Read more from our SBIFF 2026 cover story here.
Thankfully, SBIFF has generally been very good to the cause and the thriving community of local filmmakers over the years. For some years, the festival’s Santa Barbara film sidebar was curated and also nurtured by the late, great Russ Spencer. The closing night slot in 2018 was devoted to short subjects from and about Santa Barbara, a point of local pride, while 2019’s closer was the surfing doc Spoons: A Santa Barbara Story.
We might almost wish there could be a separate locavore filmfest in town, given that the local film component of the program can sometimes get lost in the mix of higher-profile and international cinema. But the going is again good this year for Santa Barbara filmmakers, in the areas of short subjects, documentaries, and even a smattering of feature films. Here is a selected sampler of what’s on, freshly cooked in and from our town.
Of the features crop, Dale Griffiths Stamos is the writer-director of Imbalance, a drama about the balance of power and legality when desire begins to smolder between a teacher and student. Also on the features list, the film Eternal Stoke, director Joshua Pomer’s documentary about Santa Barbara surfer Chris Brown, had a “world premiere” at the Lobero last summer, but the SBIFF screening represents another world premiere, of the film’s “final cut.” The doc tells Brown’s story, as a star of the surfing world and big-wave rider and local hero. Amy Wendel’s Relatively Normal, about a teenager and her dysfunctional family, is also on the feature docket with its world premiere.
A few years ago, director Robert Redfield made the impressive and deeply Santa Barbara–rooted documentary More than Just a Party Band, about longtime music hero Spencer Barnitz. That film wasn’t accepted into the SBIFF running, although it has screened at the Ojai Film Festival, Santa Barbara Independent Film Festival, and others. This year, Redfield has skin in the festival game with his new narrative short film Committee Animal, featuring Santa Barbara actress and raconteur Leslie Zemeckis.
From the same artistic family (her husband is celebrated director Robert Zemeckis) comes son Rhys Zemeckis, more typically a landscape painter but stepping out as a filmmaker here. In his cheekily monikered Nuns with Guns, said nuns resort to robbery to save their imperiled parish church.
Kerrilee Gore’s Stand by, Mother, based on a fantasy-like stage play, involves non-professional child actors from Santa Barbara, in what the filmmaker describes as an “eco-fable.”
Fil-Am, by Ralph Torrefranca (a former KJEE deejay), chronicles the frightening migration of a 16-year-old Filipino youth braving the transition from his homeland to a new, radically different life in Santa Barbara. And Trevor Silverstein’s A Sunday on the Moon surveys the warm camaraderie between a man and his nephew, on a range of subjects including nature, outer space and closely held ambitions.
On the documentary front, The Other Roe, from writer-director Wendy Eley Jackson, brings to light the all-too obscure legal case Doe v. Bolton, passed the same day as Roe v. Wade and vital to the cause of reproductive rights. Documentary filmmaker Olivia Hille advocates for the revival of California’s state symbol, the grizzly bear, in The Bear Beneath, while Ethan Maniquis’s La Tormenta deals with the power crisis in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and the community-solidarity-lined effort for keeping the lights on.
On a more personal note, To My 14-Year-Old Self tells the story of direct Arctic encounters with orca whales, by Santa Barbara–bred and now based film composer Cody Westheimer. His work went locally live and public with his symphonic piece Water, Earth, Sky, premiered by the Santa Barbara Symphony in 2022. At SBIFF this year, he puts his foot forward as an actual filmmaker, in sight, sound, and content.
See sbiff.org for the complete film schedule.
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