We hear stories from people saying that they would not want to be in Key West without the tropic.

We have a huge community base.

I'm Carla Turner and I'm the executive director at the Tropic Cinema.

We are a non-profit.

This year is our 20th year anniversary.

Our mission is just to provide the community with stories from people.

We do all kinds of indie art house films, independent foreign language films, stories that they wouldn't that the community wouldn't hear otherwise.

I love to hear people come in and say, I just want to walk through.

It's such a beautiful movie theater.

It's such a great experience.

I've.

I've loved the ambiance there.

Our founders just had this.

They wanted Art Deco.

They hired an architect and a designer to come in and kind of guide them on.

You know what?

What it would look like in the colors.

And and we have stuck with it.

I mean, we're not going to let go of our original neon, the neon sign people keep wanting us to move to LED.

We're not going to we're going to keep all of the original colors.

And yeah, everyone loves it.

Everyone thinks we're old, but we're really not that old.

So the Oscar party is always fun.

It's kind of more of a gift from the Tropic to our community.

It's definitely more of a party.

Um, it's just kind of a thank you for coming in and watching all these films that you've seen all year long, and we love to do the Oscar ballots and tally that up for the people who are really into it and think they can figure it out.

We're most successful and we draw most excitement by offering events.

So we do a lot of talkbacks.

I think people enjoy seeing the movies and hearing the stories, but they also enjoy having a conversation after the movie about how they felt.

This was really the first year we came back to doing event-based programming, where we're paying filmmakers to fly in and talk about their films.

We're just going to dive deeper into that.

We're going to continue to support new filmmakers coming in and showing their films that haven't been seen yet on our screen as a premiere.

And we're just going to keep investing, investing in our filmmakers.