When the Real Meets the Reel,
and Vice Versa
Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s
Schedule Triggers Age-Old Questions
Regarding the Odd Coupling of Real and Reel Life
By Josef Woodard | February 8, 2024
Melinda Sue Gordon for Universal Pictures
Read the rest of our SBIFF 2024 cover story here.
Interactions between the real world and the cinematic reel world — of all varied types and degrees of veracity — have been a functional aspect of cinema going back to its earliest roots. Consider the influential early nonfiction film Nanook of the North, circa 1922, Robert J. Flaherty’s documentary about Inuit life. Or, given the fictional liberties taken, should we call it a seminal docudrama? Lines between truth and fiction have continued forward in the long and dense film world tradition of biopics and true-story-based cinema.
Fast forward a century, post-Flaherty, and the 2023 film harvest has, among its most acclaimed and buzzed-about blockbusters, spotlighted real-life legends and dubious stories at the core. Of local note, Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s current program is playing its part in paying tribute to these highly touted films, with evening-long tributes to Bradley Cooper (masquerading as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro), Robert Downey Jr. (as the witness-hounding AEC head Lewis Strauss in the Robert Oppenheimer biopic Oppenheimer), and Annette Bening (as famed long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in Nyad). Martin Scorsese’s powerhouse film Killers of the Flower Moon (my vote for Best Picture Oscar) does a great service by bringing artful light to the tragic American tale about white exploitation of the Osage tribe. An SBIFF spotlight will be cast on one of its stars, Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone, during the Virtuosos Award.
Stretching the cinematic reality category a bit, we could consider the real-world pop-cultural phenom and feminist talking points of the Barbie universe linked to this year’s greatest art-meets-popcorn masterpiece Barbie. That film’s elastically mercurial Ken, Ryan Gosling, was honored at last month’s Kirk Douglas Award gala, and America Ferrera is featured in the Virtuosos Award night. In Barbie, reality also bites through the appearance of Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler, the Superdoll’s inventor.
In yet another case of a true story serving as the basis of a biopic, but from a lesser-known corner of cultural-political history, Rustin deals with the life of Bayard Rustin, an important gay civil rights activist, and organizer of the massive 1963 March on Washington — the site of MLK’s epochal “I Have a Dream” speech. Star Colman Domingo, the film’s Rustin (and also a compelling supporting actor in the recent film adaptation of the musical The Color Purple), will be in the house at the Arlington Theatre as part of the Virtuosos Award package.
Lateral and not necessarily linear connections between real and reel life naturally continue in the thicket of the festival’s hearty program. As usual, the documentary medium is broad-based and well-represented. In some cases, smartly crafted narrative techniques inform the truth-telling mission, as in the Australian doc The Last Daughter. An Aboriginal woman’s story of forced displacement as a child into a white family conveys a broader message about the systemic mistreatment of indigenous populations but in a film laid out with a keen storyteller’s skill.
In another case plucked from the upcoming SBIFF program’s maze of options, fiction and hard truth commingle in a fresh way in the docudrama Photophobia, put forth as Slovakia’s Oscar bid this year. In this semi-doc, based in a crowded metro station way station in Ukraine as shelling and wartime fears rage above-ground nearby, we get a taste of the cloistered desperation of bomb sheltering humanity, but with a subplot about a 12-year-old boy’s life folded into the factual context.
Elsewhere on the program grid, from the old-fashioned biopic spectrum comes Dance First, a U.K. film getting its U.S. premiere here. In it, Gabriel Byrne embodies the complex artist Samuel Beckett, in a film less concerned with standard rules of the biopic road than exploring the Nobel Prize–winning playwright’s tortured inner life.
In a general, more ambiguous yet palpable way, the avid SBIFF-goers among us can attest to the illusion of time and cultural travels as we manically bounce between the diverse textures of films/daily realities of different countries (48 are accounted for in this year’s program). However romanticized or unreal the notion, we can get a sense of having experienced the world through a mosaic of filmic fragments over the course of 10 days shared with others in darkened rooms.
Somewhere mid-festival, reality shifts, and film-watching saturation sets our senses reeling. It’s a film festival phenom, available on State Street once a year.
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