SBIFF Day 6 | Forever Young, Super Bowling for Stars
From Neil Young and Ariana Grande to Turkish Filmmaker Hikmet Kerem Özcan, Superbowl Sunday Had Something for Everyone in Santa Barbara
Ariana Grande interviewed by Dave Karger at the 2025 SBIFF Virtuosos Awards | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom
Dateline: Sunday night around seven. The Eagles had just landed, so to speak, with a pummeling 40-22 score against the Chiefs at the Super Bowl. I strolled over from the scene of the bustling “thrill of victory/agony of defeat” zone in Public Market and was magnetized by a thunderous roar in front of the Arlington Theatre.
On this night of SBIFF, the Arlington had the highest scream factor going for it. A bulging throng of fans and onlookers crowded the front of the Arlington to greet a cavalcade of younger screen stars convening on the Virtuoso Awards tribute. In a festival otherwise more focused on older acting legends in the tribute spotlight, this was the night of Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Mikey Madison, Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, a last-minute addition) and others. The result: an SRO house, including an excitable young demographic unafraid to let loose.
First up, Grande sat in the hot seat with TCM’s Dave Karger, bedecked in a puffy pink dress (Grande, not Karger). She talked about her current status as an Oscar nominee for her good witchy work in Wicked: was this a dream of hers? “I wouldn’t even let my mind go that far. Just playing Glinda was a dream of life.” Glinda, she said, “seems fluffy at times, but with a human heart. You get to feel pain and humanness” through the character.
Grande was followed by Clarence Maclin, the former inmate in the arts rehabilitation-themed Sing Sing whose vivid performance turned him into an instant celebrity — with a cause. His rapid rise to the national spotlight was, he commented, initially “a bucket list thing. This is it now. There is no plan B.”
For a full report on the evening, stay tuned.
On and Off the Bus
There is no hope for film critical objectivity for those of us massive, lifelong Neil Young fans trying to assess the artistic success of Coastal, Darryl Hannah’s warm bath of a rock doc on the earthy (literally) and drolly funny Young. To file the film under the loose-fit genre of rock concert films does it a disservice: Young’s wife and chronicler Hannah has achieved a rare level of “rock doc” intimacy here, giving a fly’s eye view — or more precisely, a lover’s-eye view — of the musical/touring process perhaps never before seen on screen.
Hannah shot much of the film on her iPhone, following Young at length on the tour bus, swapping stories and banter with his Silver Eagle bus driver — virtually a co-star in the film — and flowing from bus to backstage and onstage and back on the road with a fluid motion. It’s all shot in elegantly rustic black-and-white film stock. Rusticity never sleeps, in the case of the rough-edges-loving Young’s music, life and worldview.
There have been other Young-on-film and Young-in-film treatments in the past, including Jim Jarmusch’s Year of the Horse and Young’s own quirky venture into fantasy-filmmaking, Greendale (the stage version of which he brought to the Santa Barbara Bowl in 2004). But Coastal is something of a unique, private-stash specialness, offering a slow-brewing and lived-in account of Young’s first tour in nearly four years, stopping in three of the 13 stops on the 2023 West Coast solo tour (which also brought him to the Bowl, though no footage from that concert appears in the film).
The tour was something special, with a creative stage set including a Lionel Train layout (he actually bought the Lionel company, partly to outfit sets for physically challenged people such as his son Ben, with cerebral palsy, who joins the team on the Silver Eagle). He also brought out vintage instruments from his collection, including a vintage theater organ he bought at a Redwood City pawn shop (he thinks), busting out a version of the Buffalo Springfield hit “Mr. Soul.”
Young, as can happen, leaned on new songs as-yet unfamiliar to the crowds — including the timely themed mass singalong “Love Earth” — but also folded in anthems such as “Comes a Time.” Perhaps ironically, the last song we hear in the film is Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” as played instrumentally by a guitar-wielding Young on the tour bus.
In Santa Barbara this week, the man/the myth Young did show up, in the “EARTH“-promoting T-shirt seen in the film, alongside Hannah, both at the Friday-night screening at the Riviera Theatre and yesterday at the Film Center. Hannah explained that with her film, she “wanted the feel of being on the bus and the way that flowed right onstage. I also wanted to show how hilarious Neil is. I wanted to show his dry sense of humor.”
With this typical enigmatic simplicity, Young explained that “it’s just about our life. I did a tour, and she likes to film things. We got together. Whatever it is is what it is.”
Someone from the audience asked Young if his guitar strap was the same one he’d had for decades. “Yeah,” he quipped, “and same guitar and amps. Maybe the same strings,” triggering an audience guffaw. “I’m amazed I’ve lasted this long doing the same shit.”
Refocusing on the film, Young noted, “I really loved the architecture in the film, and the way Daryl shot that part of it. It was very natural and cool. It had a groove to it,” he said, then turning directly to his partner, “so thanks, honey.”
Turkish Treasure
Clearly, one of the finest films of the festival so far is the Turkish Hakki, literally about treasure hunting and a human drama of Shakespearean dimensions. In what plays like a Shakespearean tragedy in a small Turkish town in the Aegean region, and a study of the destructive powers of greed, a man who struggles to feed his family selling trinkets and giving tours literally discovers treasure in his backyard. Digging up a stubborn tree root, he bumps into an ancient sculpture, which turns out to be of value as an antiquity.
Digging, both the actual, desperate act and the symbolic obsession, becomes a driving force in the tale, which plays like a parable with visceral energy onscreen. We watch the steady process of his undoing, from decency and moral uprightness to a man obsessed with unearthing more treasures and transcending his poverty. In effect, he digs himself into a hole of ever-deepening consequences of self-destruction. The final shot caps off an increasingly claustrophobic cinematic journey.
First-time filmmaker Hikmet Kerem Özcan makes an auspicious debut with the film, and spoke in a Q&A after the screening. He explained that in this ancient area of Turkey, “it’s very common to search for treasure.” Hearing about a real-life story similar to this, when he was young, “sparked my mind.”
Özcan also spoke about the narrative arc of the plot, which involves “some kind of transformation. In the first part, he has a good life, good family. But he decides to travel to the dark side of life. Digging is a metaphor. Every time he goes to work, the problem gets larger.” Metaphor and tragedian story structure aside, the underlying message is, as Özcan says, that “greed and ambition are human.”
It’s a timeless message, and a timely one.
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