2014 SBIFF Director’s Panel

Reviewed by Poya Salari. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014.

The directors on the 2014 Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Director’s Panel, were Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), Jennifer Lee (“Frozen”), Morgan Neville (“20 feet from stardom”), Joshua Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing”) and Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”). All of the director’s have been nominated for an Academy Award for their work.

I found the panel really interesting as two of the films were documentaries, and two others were foreign language films, while the fifth was an animated feature. The fact that all the films on panel were interesting and critically acclaimed, made it even more enjoyable. The directors each started out by talking about the backstory of their films and how they came about and what might have drawn them to the project. I found Felix Van Groeningen talking about how The Broken Circle Breakdown was made really interesting, how they adapted the film from a play and what elements they added in order for it to work as feature film, and just how they tackled that situation in general.

The directors went on to talk about the process of making their films. When Joshua Oppenheimer was talking about the making of his documentary The Act of Killing, the things he was talking about that occurred during the making of his film, were really gripping and very insightful.

All of the directors in general gave good talks about the making of their films. Personally, I wanted to hear more from Paolo Sorrentino, who was speaking mostly through a translator and giving pretty short answers. Having said that, I still enjoyed some of his answers. One I enjoyed in particular was when he said the with The Great Beauty they set out to make a film about everything, but instead they made a film about nothing.

Something very nice and important with this panel was that it had a woman on it, Jennifer Lee who made Frozen. As we all know directing has been male dominated for some time, but now you see more and more women stepping up, which makes me very happy.