Screening: Holes

Presented by The Granada Theatre

As part of our Granada Centennial film series, Santa Barbara Home Movies: Films by Artists and Performers Who Call Santa Barbara Home.

Starring Shia LeBeouf, Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Henry Winkler, Tim Blake Nelson
Directed by renowned filmmaker Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Steal Big, Steal Little, Under Siege)

Louis Sachar’s 1998 novel ”Holes,” which won a Newbery Medal and a National Book Award, has also, and more importantly, attracted a fanatical following among children in the middle grades.

Dogged by bad luck stemming from an ancient family curse, young Stanley (Shia LaBeouf), is plucked from his family’s chaotic apartment, and sent off to Camp Green Lake, a very weird place that’s not green and doesn’t have a lake. Under the sinister eye of Mr. Sir (Jon Voight), the young inmates are assigned the task of digging holes, one after another, in the desert. The stated goal of this backbreaking Sisyphean labor is to build character, but it also seems that the warden (Sigourney Weaver) is using the boys to find some mysterious, precious treasure that she believes is buried in the sand. But what? And how is the mystery of Camp Green Lake connected to Stanley’s family curse?