Gosling Going for Gold with SBIFF

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has its annual Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film on tap in January as part of its pre-festival slate before the 39th festival takes over town February 7-17. Perennially praised actor Ryan Gosling is set to receive the prestigious prize at a black-tie dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara on January 13. The two-time Academy Award nominee (Half Nelson and La La Land, the latter of which earned Gosling SBIFF’s 2017 Outstanding Performer of the Year award) is sure to garner a third nod for playing Ken opposite Margot Robbie’s title turn in Barbie. Meanwhile, SBIFF’s Cinema Society at Riviera Theatre winds up its utterly comprehensive slate of Oscar-hopeful 2023 films with two foreign language entries: France’s The Taste of Things and Australia’s Shayda, both followed by writer-director Q&As, on January 11 and 12. Details at www.sbiff.org. Stay tuned to this space for much more as the 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival approaches. 

Further Focus on Film 

SBIFF isn’t the only supplier of serious films this week as Fielding Graduate University kicks off its 50th anniversary celebration on January 14 with the premiere of The Voices of Fielding, which features students and alums from all schools at Fielding, including local Santa Barbara leaders and alums – U.S. Representative Salud Carbajal and California State University Channel Islands President Richard Yao, PhD. A discussion with the film’s director Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Fielding President Katrina S. Rogers and a reception conclude the free event. Visit www.fielding.edu/fielding-hosting-film-premiere-the-voices-of-fielding-on-jan-14.

UCSB’s Pollock Theater screens Still Film, an experimental movie presented in the form of a trial using only 35mm publicity stills from studio press kits in both an ode to movie culture and an acute critique of the regressive artistic sensibilities that plague contemporary Hollywood. Writer-director James N. Kienitz Wilkins discusses the project following the January 18 afternoon screening. 

That’s the same night that UCSB’s Arts & Lectures launches into 2024 with a free Thematic Learning Initiative screening of Ballerina Boys, the documentary on Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo that traces the troupe through interviews and contemporary and archival performance footage. The Trocks, an all-male comic ballet company, perform live at the Granada a week later on January 25.