Published Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 23, 2026. Guest Column.
Our film festival brings Sarasota together. Come join us.
Recently, I was struck by the parallel between eating and visual media. Food delivery apps – DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats – are now used by 70% percent of Americans at least monthly. Fully a quarter of us use them weekly. Suburban families, college students, and remote workers in urban apartments – all succumb to the allure of infinite choices of food and drink arriving at the door.
Why? Busy parents fetching children don’t have time to cook. Couples working multiple jobs each struggle to make it to the grocery. The expectations of entertaining with home-cooked meals seem formidable.
Another reason behind this trend strikes me as more socially disturbing, however. Family and friends may eat under the same roof, but they all need their own unique food. Dad wants a burger; Mom craves Chinese. This one votes for pepperoni pizza, and that one says a container of ice cream will do just fine. Individual diners today like to get exactly what they want. For themselves.
Yet something is lost when we don’t share meals. We don’t experience each other’s preferences, perhaps expanding our horizons. We don’t figure out compromises – pasta today, Vietnamese on Friday, you cook tomorrow, I’ll do Sunday. And when we stop sharing food, we lose a community builder. Sharing food is a way of saying ‘yes, we are different, but we’re all in this short life together.’
And now the comparison of food to visual media. On a plane trip last month, I strolled the darkened aisle and scanned the screens of my fellow travelers: Casablanca, Ted Lasso, F1: The Movie, Breaking Bad, The Devil Wears Prada; the variety in each row went on and on. To each his or her own.
Yet our homes are scarcely different. Visual media – films, television, streaming series, news, social media videos – are now almost exclusively both selected and watched individually. You have your news, social media feed, Netflix and Hulu accounts, and I have mine. Fewer than half of Americans actually ‘coview’ any show. We see different screens, and we see them alone.
Moreover, algorithms designed to maximize profit ensure we each get more of the same, so we are rarely exposed to themes, places, or perspectives we have not already seen or that are not ‘curated’ for us. Americans now spend upwards of 8 hours a day on screens, nearly all in our own micro-worlds.
I don’t run Grubhub, but I do run a local film festival, now in its 27th year. And guess what? We pick the films, and we invite everyone to come join us. Together.
We show the work of women directors from around the world, which almost certainly means these are not the perspectives you usually see. And while the point-of-view may vary, the themes are universal: the death of a parent, the humor of human anxiety, the fear of war, the enthusiasm of a new romance. This year alone our films take a three-week trek through Northern Lapland, explore the quest for justice in Iran, ride a motorcycle in Mongolia, and follow elephants in India.
Seeing media not curated by your personal familiar algorithm means you are opening yourself up to someone else’s world; it means you care enough about others to see their reality, even for an hour or two. None of us can live other lives, but we can all open up to other perspectives. When we see the experiences of others, we learn about the compromises they make, the struggles they endure, the small victories they celebrate. What could be more human?
And those experiences, those perspectives, can be shared in the moment. When we are with people – in community – who watch the same things, we feel the energy of shared laughter, the pain of shared tears. At our festival, something happens to our audiences sitting together in the theater. After the show, they turn to each other and say, “I never knew that.” They say, “What did you think?” and “I wish everyone could see this!”
Stop curating your own life for an hour, a day, or the whole weekend. Join a community of fellow viewers. Because without some shared experiences, community suffers. And because shared movies, like shared food, may shrink our differences just a little bit.
E Scott Osborne is the Chair of the Reel Equals Film Festival (March 5 – 10, 2026, Sarasota)