Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, left, and Sundance Film Festival Director Eugene Hernandez discuss Schnabel’s film “In the Hand of Dante” at the Sonoma International Film Festival on Friday, March 27, 2026.
Melania Mahoney
Julian Schnabel’s latest movie prompted a wave of walkouts at the Sonoma International Film Festival, fueling a testy exchange between the Oscar-nominated director and his audience.
It was the most notable highlight in a buzzy five-day film festival, punctuated by Sonoma’s No Kings rally and capped by a made-in-Sonoma indie film, which closed the festival on Sunday, March 29.
There likely have been few post-film discussions in the festival’s 29-year history that could match Schnabel’s. As he sat through his latest movie, the star-studded “In the Hand of Dante,” at Sonoma’s Veterans Hall on Friday, March 27, about half-dozen people left during the 2½-hour film’s first hour. But by the final hour, that trickle turned into a steady stream as about two dozen viewers headed for the exits.
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At one point near the end, a patron’s cell phone went off, further disrupting the screening.
Schnabel — who watched the film near the front of the theater while sitting with pal Tom Waits, the musician and sometime actor who lives in Sonoma County — addressed the walkouts immediately as the post-film discussion moderated by Sundance Film Festival Director Eugene Hernandez began.
Oscar Isaac in a scene from Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante,” based on a 2002 novel by Nick Tosches.
Netflix
“It’s so interesting for me to see people walking out of the movie,” Schnabel said at one point. “I’ve never seen that before. I don’t know what’s going on in this town. You’re supposed to be movie buffs or whatever.”
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Schnabel, who despite being clearly irritated remained calm and did not raise his voice, noted that no one walked out of the movie at Venice in a 2,000-seat venue where he received the festival’s prestigious Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award.
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“Maybe these people needed to go to the bathroom,” he said.
Then an audience member shouted to the stage that the movie was too violent.
“Well, life is violent,” Schnabel responded.
“Not that violent,” the audience member replied.
“Well, maybe your life isn’t, but you’re lucky,” Schnabel retorted.
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Oscar Isaac, left, and Gal Gadot star in Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hands of Dante,” which screened at the 29th Sonoma International Film Festival.
WME Independent
As the beginning of the discussion, as a photographer assigned to cover the event tried to get into position to shoot the discussion, a front-row patron asked the photographer to move out of the way — and Schnabel quickly intervened.
“He’s trying to do his work. But listen, don’t let her insult you,” Schnabel said to the photographer. “Enough people insulted me by walking out of the movie because they thought, I don’t know, they couldn’t understand it. So you keep doing what you’re doing, just don’t sit in front of her. That’s the problem. Just stay low.
“It’s good man, it’s all good, we’re all going to get hit by the same bomb.”
“In the Hand of Dante,” based on a 2002 novel by Nick Tosches, is a complex movie in which the a fictionalized version of Tosches (Oscar Isaac) is hired by a mafia boss (John Malkovich) to team up with a hit man (Gerard Butler) to steal and verify a possible original copy of “The Divine Comedy,” the 14th century epic poem by Italian philosopher Dante Alighieri.
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The film is a thriller, a spiritual journey and a tragic comedy, and includes flashbacks to Alighieri’s life (Isaac plays the poet as well). The expansive cast includes Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese.
The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year to a standing ovation, although reviews out of the festival were mixed.
The reaction in Sonoma from the people who remained to the end was more of a tepid applause.
Festival Artistic Director Carl Spence admitted the film is “challenging,” but defended the selection.
“Julian is an uncompromising artist and he doesn’t follow anything but his own artistic vision,” Spence said during Sunday’s awards banquet, calling the acclaimed artist “a pretty brilliant human being. ‘I’m very proud that we included that vision in the festival and that he provoked the audience. He made us a bit uncomfortable and made us think about things in a different way.
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Hernandez, who is helping lead the Sundance festival’s transition from its longtime home in Park City, Utah, to Boulder, Colo., repeatedly tried to steer Friday night’s discussion back to Schnabel’s work. After all, this is a man who rose to fame in his native New York during the 1970s and ’80s with his large-scale Neo-Expressionist plate paintings and, as a filmmaker, broke through with the biopic “Basquiat” (1996) and won an Academy Award nomination for best director for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007).
Julian Schnabel shown during a ceremony honoring Franco Nero with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Feb. 12, is an acclaimed artist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
“In the Hand of Dante” is his first film since “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018), his take on Vincent Van Gogh, starring Willem Dafoe.
But Schnabel consistently brought the topic back to the audience’s behavior during the nearly half-hour discussion.
When Hernandez asked Schnabel to speak about his visual style as a painter versus as a filmmaker, the artist eventually answered the question. But he began with: “Wasn’t that crazy when this woman’s telephone went off?”
“I mean, that was a real drag, sorry to say,” he went on. “I mean, people should leave their phones outside of the theater.”
Near the end of the discussion, Schnabel took issue with the exit doors with noisy metal push bars. Veterans Hall is a community space that is converted into a theater for the annual film festival, and unlike most theaters, the exits are near the front instead of near the back, making walkouts more intrusive.
“When you’re a director, you notice everything,” Schnabel said. “Everyone, you’ve got to fix the doors in this place. Thank you for showing the movie here, but I would fix the doors just so when people walk out, it’s not so much of a problem.”
Nonetheless, Spence told the Chronicle he enjoyed taking Schnabel around the town Friday before the event, including a stop at the Sonoma Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.
After the screening, Schnabel was celebrated at a private dinner that included industry veterans and festival supporters.
“He was actually quite nice,” Spence said. “When he left the next day, he called me from the car (on the way to the Oakland airport) and gave me a really nice warm thank you — very appreciative. He really actually enjoyed his experience here.
“But in the moment, he was frustrated a little bit and didn’t quite understand.”
“In the Hands of Dante” currently holds a 43% rating from 21 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. The film was acquired by Netflix earlier this month. A release date has not yet been announced.
A scene from “Jane Elliott Against the World,” about a rural Iowa schoolteacher who became an unlikely national voice against racism, which won the audience award for best feature documentary at the 2026 Sonoma International Film Festival.
Sonoma International Film Festival
On Saturday, March 28, hundreds flooded Sonoma’s tiny town square for a No Kings rally, part of a national day of protest against President Donald Trump’s actions during his second term. The demonstration, which took place in full view of the Sebastiani Theatre, the 1934 jewel that is the flagship of the festival, added to the vibe of the event.
Several rallygoers made it to late-afternoon screenings, including the audience award-winning documentary “Jane Elliott Against the World,” about a rural Iowa schoolteacher who became an unlikely national voice against racism, at the Sebastiani. Others were spotted at a Veterans Hall showing of Robert Gordon’s “Newport and the Great Folk Dream,” about the Newport Folk Festival’s electric years from 1963-1966, a period immortalized in the 2024 Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”
Michaela Coel, left, and Ian McKellen in “The Christophers,” which won the audience award for best narrative feature at the 2026 Sonoma International Film Festival
Cinequest
Overall, the festival screened 104 films from 37 countries. There were also industry panels that included film directors Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”). It opened Wednesday, March 25, with California Maude Apatow’s “Poetic License,” a comedy starring Cooper Hoffman and her mother Leslie Mann, and closed with “Under the Lights,” Miles Levin’s shot-in-Sonoma indie about a teenager with epilepsy.
Two grand jury awards for feature-length films were handed out Sunday. Best narrative feature went to “Maspalomas,” a Spanish film about an elderly gay man who hides his sexual orientation after moving to a nursing home. Chase Joynt’s “State of Firsts,” about Sarah McBride’s successful campaign in Delaware to become the nation’s first transgender congressperson, won best documentary feature.
The feature-length narrative audience award went to Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” the festival’s centerpiece presentation, which stars Iam McKellen as a cantankerous artist. It opens in Bay Area theaters on April 17.
For a full list of award winners, go to sonomafilmfest.org.