Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2012

What does a father mean to a daughter? Filmmaker Nadia Josefine El Said poses that question to a handful of women who share their poignant personal stories, told in beautifully crafted vignettes using stylish graphics, drawings and staged tableaux.

*Newly restored print of this film classic. In a futuristic Britain, a gang of teenagers go on the rampage every night, beating and raping helpless victims. After one of the boys quells an uprising in the gang, they knock him out and leave him for the police to find. He agrees to try "aversion therapy" to shorten his jail sentence. When he is eventually let out, he hates violence, but the rest of his gang members are still after him.

A group of 12 resistance fighters unite around their leader as they prepare a coup d'état. After he is captured and tortured, the resistance leader now hunts those who were once closest to him.

A film about remembrance of a loved one, as illustrated through the bereavement of those closest to the loss.

Evoking some of the most renowned Czech films of the sixties, CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS in particular, Tomás Lunák weaves a spell around his tale of Alois, a middle-aged dispatcher who works at a small railway station in the Sudeten, the mountainous region along the Czech borders with Germany and Poland. The film looks back to troubled and still resonant moments in history, yet as Alois goes about his daily life, another more insidious reality surrounds him. ALOIS NEBEL seems to flow effortlessly across the screen. Visually, this film is an absolute delight, its rotoscope animation allowing Lunák to concentrate on the essential in every shot, while the choice of black and white perfectly matches the tone of the story. Atmospheric and drenched in mood, ALOIS NEBEL is destined to become a classic of the form. - Abridged and Adapted from Toronto International Film Festival, Piers Handling

Landing on the global movie scene like an über-talented extraterrestrial, Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (DOGTOOTH) engages with the idea of substitutes. Consisting of two men and two women of varying ages, ALPS is the name of an underground group that offers a most unusual service: they inhabit the role of your dearly departed, adopting their mannerisms and wearing their clothes until you can accept that they're gone. Lanthimos ingeniously populates ALPS with one-dimensional characters, whose lack of complexity allows them to slip effortlessly into other people's personalities. That is, except for Monte Rosa (Aggeliki Papoulia), a hard-working nurse who instigates an imaginary friendship with one of her patients. Lanthimos drops a few hints about her background: a stagnant home life, a demanding father. Or does he? Who's to say that this nameless father figure isn't just another one of her clients? When a director has the ability to make you question your own perception, you know you're witnessing greatness. - Abridged from Toronto International Film Festival, Dimitri Eipides

From the time he directed MEAN STREETS in 1973 to this year’s HUGO, director Martin Scorsese has established himself as a modern day cinematic master. Scorsese has garnered six Academy Award® nominations for Best Director (including a 2007 Oscar® win for THE DEPARTED). With the films TAXI DRIVER (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and GOODFELLAS (1990) ensconced into the AFI’s Top 100 American film list, Scorsese is widely known as the greatest American film director of his era. The filmmaker has earned numerous accolades including France’s Legion of Honor, Italy’s Order of Merit and the U.S.’s Kennedy Center honors. Additionally, Scorsese recently took home the best director award at the Golden Globes in 2012 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2011. For this lifetime dedication to making movies as well as preserving them through The Film Foundation, SBIFF is extremely proud to award Martin Scorsese the 2012 American Riviera Award.

As clearcutting continues to ravage California's coastal redwood region, an environmental activist decides to defend the McKay Tract. Living atop an ancient redwood canopy, he fights for a sustainable future.