SBIFF ’09: Welcome to the Show

Rather than slouching toward its milestone silver anniversary status next year, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival at age 24 is basking in a slow and steady upward mobility, both on local and, more importantly, global fronts. Starting tonight with the ceremonial klieg light-enhanced opening gala at the Arlington and running for 10 days with more than 200 film titles, the festival will once again be in the town’s face, a happy occasion for filmgoers and merchants seeking an influx of off-season tourist dollars.

On the local level, the festival has no equal among concentrated cultural events in town. For 10 days, SBIFF reaches out into a broad public cross-section-not just cinema geeks and celebrity gawkers-and rightly commands the spotlight. By international standards, the festival has elevated its standing in the last several years (“the Roger Years”) both vis- -vis the expanding film festival circuit and the Oscar ramp-up Hollywood scene.

Word has it that Santa Barbara recently earned a kudo on the Top 12 tourist destination list in America. Our position as a top-drawer tourist town is once again confirmed by objective outside parties, for better and worse. Could SBIFF be a candidate for the top dozen film fests, were there such a thing? Quite possibly.