Santa Barbara’s SBIFF Film Center Hits Town, Year-Round

There’s a new movie game in town, and screen time is upon us. This weekend marks the public unveiling of the ambitious new SBIFF Film Center story, in which the former Fiesta 5 multiplex is being taken over by the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF). The new multi-screen film forum is a next-act branching-out for SBIFF, which acquired and radically improved and transformed the Riviera Theatre in 2016. This time, though, the effort lands the festival and its cinematic imperative in the city center, with a hoped-for side effect of helping to revitalize a State Street null zone.

Determined and enterprising SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling asserts that “people are hungry to go to the movies, but they want different and thoughtful programming and state-of-the-art projection and sound. People want an experience and also a sense of community. I feel the festival provides the latter, and now we will have a year-round canvas — a bigger tent on which to welcome everyone.

“And the fact that we will also be helping with the revitalization of the downtown corridor is icing on the cake. Art’s main goal is to enrich people’s lives, and that is what we’re hoping to achieve with the Film Center.”

Although news of the center’s manifestation has come to public light only recently, the roots go deep. Durling notes, “We’ve been dreaming about this for close to 10 years — running an arthouse. I started making inquiries about possible venues with room for several screens, but nothing was available or could work. Then Michael Towbes reached out — unexpectedly — and we took over and renovated the Riviera. It’s been eight years, and it taught us how to run and program year-round.

“We learned how to cultivate an audience and how to curate interesting programming ranging from retrospectives, ‘late-nite’ movies, etc. Yet I was always feeling constricted by only having one screen. Certain films would do well, but we wouldn’t be able to keep them.”

Is he both excited and nervous on the verge of the Film Center’s opening? “I’m more excited than nervous. If it hadn’t been for the experience of eight years of the Riviera, I would feel more nervous.”

In the first slate of films scheduled in the Film Center, variety is telling and foreshadowing. There will be important new releases — the superb indie film Bird from acclaimed director Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Cow), the new August Wilson film adaptation The Piano Lesson, and the doc Dahomey by Mati Diop (Atlantics). Family- and holiday-leaning fare includes The Wizard of Oz (ever deserving of a good big-screening encounter) and The Princess Bride, and, for film geeks, a welcome Fellini retrospective.

Durling describes the center’s opening menu as “a sample of what we’re going to be doing. Each hall will have its niche — foreign films, documentaries, independent films, restored films and retrospectives, and family programming of classics and new animated films.”

That range of cinematic fare closely matches the curatorial agenda of the annual SBIFF — with more space given to family and animated films. On artistic and also logistical fronts, the festival and the Film Center will enjoy a symbiotic interweaving. Having the Film Center, says Durling, “guarantees that SBIFF will always have a venue for our annual big event. But the ethos of the year-round programming at the Film Center and SBIFF are one and the same.”

Filmic qualities aside, this weekend’s opening could be considered less a grand opening than a soft and funky-around-the-edges brand of opening. A major renovation will be undertaken next year, but the energetic momentum of the project necessitated pulling together more of a workable, fast, cheap and slightly out-of-control marshaling of resources and equipment to get the center up and running.

“When MTC [Metropolitan Theater Corporation] vacated the premises,” Durling explains, “they took everything out and left empty halls. We cleaned and scrubbed the space, got seats — quirkily mismatched — and screens and projectors. It’s all temporary, yet a great improvement to what was there before. I think people will be delighted to see it feel less funky. Once the festival ends, we will shut it down and do a major restoration and upgrades — similar to the metamorphosis that the Riviera underwent.”

The metamorphosis of the Fiesta 5 into the SBIFF Film Center wasn’t an entirely smooth or untrammeled process, rather a dramatic and drawn-out tale involving courting and fighting with the city, Metropolitan Theaters, and other forces (see Nick Welsh’s cover story for the full scoop here). Have the negotiation obstacles and challenges leading up to this moment made the current flowering all the sweeter? Durling answers pithily: “All’s well that ends well.” 

This weekend, all’s well that begins well, with fine reasons to descend the compound’s stairs into an “underground” cinema temple in progress.

For info and schedules, see sbiffriviera.com.