The Santa Barbara International Film Festival announced that it’s close to signing a lease, pending final city approval, for the former Fiesta Five cineplex at 916 State Street (Canon Perdido/Carrillo). The new Film Center will serve as a hub for the film festival and screen films the rest of the year.
“This film mecca will year-round show foreign films, independent cinema, documentaries, retrospectives of classic films and important filmmakers, family programming, as well as free educational and community programming,” said the press release. “It will serve as a place for discourse, education, and community, with a commitment to presenting diverse social, political, historical, and cultural realities,” whatever that means. (“Diverse historical realities” sounds related to “alternative facts”….)
The plan is to open on November 15, and then close for renovations after the film festival in February. Improvements include “state-of-the-art sound and projection, new comfortable seating, high-quality concessions including local artisanal snacks, brand new heating and air conditioning, an art gallery in the lobby, and much more.” KEYT reports that the organization will begin a $15 million fundraising drive for the project. Go ahead and chip in now.
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Why did they rip out and throw away the seats?
Jeez, rather snide aside for a cultural news squib, eh? “Diverse historical realities” is clearly a reference to the idea that minority viewpoints are “undertold” — that we all learn about Presidents in school, in industrial leaders like Ford and Carnegie, but few details about African-American slave life in the South, how the Chinese lived who built the US railroads, the inner (or even outer) lives of the Eastern Europeans who worked in Ford’s factories or Chicago’s slaughterhouses. “Alternative facts,” by contrast — and hopefully you know this — are deliberate lies by those in power to unethically undermine opponents, to claim there’s a dispute about the facts when there is none.
VIVA MI AMIGO! I read that slighted verbiage a bit differently, but can see your POV clearly too