Overview

Twenty world premieres of feature films highlight the rest of the program, 3 of which are North American premieres, and 16 of which are U.S. premieres. The festival will also screen documentaries and shorts.

The closing night film will be The Price of Glory, a family story about a father who pressures his sons to rise to greatness, starring Jimmy Smits. This film is the directoral feature debut of Carlos Avila who will be present at the screening with Smits.

The festival will honor Academy Award-winning actor Sir Anthony Hopkins with the festival's Modern Master Award at a ceremony which will be hosted by actor Edward Norton. Film historian Leonard Maltin will screen highlights from Hopkins' distinguished career - Lion in Winter, The Silence of the Lambs, Remains of the Day, Titus - and conduct an intimate chat with the actor.

The festival will also honor three comedic geniuses. Richard Pryor will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Whoopi Goldberg will receive the Ruby Award, and there will be a tribute to the work of award-winning director-producer Ivan Reitman (Dave).

Award-winning French director-writer-comedy actor Albert Dupontel will be present at "Meet the Filmmaker" evenings following the screenings of his Bernie, La Maladie De Sachs, and Le Createur. This event is sponsored by the French Consulate.

There will be a retrospective of internationally acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou's work including Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, The Story of Qiu Ju, and To Live.

Each year the festival produces seminars for filmmakers which attract highly respected film industry talent and executives as panelists. The subjects this year are Has Indiewood Taken Over Hollywood?; Independent Filmmaking: Planning the End Game; It Starts with the Script; and Marketing and Distributing Programming Online.

Among the films premiering at the Santa Barbara International Festival are Deadly Debris, a documentary by Vy Le My of Vietnam about the destruction that continues after the bombs have fallen; Japanese director Satoshi Iska's thriller The Frame; Homeland, a documentary about the poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; Noriega: God's Favorite, a feature film directed by Roger Spottiswode and starring Bob Hopkins as the Panamanian general; and Row Your Boat, an interracial love story about a Chinese immigrant and a homeless convict struggling to build a new life for himself.

Contributor/festival specialist
Wendy Carrel

The Festival closed Sunday night March 12 at one of the oceanside city's vintage movie theaters, the Arlington on State Street, with an awards ceremony and the presence of popular TV and feature film actor Jimmy Smits who served as one of the evening's hosts and introduced the premiere screening The Price of Glory, in which he stars. (The father-son boxing film will be released by New Line Features in the U.S. in April).

The top award winners were Regis Warnier's French language epic saga East West which picked up the Audience Award, and Canadian filmmaker Louis Belanger's dark debut drama Post Mortem which won two awards - the Body Shop's Independent Voice Award for a North American feature film with no distribution in place, plus the Special Jury Prize for Artistic Merit, a $4,000 cash award from indie internet company IFILM.com. East West, the official French entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar later this month, will be released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.

The Body Shop, a British-owned bath and toiletry chain, sponsored three other awards. Its $5,000 Burning Vision Award, celebrating an emerging filmmaker of a feature-length U.S. film with no distribution in place, was awarded to Amy Goldstein for her film East of A. The Phoenix Prize, for best feature-length film in the U.S. or World Cinema sections "which embodies the courage of the human spirit," went to Marco Bechis' Garage Olimpo, a drama about the disappearance of a young middle-class woman who endured torture at the hands of the Argentinian secret police. Festival Director Renee Missel presented the award and its $3,000 cash prize. The Body Shop's $2,000 Insight Award for Best Documentary feature film was awarded to James Ronald Whitney's moving tale about his family's incest, Just, Melvin.

Other festival award winners were…. Audience pleaser, Everything's Jake directed by Matthew Miele, co-written by Christopher Fetchko, and starring Ernie Hudson (OZ) as a homeless man, won the Burning Vision Jury "Special Mention" Award. The comedy/drama has been invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The World Prism Award for best feature-length foreign film went to French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Ameris' Mauvaises Frequentations (Bad Company). Javier Aguirresarobe of Spain won the Best Cinematography Lumina Award for La Nina de Tus Ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams). The Human Right's Award, a newly-created $1,500 cash prize for a film which "promotes social justice and human rights" went to Santa Barbara filmmaker Kevin McKiernan for his documentary Good Kurds, Bad Kurds. Winning short films included Echo from Belgium, and Shroud of Silence, a documentary, and an animated film When the Day Breaks. The Peter Stark Screenwriting Competition brought $5,000 to Jeff Jackson for a black comedy, and $3,000 to Valerie Red-Horse for an Apache Indian war script.

The Salute to Comedy live events earlier in the week were soldout and starstruck locals got to see comedienne Lily Tomlin, along with comedienne Paula Poundstone and "cowboy philosopher" Argus Hamilton present the festival's first Lifetime Achievement Award to wheelchair bound comedian Richard Pryor at a moving evening where Pryor's actor daughter Rain read the acceptance speech. Actors Jodie Foster and Edward Norton honored fellow thespian Anthony Hopkins with the festival's Modern Master Award at another evening event. Comedienne Whoopi Goldberg and producer Ivan Reitman were also feted with evenings of tribute and awards in their honor.

The opening days of the festival were greeted by cold weather and torrents of rain, but by mid-week the sun came out and the weather was warm. Despite the initial inclement weather at this resort destination, the only preserved Spanish colonial city in California, the festival office reported 38,000 in attendance, a slight rise over last year.

Not every screening was packed this year, but there were some standout films and standing room only at some screenings, particularly the documentaries. There were 28 documentaries, including the seven human rights documentaries. Other than the already noted award winners Good Kurd, Bad Kurds and Just, Melvin were Americanos, a lively and humorous look at Latino life in the U.S. produced by actor Edward James Olmos' production company; last minute entry Chasing Buddha, an amusing and memorable account of an Australian feminist turned Buddhist nun; Burning Man, Alex Nohe's entertaining document of the annual summer artisitic mardi-gras in the Nevada desert; Dempsey Rice's personal Daughter of Suicide; Homeland, a documentary about the Lakota Indian Nation families; and Christina Lundberg's spiritual journey On the Road Home which documents meetings with holy women from around the world.

Other than the festival's award-winning films, there were other feature titles of note - Majid Majidi's deeply moving and beautifully photographed Color of Paradise about a blind boy and his unhappy, frustrated father; the feel good Swedish comedy Breaking Out about a theater director-playwright who teaches prisoners to act (Warner Bros. has purchased the re-make rights); and French director Albert Dupontel's most original La Maladie de Sachs, based on a book, about a country doctor's observations of the patients and the women who influence his life.

Since the arrival of Renee Missel as festival director three years ago, the festival has focused on producing seminars of use to filmmakers. The most popular event remains the panel of Academy Award nominated screenwriters who appear with other well-known screenwriters to discuss how they write what they write. The event which is held at the Riviera Theater in the hills above the city was again sold out. Los Angeles based attorney Harris Tulchin hosted a panel about filmmaking on the most important new medium of the future, the Internet, and invited executives from Internet companies to discuss their business plans, especially as they related to distribution. This was an adjunct to a series of "Digital Days" panels which included clips of feature films now being shot on digital presented by Mark Stolaroff of Next Wave Films, a Teen Digital Competition, a Young Filmmakers in New Media panel, a Digital Realities technology panel, and the screening of Frank Foster's documentary The History of Computer Graphics. Also featured was a panel of Hollywood studio executives and producers discussing the success of breakthrough edgier studio films such as American Beauty, and Filmfinders' Peter Belsito hosting a panel of producer's representatives and distributors on the ins and outs of independent distribution.

Contributor/festival specialist
Wendy Carrel