SBIFF 2018 Wrap-Up

As SBIFF 2018 came to a close on Saturday night, with a heartwarming and civic-minded roster of Santa Barbara documentaries, the festival board president Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com) introduced the evening with more than just the expected wrap-up rhetoric. “It has been an amazing festival,” she told the packed crowd at the Arlington, “and at an important time. Didn’t we just all need this?” She was referring, of course, to the recent mudslides — occurring three weeks before SBIFF’s opening night — and their ongoing, collective post-traumatic aftermath.

Later that night, at the closing party well-lubed by event sponsor Belvedere Vodka, the festival’s intrepid and sociable executive director Roger Durling was being feted with due congratulations, while trying to explain a general thematic arc to the festival at this special and tender moment in Santa Barbara. “I wanted to start big (which he did, with Emilio Estevez’s quite fine and humane opening night film the public) and then bring it back home,” he said.

The plan worked wonders, and the Arlington throng happily soaked in the tales of what makes Santa Barbara … well, Santa Barbara. I don’t think I was the only one who sat in the glow of area-made docs — of all levels of slickness — and community stories on Sunday night and suddenly had the epiphany: “I love this town.”