Read more from our SBIFF 2026 cover story here.
When Let Me Paint My World for You (a world premiere German-Swiss documentary) screens at 8 a.m. on February 5, it will be the first Santa Barbara International Film Festival film in a new era for the Santa Barbara moviegoers, marking the debut of SBIFF’s McHurley Film Center, a state-of-the-art, five-screen multiplex grander than any we’ve ever seen in this town.
Ironically, days later, there’s another SBIFF world premiere (Feb. 9), of an American documentary called The Last Picture Shows, which filmmaker Rustin Thompson describes as “a journey into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life, the movie theater.” He says it’s “both a eulogy and an elegy for the threatened community experience of gathering in a dark place and watching a film together.”