A Fest-Goer’s Guide to TBA-Land

All good things come to end, and so it goes with SBIFF #39, closing tonight at the Arlington with the world premiere of Heather (Drugstore Cowboy, Boogie Nights) Graham’s Chosen Family, which she wrote and directed.

Meanwhile, the fest’s final day is chockablock with cinematic content for the taking. One of the beacons of hope for festival-goers is the empowered acronym TBA. Wisely, SBIFF pre-plans many TBA slots on the last two days of the festival to fly in films with popular demand or special artistic merit. Word-of-mouth buzz amongst the avid festival population is a critical component of the annual 10-day experience, and inevitably, certain coveted titles will slip through the cracks of people’s plans. To the rescue, with luck, come the TBA announcements.

Saturday’s TBA parade is set, and this humble SBIFF addict can at least vouch for several films well worth catching while the catching is good (again).

One of the true sleeper jewels of this year’s lineup is the Irish film That They May Face the Rising Sun, a slow-brew, luminous and meditative journey into pre-tech rural Ireland. There are also sassy old characters with just enough potty mouth to keep things bubbling (though not with the feckin’ expletive density of The Banshees of Inasherin).

Also worth seeing on Saturday are the Danish film Before It Ends, a twist on the refugee theme, regarding a Danish town late in WWII where German refugees are facing a health crisis and townsfolk facing a moral quandary over compassion vs. steering clear of aiding the enemy. Speaking of moral quandaries, the potent but dark, parable-like Bulgarian film Blaga’s Lessons got ‘em by the bushel, folded into a deceptively clean narrative package. On Earth as in Heaven is an intriguing Quebecois film about young sisters raised in Christian cult and seeking a way out and a way forward in their lives–one in a series of interesting and alternative coming of age films this year, alongside Mr. Freeman, Hoard and Excursion.Saturday also ushers in a veritable micr-ofest of worthy documentaries, from the poignant Aboriginal saga The Last Daughter to a cave-diving legend’s bio Diving into the Darkness. Giants Rising is both an inspiring celebration and educational portrait of magnificent coastal redwoods–what remains of them–and the Special Olympics World Games is a subject beautifully handled in All You Hear is Noise, wisely focusing on a few special athlete stories. Off in its own thematic corner of the doc section, First We Bombed New Mexico is a potent social activism-fueled report on the ongoing and government-neglected health hazards of fallout from the Trinity a-bomb test. The film’s timing, in the shadow of Oppenheimer release and hubbub, is impeccable.

Local color sneaks into the picture in both direct and indirect ways with the alluring documentary The Cowboy and the Queen, directed with poise and obvious affection for the subject by Andrea Nevins. The cowboy in question is famed horse whisperer trainer Monty Roberts, long based in Solvang, while the queen is equestrian-fixated Queen Elizabeth. Yes, that one. Montecitan Harry’s grandma. As relayed in this smart transhistorical account, including her Royal Highness visit to Santa Barbara County in the 1983, we get a moving portrait of a friendship between horse people concerned with a more compassionate view of training without breaking the animals.

Possibly the most inventive doc this year—but one with a powerful window on substance—was In the Rearview, shot mostly from the driver’s rearview mirror on Poland-bound vanloads of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the terror at home. The film offers a sense of life during wartime from a refreshing, and tragic vantage.

Quarantine Follies, Spanish Flu Division

By coincidence or providence, fest-goers this year got a double dose of the distinctive and deliciously hard-to-categorize Peter Sarsgaard on the big screens. There he was, in a brief criminal cameo as a gold-toothy pimp in Olmo Schnabel’s edgy and sometimes self-indulgent Pet Shop Days. But we got a much more substantial dose with Sarsgaard’s sly and cool leading man role in the satire Coup!, which packed Fiesta Theater 4 yesterday afternoon at its U.S. Premiere (after a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival).

Sarsgaard threw himself into the role of a charismatic and subversive cook on an estate sequestered during the Spanish flu in 1918. The patriarch of the household (Billy Magnusson) is an ostensibly virtuous vegetarian, champion of the working class and a dubious muckraking journalist. But a swirl of ulterior motives and layers of deceit complicate and juice up the plot, not to mention suggesting parallels to the rich folk-scamming Saltburn and Upstairs/Downstairs. Sarsgaard’s conniving character works angles in ways resembling Jack Nicholson and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Co-directors/writers Julius Schulman and Austin Stark–who met as who have known each other since early childhood–concocted the screenplay during the pandemic, partly so as “not to go crazy,” as Schulman said in a Q&A. They were also interested in telling a quarantine story not from the recent COVID but during the “flu from Spain.” 

A script found its way to Sarsgaard, who enthusiastically signed on, helped develop the project and improvised on set. Schulman noted that the actor has “a cerebral intensity and shares our dark, absurd sense of humor. He rarely gets to play these colorful characters, instead of these quiet roles.”

Stark commented that “we were seeing a lot of wealthy families escaping to remote estates, taking their staff with them. A strong thematic current was the conflict between civilization and savagery, and it was more about class conflict than politics.”