Eight World Premieres Set at Film Festival

The fifth Santa Barbara Film Festival, today through March 11, will present more than 75 films in 10 days, including eight world premieres, plus workshops, seminars and tributes to actor Rod Steiger, veteran animator Chuck Jones and Kenneth Branagh , star and director of the new “Henry V.”

There will be a special series of nine new or recent French pictures, starting with Coline Serreau’s comedy, “Mama, There’s a Man in Your Bed,” the festival’s opening-night attraction. Daniel Auteuil stars as a yogurt magnate who discovers traitors within with the aid of one of his company’s cleaning women (Firmine Richard). The festival closes March 11 with Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso.”

Among the other French films are “Un Amour Interdit” with Fernando Rey and Brigitte Fossey; “Australia,” with Jeremy Irons and Fanny Ardant; “La Fille de Quinze Ans,” in which Jacques Doillon stars as well as directs, and composer Michel Legrand’s autobiographical “Five Days in June,” which marks his directorial debut.

John Waters’ “Cry Baby,” billed as a “juvenile delinquent musical comedy love story” and starring Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, heads a lineup of 10 independent American features that also includes Ghasem Ebrahimian’s “The Suitors,” a haunting film about a young Iranian widow’s painful odyssey of self-discovery in Manhattan.

Among the films from England are Carlos Sorin’s comedy “Eversmile, New Jersey,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an American dentist promoting dental hygiene in Patagonia, and Mel Smith’s romantic comedy “The Tall Guy,” starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. From Australia there’s the thriller “Georgia,” starring Judy Davis, and from the Philippines Lino Brocka’s “Macho Dancer.”