The Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Tuesday feted this year’s four recipients of the Outstanding Director of the Year Award.
The honor was created to recognize a select group of directors who have pushed the boundaries in their storytelling and created films that showcase the art of filmmaking at its best, including Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), David Fincher (“Mank”), Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”) and Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”).
The four directors received their awards and discussed their work Tuesday during a live-streamed event. The tribute was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.
Moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s longtime awards columnist, Scott Feinberg, awardees participated from remote locations. The event featured a 90-minute-plus conversation with the honorees about their work this year, as well as their insights for people aspiring a career path in the film industry.
“Scott has been an SBIFF moderator for 10 years,” SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling said. “We are so grateful to have him here tonight.”
Durling said of the directors: “In this past difficult year, these four exemplary storytellers showed us ways to dream and re-evaluate our perception of the world at large. They’re all rewriting cinema history, and it’s lucky for us to get to hear them converse with one another.”
Zhao was born in Beijing in 1982. Her father was an industrialist and real estate developer, and her mother was a hospital worker. To Vogue, Zhao described herself as “a rebellious teen, lazy at school.” When she was 15 years old, despite knowing nearly no English, her parents sent her to a private boarding school in the United Kingdom.
Zhao earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and later studied film production at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.
In 2015, Zhao directed her first feature film, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me.” Filmed on location at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the film depicts the relationship between a Lakota Sioux brother and his younger sister. In 2017, she directed “The Rider,” a contemporary western drama that follows a young cowboy’s journey to discover himself after a near-fatal accident ends his professional riding career.
In 2018, she directed her third feature film, “Nomadland.” The film was shot over four months while traveling the American West in an RV. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim. Released in 2021 by Searchlight Pictures, the film garnered the Golden Globe for Best Director, making Zhao the first woman of Asian descent honored. At 39, she is the second woman to win a Golden Globe for directing since Barbra Streisand in 1984.
“I had lived in New York City for 10 years,” Zhao said. “I was feeling disconnected. So what I did, like many Americans did, I moved out West to the South Dakota Badlands, where I felt at home. What I enjoy most now is the editing.”
In February, Variety reported, “With 34 awards season trophies for directing, 13 for screenplay and nine for editing, Chloe Zhao has surpassed Alexander Payne (‘Sideways’) as the most awarded person in a single awards season in the modern era.”
Fincher, 59, is a legendary director with 43 feature credits spanning from 1992 (“Alien 3”) for 20th Century Fox to 2020 (“Mank”) for Netflix. His films have received 40 nominations at the Academy Awards, including three for him as Best Director.
Born in Denver, Colorado, Fincher started filmmaking at an early age, directing numerous music videos, including Madonna’s “Express Yourself” in 1989 and “Vogue” in 1990. The script of “Mank” was inspired by his own family ancestors growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The son of Korean immigrants, Chung is a 43-year-old American film director. His debut feature, “Munyurangabo” (2007), was showcased at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was the first narrative feature film in the Kinyarwanda language. Chung had accompanied his wife, Valerie, an art therapist, to Rwanda a year earlier when she volunteered to work with those affected by the 1994 genocide. He shot the film in 11 days, working with a team of nonprofessional actors he found through local orphanages and using his students as crew members.
His semiautobiographical film “Minari” won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. For “Minari,” he received numerous other major awards and nominations, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 93rd Academy Awards.
“I figured I might have just one shot at making another film,” he said. “I needed to make it very personal and throw in everything I was feeling.”
Chung attended Yale University to study biology. With exposure to world cinema in his senior year, he dropped plans for medical school to pursue filmmaking. He later earned a master’s degree in fine arts in filmmaking at the University of Utah.
Vinterberg, 52, is a Danish film director who co-founded the Dogme 95 movement in filmmaking, which established rules for simplifying movie production. He is best known for the films “The Celebration” (1998), which he described: “The success of ‘The Celebration’ gave me many opportunities.” Vinterberg joined the SBIFF broadcast at 3 a.m. Copenhagen time.
Other films included “Submarino” (2010), “The Hunt” (2012), “Far from the Madding Crowd” (2015) and “Another Round,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
In 2019, Vinterberg lost his daughter in a car accident, and he dedicated “Another Round” to her, filming much of the film at his late daughter’s school with her classmates. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction.
During the SBIFF interview, Vinterberg said, “I made this film shortly after the death of my daughter. It kept me from insanity.”
The 36th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, presented by UGG, runs through Saturday with online events and free in-person screenings at two oceanfront drive-in theaters at Santa Barbara City College, 140 Loma Alta Drive in Santa Barbara.
Click here for more information about SBIFF, this year’s events schedule, and festival passes and tickets.
— Noozhawk contributing writer Rochelle Rose can be reached at rrose@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkSociety, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.