The 38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which will take place from Feb. 8 through Feb. 18, has already announced an impressive lineup of screenings and a star-studded roster of actors and actresses who will attend career-retrospective tributes at the fest, including Cate Blanchett (whose evening I will be moderating on Feb. 10), Brendan Fraser, Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.
On Monday, the fest revealed that a vast majority of this year’s Oscar-nominated directors, writers and producers will also be in attendance to participate on special panels.
At the Arlington Theatre on the evening of Feb. 17, three of the five best director nominees — Tár’s Todd Field, Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and The Banshees of Inisherin’s Martin McDonagh — will be on hand to collect the fest’s Outstanding Directors of the Year Award following separate and group conversations, which will be moderated by yours truly. (Additional honorees/participants may yet be added — stay tuned!)
Earlier in the fest, on Saturday, Feb. 11, those four individuals will also represent their three films on the Writers Panel alongside Living’s Kazuo Ishiguro (the sixth Nobel winner to be Oscar-nominated, after George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Harold Pinter and Bob Dylan), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’s Rian Johnson (an original screenplay nominee for the first Knives Out and now an adapted screenplay nominee for its sequel), The Fabelmans’ Tony Kushner (a Pulitzer winner for Angels in America), Triangle of Sadness’ Ruben Östlund (winner of this year’s Palme d’Or), All Quiet on the Western Front’s Lesley Paterson and Women Talking’s Sarah Polley. IndieWire’s Anne Thompson will moderate.
Later that same day, Claudia Puig will preside over the fest’s Women’s Panel, which will include Anne Alvergue, the director of the best documentary short nominee The Martha Mitchell Effect; Oscar winner Ruth E. Carter, a best costume design nominee for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; Hannah Minghella, the producer of the best animated short nominee The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse; Domee Shi, the director of the best animated feature nominee Turning Red; Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, a sound editor on the best sound nominee Avatar: The Way of Water; and Mary Zophres, a best costume design nominee for Babylon.
The following day, Sunday, Feb. 12, Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Times will anchor the Producers Panel, which will consist of Tár’s Field, Elvis’ Gail Berman, Top Gun: Maverick’s Jerry Bruckheimer, Women Talking’s Dede Gardner, All Quiet on the Western Front’s Malte Grunert, The Fabelmans’ Kristie Macosko Krieger, Avatar: The Way of Water’s Jon Landau and Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Jonathan Wang.
And later that day, the fest will debut a new gathering, the International Directors Panel, under the oversight of fest director Roger Durling, on which all five best international feature nominees will be represented: The Quiet Girl’s Colm Bairéad, All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger (whose film is also nominated for best picture, a rarity for a non-English-language film), Close’s Lukas Dhont, Argentina, 1985’s Santiago Mitre and EO’s Jerzy Skolimowski.