Santa Clarita Film Fest Outlasts Its Critics

It still doesn’t rival Sundance or Telluride, but the Santa Clarita International Film Festival has proved to be as hardy as the region’s desert vegetation.

The seventh annual film fest starts this afternoon and will offer a week’s worth of family movies, industry panels, workshops and readings of original screenplays.

As executive director and co-founder Chris Shoemaker recalls, seven years ago naysayers predicted the festival would never survive because it refused to screen films that included gratuitous violence, nudity and most four-letter words.

But time has proved the critics wrong.

When the festival began in 1994, Shoemaker and his colleagues had to rent films to fill out the week-long schedule. This year, 150 films were submitted for consideration, of which 54 will be screened. That’s 15% more than last year, Shoemaker said, which he finds especially heartening given the explosion in the number of film festivals worldwide.

Ten of the screenings will be premieres.

One of the draws of the festival is the closing gala at which industry stalwarts and others are honored. This year director Arthur Hiller is among the honorees, for such cult films as “The Americanization of Emily” and “The Hospital” as well as “Love Story” and other box-office successes.

The late “Friz” Freleng, one of the geniuses of Warner Bros. animation in its prime, was the first to receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award.

Since then the annual animation award has been called the Friz, and this year’s winners are Disney legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Pals since they met at Stanford University in 1931, the octogenarian artists are the last survivors among the studio’s famed Nine Old Men.

The Santa Clarita International Film Festival opens today and continues through March 16. All screenings are at the Edwards Cinemas, Valencia Town Center. For information, call (661) 257-3131.