When the 35th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival wrapped at the end of January 2020, no one could have anticipated how completely transformed life would be in a matter of weeks. The festival’s suite of offices and screening-equipped classrooms at the Barbakow Family Center for Film Studies on State Street across from the Arlington Theatre was thriving, the winners of the 10-10-10 student film competition were celebrating, and the 2020-21 class of the festival’s Rosebud program was gearing up for a robust season of sneak previews and Q&A sessions. Then, thanks to COVID-19, everything ground to a halt.
Actually, that’s not what happened. Thanks to the ingenuity of SBIFF education coordinator Claire Waterhouse and the rest of Roger Durling’s dedicated staff, these ambitious programs, which now ordinarily reach as many as 14,000 people per year, kept rolling, albeit virtually. In fact, thanks to the flexibility with regard to location inherent in digital meetings, some aspects of the work even ramped up.
For example, the festival’s film society increased the number of sneak previews it offered, giving film-starved fans access to top talent through live Q&A sessions on Zoom. And almost immediately upon lockdown, the festival began publishing daily emails written by Roger Durling and Claire Waterhouse that offered detailed criticism and analysis of recommended films.