If there was an operative principle and manifesto-like maxim best describing the experience of the 36th annual SBIFF, it filled the screen countless times over 10-plus days, in previews before each screening: “THE SHOW MUST GO ON.” And so it did, bravely and admirably, in the face of pandemic shutdown provisions. When the pandemic going got tough and threatening to such a complex event with a highly public interface, the festival did go on, in a mostly virtual way.
SBIFF ’21 opened on a bold, illuminating note, with the doc Invisible Valley, about the gross socio-economic realities in the Coachella Valley. The screening was preceded by a few words from longstanding SBIFF exec director Roger Durling, in lieu of the traditional gala opening night rituals, which usually includes a moment when Durling invites the audience to briefly converse with a stranger. This year, Durling told the car-bound crowd, “There was never any doubt in our minds that would go forward with the film festival. We were not going to cancel and we were not going to solely do a virtual event.”
Enter the two drive-in screens in the SBCC parking lots and a large stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, with multiple, free-to-the-public screenings. This year, we missed the human touch of Durling and such programmers as Mickey Duzdevich and Audrey Arn introducing and interviewing filmmakers, but said humans did show up at the drive-ins, for scaled-down but reassuring appearances.