Santa Barbara

THE 37TH ANNUAL SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

WRAPS UP WITH OSCAR NOMINATED WOMEN’S PANEL AND A SCREENING OF DIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER 

(Photo Credit: Getty/Santa Barbara International Film Festival)

[Director Dave Wooley at the 37th Santa Barbara International Film Festival]

(Photo Credit: Getty/Santa Barbara International Film Festival)

The 37th Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival presented by UGG closed with a special screening of DIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER, with the iconic singer in attendance. The documentary follows Warwick as she smashed through cultural, racial and gender barriers to become the soundtrack for generations and a voice fighting for humanitarian causes. Featuring interviews with Burt Bachrach, Gladys Knight, Gloria Estefan, Snoop Dogg, Bill Clinton and many more. Check out director Dave Wooley’s red carpet interview HERE.

Earlier in the day, the Women’s Panel took place, featuring Diane Warren (Composer, “Somehow You Do” from Four Good Days) Jessica Kingdom (Director, Ascension), Lynn Harris (Producer, King Richard), Amber Richards (Set Decorator, Power of the Dog) and Elizabeth Mirzaei (Director, Three Songs for Benazir) in a conversation led by SBIFF Program Director Claudia Puig. The full panel can be watched HERE.

Highlights from the conversation include: 

• Harris on working with Will Smith: “He was so kind and wonderful, and generous. Generous to the other actors, especially to the young girls, it was their first big movie with a movie star… we shut down seventeen days into the pandemic… when we did come back, Will, truly as a leader, kept morale up at time when it was very difficult and scary.”
• Mirzaei on the timeliness of her documentary: “We can see what’s happening in Ukraine right now… we feel like it just can’t be an accident that we feel an ability for us to speak about the way that the world looks at the people who are considered the ‘other’. That’s why we feel this movie is important right now in a time when the world is confronting multiple wars… we hope this film helps…”
• Warren on not taking ‘no’ for an answer: “Everybody on this panel has been told ‘no, you can’t do this, it’s not gonna work’. I’ve been told that so many times, it’s like ‘fuck you, yes I’m gonna do it!’ …I read something once that said you've gotta be dyslexic when you hear the word ‘no’ so then, it’s ‘on’!”
• Jessica Kingdom on persevering to get her documentary completed: “When we first got our funding from our sales agent, they gave us a small loan to go and do the initial shoot…. We didn’t know if we could pull this off or not because the vision was so ambitious… I told the other producer, ‘the loan says we have to deliver a movie by this date, but it doesn’t say it has to be a good movie!’ …that was the mindset I was going into it with, just try to finish it. You don’t have to shoot for greatness, you just have to shoot for finishing it. And this is what we ended up with!”
• Richards on picking out set décor from the United States: “I got to come over and go to prop houses here, because we don’t have that in New Zealand. I was completely blown away by the access that you have here to critical collections. I spent four and a half days here and filled a forty-foot container!” 

The 37th Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival ran from March 2nd to March 12th. For more information, please visit www.sbiff.org.