SBIFF Day 9 | Balletic Action Connection, and News from Mongolia

A Week and Some Change in and Our Senior Arts Writer is Still Going Strong

Zoe Saldana and moderator Scott Feinberg | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

The Zoe Saldaña tribute night at the Arlington started later than expected, and for a very good and worthy reason. On the red carpet, after the de rigueur photo ops and sound-bite supplying with professional reporters, Saldaña was extra open and generous in speaking with eager young journalists in line. The full-ish house could wait. That’s the way she rolls.

Saldaña made the quick drive to “work” from her Geroge Washington Smith–designed Montecito home, where she lives with her family. She is the famed and athletic star of action and sci-fi cinema who has come in from the cold and into the light of art film/musical glory in Emilia Pérez, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Zoe Saldana at the SBIFF American Riviera Awards, February 12, 2025. | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom
It was a family night on the red carpet for Zoe Saldana | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom
Zoe Saldana and Rob Lowe at SBIFF 2025 | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

As laid out in the life/art summarizing night, her path to high-profile roles in the Avatar and Avenger franchises started out with dreams of dancing, in ballet and beyond. Her first film role, in Center Stage, she told moderator Scott Feinberg (Hollywood Reporter), “was a kind of kismet — a way to say goodbye to my old life and hello to the new path.” She also explained that “I don’t think I could have done Avatar without ballet. It gave me awareness of my body. Ballet was a tool for action and sci-fi movies.”

Coming full circle, her body-aware talents — not to mention her singing chops — feed into the wonder that is her Emilia Pérez role.

‘To Kill a Mongolian Horse’ | Credit: Courtesy

From Mongolia, with Love and Loathing

You never know where micro-themes within the SBIFF program might take you. This year, two of the more intriguing films in the program deal with the common theme of Mongolian families forced, by conditions including climate change, to forgo ancient lifestyles and landscapes and move from the harsh but deeply rooted grasslands terrain to urban regions for survival.

In the first wave of festival films, we caught the slow-moving but engrossing saga The Wolves Always Come at Night, actually a docufiction creation by Australian director Gabrielle Brady. In the second wave of festival films comes a related but distinctly different Mongolian drama, To Kill a Mongolian Horse. This fascinating and artfully wrought film, from writer-director Xiaoxuan Jiang, is a an exotic, melancholic, and meditative tale of herdsman and horsepeople driven to sorry ends by shifting economic and cultural forces.

Among the critical distinctions of this film, compared to Wolves, are the gaudy pageantry of trick-riding horseplay scenes, the exploitative interventions of Chinese interlopers in Mongolia, and a memorably audacious scene in which our soul-bruised protagonist rides his prized horse through a banquet and swipes a bottle of liquid courage and abandon.

Films like these are the reason some of us love SBIFF.

‘The Wolves Always Come at Night’ | Credit: Courtesy

SBIFF Trivia Dept.

There is an odd point of discussion going around town after Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious “pee break” moment at the end of his tribute night at the Arlington. During his absence, festival head Roger Durling made joking small talk with moderator Josh Brolin and award presenter, director James Mangold, and when Brolin asked if this was an unprecedented event, Durling recalled that Javier Bardem also felt the call of nature during his tribute back in 2008 for No Country for Old Men (also featuring Brolin, incidentally).

But I do remember at least one other such instance, two years ago when Todd Fields, of Tár fame, snuck away to the lavabo. Hive mind: Do you remember any other such instances? These trivial details do matter, for archival sake.

‘I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol’ | Credit: Courtesy

Late-Night Bites

In the great tradition of quirky, kitschy, and edgy films screening in the late-night slot at arthouse theaters and film festivals, SBIFF has stepped up its late-night menu this year. There is something special about joining a like-minded crowd for late-shift cinema, such as happened with a decent-sized Monday-night crowd taking in I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, an archival material-powered doc about underrated early pistol Glen Matlock.

The night before, we caught the gonzo Bulgarian comedy Triumph, based on the true story of an official, military-guided dig for a supernatural power source led — and misled — by a clairvoyant. (The film features Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, also seen around SBIFF, in O Horizon and The Apprentice).

One of the most poetic documentaries on the program, also screened in the late-night slot, is the affectingly ambient To Close Your Eyes and See Fire, essentially an impressionistic portrait of Beirut in the years after the infamous 2020 port explosion, causing more than 200 deaths and an aura of dread around the city. In this roaming, narration-free doc, we get an omniscient sense of the city’s inner and outer life.

For sheer adrenaline-pumping grit, it’s hard to beat The Quiet Ones, about the biggest cash heist in Danish history. It may not have been wise to watch this knuckle-biter right before bedtime, but hungry film fans do what they have to do, while the getting’s good.