Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Storytelling for the Screen:
One Battle After Another
- Saturday, October 4, 2025 / 2:00 PM - 5:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (161 minutes)
- With Andy Jurgensen (editor)
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Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Sean Penn
The latest from filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another (2025) is a sprawling action-thriller epic that focuses on the reunion of a band of former revolutionaries; the film is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Washed-up rebel Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). When Bob’s evil nemesis (played by Sean Penn) resurfaces after sixteen years and Willa goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find his daughter. Father and daughter battle the consequences of Bob’s past and the lingering scars of their past struggles. Shot in the beautiful and expansive VistaVision format, the film is one of the year’s most ambitious releases.
Editor and alumnus of the UCSB Film and Media Studies program Andy Jurgensen joined moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of One Battle After Another.
Biographies
Andy Jurgensen (editor)
Andy Jurgensen is a Los Angeles-based film editor and a graduate of UC Santa Barbara’s Film and Media Studies program. He started his career working as an assistant editor on both studio and independent features, including The Campaign, Trumbo, All the Way, Bombshell, the Sundance-winning Afternoon Delight, and box office hit Bad Boys for Life.
His collaborations with director Paul Thomas Anderson began with Inherent Vice (as assistant editor) and continued with Phantom Thread (associate editor), leading to his feature editing debut on Licorice Pizza (2021). The film earned him nominations from BAFTA, American Cinema Editors, and the Critics’ Choice Awards. Andy has also cut many of Paul Thomas Anderson’s short-form works, including Junun, Anima, and music videos for artists such as Radiohead, Joanna Newsom, HAIM, and The Smile. Most recently, he edited Anderson’s latest feature, One Battle After Another.
Moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB)
Miguel Penabella is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines conspiracy, spectrality, and melancholia as theoretical frameworks for examining historical revisionism in the Philippines and the links between former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte. He is also interested in theorizations of cinematic temporality and slowness. He is a former coordinating editor of Media Fields Journal.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.