No Place Like a Festival Home
Don’t miss these SBIFF highlights
By Josef Woodard
If the big news at last year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival was its grand ceremonial 40th birthday, this year’s model will be remembered as a grand housewarming season. This week, the festival officially opened its ambitious McHurley Film Center, a lavishly renovated—and redesigned—five-screen complex that gives the festival and official home base after decades of camping out in rented theaters.
On Monday evening, longstanding SBIFF head Roger Durling presided over the film center’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, with commentary from mayor Randy Rowse and significant patron and Center namesake Nora McNeel Hurley. An eager throng filtered into the hip, elegant ambience of the newly christened space, with champagne and popcorn in hand and mouth. The Center has been under construction since last year’s festival and, as promised, is ready to wear just in time for this year’s 10-day cinematic tapestry, opening on Wednesday night with the World Premiere of A Mosquito in the Ear.
As usual, SBIFF’s full slate of films drawn from around the globe, Oscar-timed celebrity tributes, panels, and more will take over the city and extend its appeal to many demographics of film fans and cinephiles, serious and casual. The festival has gained considerable ground and clout in the international film festival scene in the past two decades since Durling took the reins in 2004.
Apart from the Film Center homebase, screenings will also take place up at the festival’s existing, lofty Riviera Theatre outpost. Up State Street, the Arlington Theatre assumes its traditional role as the historic site for the opening and closing films, daily free screenings and a list of starry tributes. Among the honorees coming to town, all having earned recent Oscar nom cred, are Ethan Hawke (from Blue Moon), Michael B. Jordan (for his double role in Sinners), Adam Sandler (from Marty Supreme), a triple crown booking of Leonard DiCaprio, Benicio Del Torro and Sean Penn (from One Battle After Another), Stellan Skarsgård (from Sentimental Value), and Kate Hudson (from Song Sung Blue).
Panels include directors of note (and nominations), screenwriters, producers, women in film, and the “Artisans” tribute focusing on vital film craft artists just outside the spotlight. One special feature this year is a tribute to painter/director Julian Schnabel, surrounding the U.S. premiere of his new film In the Hands of Dante.
A short list of recommended films from advance screeners I’ve had access to: Abril (Costa Rica), Space Cadet, Little Lorraine, Perla, Don’t Call Me Mama (Norway), Viral (Japan), Lost Land (Japan, about Rohingya refugees in flight), On the End (starring a frumpy Tim Blake Nelson), and the documentaries Dear Lara, A Life Illuminated, and Steal This Story, Please! (winner of this year’s Social Justice Award). For comic relief, check out You Had to Be There, about the wealth of influential comics who descended from Toronto into the SNL/SCTV cultural swim.
For festival-goers of all intensities, over the next ten days, most all roads will keep leading to 916 State Street, the McHurley complex. There’s no place like a home to call a festival home. For more information, sbiff.org.
