International Fine Arts Film Festival Santa Barbara Presents Fifth Season Online
The International Fine Arts Film Festival has announced its winners, a robust selection of films from many countries that celebrate and promote excellence in art disciplines: Animation, Dance, Documentary, Experimental, Narrative and Original Score. Winners have been chosen by twelve judges from across the nation and their picks are comprehensive in scoring from rankings in filmmaking to the film’s ability to generate interest in and touch the arts. Creators include painters and sculptors, hand-drawn animators, professional dancers, musicians and over the edge experimental artists who combine many art forms.
The top winners are those films chosen as best “Winner” or “Finalist.” These include UpWell, Initiation, Walls of Limerick, Bisque, Still Untitled, Perfect Dancer, The Prepartor, Gloria’s Call, Tip Toland, Outlier, Winter, and Birch Grove. These films are from the USA to Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland and Poland. The runner ups, which include Semi-Finalist and Honorable Mention are also listed and available for individual viewing on the Winner’s Page on the website. These also included five Director’s Choice awards picked from a remaining list of 75 films.
Notable is UpWell, directed by J'aime Morrison, with deep Montecito roots, won the top prize in Experimental. It was judged highly for its storyline and filmmaking, which included women surfers in California, and moreover for its display of soulful and sheer beauty. The two judges who chose it are not, nor have ever been surfing, nor live near oceans. Founding director Lynn Holley said their choices are a testament to the power of a great film. Bruce Fowler Surfboard has donated to the festival and a cash prize will be awarded to the filmmaker in support of women filmmakers and women surfers.
The website’s homepage offers an introduction by Lynn Holley, who created this festival a number of years ago, and which since 2017, has always been held in a physical space at SBCAST, or in the gallery of Santa Barbara’s Jewish Community Center.
“The amount of films accepted this season is a hundred times more than ever,” Holley said. “I was shut down in my apartment, and I kept extending the time of entry. So as I enjoyed watching so many films, I just started selecting more for eventual screening. I figured it would be a great opportunity for filmmakers to be in a festival, and I believed it would be certainly easier than trying to manage so many people in a physical space. I was wrong. Online is very time consuming and difficult, but my skill-sets on building websites and managing films and making movies has increased exponentially.”
Holley is planning sixth season in 2022 as a much smaller event with a combination of physical and virtual screening. Funding support for the film festival depends on donations. The film festival’s fiscal receiver is Santa Barbara’s Art Without Limits, a non-profit mentoring organization.
Holley has personally created the website and its online viewing to accommodate the staggering amount of films. The homepage also offers over twenty trailers of films in the festival and provides detailed information on each film.
About the film festival founder
Most recently, Holley is the former curator of SBCAST in Santa Barbara and the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara. She is also a writer who completed a children’s Christmas book in 2020, a collaborative effort between three generations, her daughter Wendy and granddaughter Eva.
Holley has worked in and established galleries from New York to Santa Barbara and on to Florida, where she was the executive director of the Marco Island Center for the Arts. She holds a Master’s Degree with Merit in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester England and she is a former journalist who has reviewed films for daily papers and written, lectured and created installations that touch on current subjects, as in her most recent installation, The Nature of Walls, which opened at SBCAST in 2018, and which she developed into a lecture. Holley was also a featured presenter at an international Museum Conference, which took place in England in 2016. Her lecture title was alluring and widely admired: The Dance of the Muses from Las Vegas to the Louvre: Perception and the Power of Myth. She has delivered this lecture twice in Santa Barbara, and it will be online later this year.
Does Holley have a favorite film? “Yes,” she said, but she is not telling, yet. “There are so many films that have spurred my interest in exploring their ideas further, and it is not just the winners of which I am speaking. There is an incredible amount of wisdom on the arts throughout this festival, and on filmmaking,” she added. “It is all there and free for the taking. My gift to the world during the pandemic.”
