paris, 12 out of the 14 films at the Cineplex on the Champs-Elysées were American made."

Kielbasa's first act was to board a flight to L.A., on his own dime, to visit old friends and acquaintances. A friend with Showtime came through and offered world-premiere showings of two Showtime films, promising to send the stars to Sarasota as well. And they did show up: Jon Favreau and Jonathan Silverman, with their respective movies, Marciano and Freak City. In January 1999, the film festival's debut, the three-day event included eight movies and a ritzy gala that raised enough seed money to propel the organization forward for a five-day event the following year. The 2000 festival presented 64 films and was hugely successful, bringing in Hollywood supernovas Jon Voight and Brooke Shields.