The Screen Is the Thing, Big-Time

The Screen Is
the Thing, Big-Time

The 38th Annual SBIFF Returns
in All Its Screened and Live Glory

By Josef Woodard | February 9, 2023

Check out the world and U.S. movie premieres at SBIFF.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) is up to old tricks again, and that’s entirely a fine and culturally revivifying thing. COVID tried to stop the mighty SBIFF, but in 2021, the festival went online and “to the drive-in,” with specially equipped screens at Santa Barbara City College, across the boulevard from the sea. Last year’s model followed a hybrid example, in theaters and with an online option for those inclined to avoid actual breathing crowds, and with some travel-challenged guests appearing in Zoom form.

After Wednesday night’s opening night screening of Miranda’s Victim at the Arlington Theatre, the festival, now to edition number 38, happily descends on the city for the next 10 days, returning in full, three-dimensional splendor, and with traditions intact. There will be celebrity tributes, timed with many performances also given timely Oscar nom nods; panel discussions, of which the writers’ panel on February 11 — featuring the screenwriters from Everything Everywhere All at Once, Tár, Living, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Women Talking — is always a hot ticket; and bushels of film screenings of all types, domestic and foreign, fiction and otherwise. It comes to an end on Saturday, February 18, perhaps prophetically, with the U.S. premiere of I Like Movies. Yes, we do, too.

At a press conference announcing this year’s festival, held at Sullivan Goss gallery last month, long-standing executive director and voice of the fest Roger Durling offered words of salutation and invitation, along with programmer Claudia Puig, the well-known critic who took the reins of programming starting last year.