Category: Experience

Experience

28th SF Int'l Asian American Film Festival Opens

This year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival observes an organizational milestone: 2010 marks the beginning of a fourth decade for the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), hitherto known (until 2005) as the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA).

CAAM’s and NAATA’s achievements over the last 30 years are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that an organization originally founded to nurture Asian American filmmakers (an effort given further muscle by strong support from the Center for Public Broadcasting) as well as counter ethnic stereotypes still prevailing in popular media (perhaps peaking with the protests against mid-late ’80s thrillers Year of the Dragon and Black Rain) has long since accomplished all that and more. Today’s CAAM can look back on helping to foster such important high-profile voices as Wayne Wang and Ang Lee, while stoking both present and future makers via its distribution, PBS presentation and funding arms.

topics: activism, actors, asian american cinema, asian cinema, audiences, bay area, sf international asian american film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

Experience

Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’

If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.

topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, documentary film, film arts foundation, frameline, independent film, sf international lgbt film festival

Experience

"Freaks, Punks, Skanks, & Cranks"—through Feb. 27

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts continues a five-part series showcasing cinematic representations of, well, freaks, punks, skanks, and cranks. More on the series in SF360.org.

Experience

Getting Behind the Music at Noise Pop Film Festival

Jimi Hendrix is not playing San Francisco’s 18th annual Noise Pop festival this year, but—along with Drive-By Truckers, George Clinton, Lou Barlow and Tool—he is making an appearance in the event’s Film Festival component, which runs February 24-28 at a variety of S.F. venues. It’s a disparate program ranging from portraits-of-an-artist to historical flashbacks, philosophical musings on music itself—and a couple items only tangentially about the auditory art form.

topics: cult cinema, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, music

Experience

"Freak" Flag Flying at YBCA

Because it’s a place where contemporary visual art, pop culture themes, live performance of myriad disciplines and recorded media comingle, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has sustained a major place in San Francisco’s cultural landscape since 1993—yet perhaps without quite receiving the due it would have had its mission been narrower and more easily defined.

That resistance to precise classification is, actually, much of what we like about YBCA. In the film/video department alone, longtime curator Joel Shepard has carved out a unique Bay Area programmatic niche that can encompass retrospectives of important but little-seen current international fiction and documentary directors alongside shows that reflect a distinct fondness for for vintage exploitation, subcultural artifacts and cinematic “outsider art.”

All three of the latter are on display in the venue’s new series “Freaks, Punks, Skanks and Cranks."

topics: actors, bay area, music, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts, youth

Experience

San Francisco Cinematheque Springing into Action

The spring edition of the San Francisco Cinematheque calendar is making the rounds, and my copy is already dog-eared with wishful thinking. Beyond the usual bounty of local premiers and filmmaker spotlights, it’s exciting to see Cinematheque continue to cultivate unusual collaborations, programming formats and venues—even the most seasoned Bay Area filmgoer may need to consult the key to decipher some of this calendar’s site abbreviations (Quick, what’s PTUSF? NNC?). So grab your datebook and get ready for a rundown.

topics: audiences, avant-garde, curators, diy, documentary, exhibition, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

Experience

SF Indiefest at Twelve

It may be a strange time for independent film, with scaled back "indie" divisions of Hollywood studios and filmmakers self-distributing online, but SF Indiefest, now in its 12th year, is holding steady as a great aggregator and champion of the unsung, underdog, and un-buzzable. Like a wizened video store clerk, this year’s fest offers up an "if you like x, you should check out y" for just about every ‘x’ you could throw out there. Whether you’re jonesin’ for something experimental, a gritty domestic drama, or Shakespearean vampires (more on them later), Indiefest has your fix.

topics: bay area, digital distribution, distribution, diy, independent film

Experience

Darkness lights up the Castro screen with Noir City's return

Every year at the end of January, many in the Bay Area film community tune their radar to the snowy, showy glare of the Sundance Film Festival. For anyone not actually attending, however, there’s a big, contrastingly “dark” consolation prize: The virtually simultaneous Noir City festival. Who’s to say those stay-at-homes aren’t the luckier ones?

Now in its eighth year, Noir City takes over the Castro Theatre for ten days January 22-31. The theme is “Lust and Larceny," and there are a number of nights paying tribute to particular stars and directors.

topics: actors, castro theatre, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir

Experience

It's "Playtime" with Jacques Tati in two new series

You could make a case for Jacques Tati as the last great silent comedian—even if he didn’t begin making features until two decades into the sound era. Certainly he had more in common as a filmmaker with the styles of Chaplin and Buster Keaton than any major comic talents of subsequent decades, including primarily slapstick (rather than verbal) ones like Laurel & Hardy.

His contribution remains unique—the closest comparisons being, perhaps, Keaton for his deadpan orchestration of extraordinary physical chaos, and the current cult Swedish director Roy Andersson (You, the Living) for his existential absurdism built through meticulously designed setpieces sans conventional plot or character focus. If Keaton was once a thoroughly mainstream entertainer, and Andersson is something of a rarefied arthouse secret, Tati was a bit of both—a critical favorite who enjoyed his moment of international success, albeit all too briefly.

topics: actors, audiences, cinephiles, comedy, directors, pacific film archive, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Experience

Animal-rescue film "Mine" finds no shelter from Katrina's emotional aftermath

It’s not fair, but the shelf life of a documentary often depends more on its subject than its quality. And for certain works in progress, the window may be quite small and the pressure on the filmmaker pretty intense. All the while Geralyn Pezanoski worked on Mine, her debut doc about the separation and occasional reunion of pets and owners in post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2005 hurricane was receding into the distance. “A lot of people told me, ‘If you don’t get this out in two years, you won’t have an audience,’” she recalls. Sound reasoning, except it was blown out of the water from the moment the doc premiered last spring at South by Southwest, where it went on to collar the Audience Award. As Film Movement takes the film across the country this month , with the Roxie serving as the local venue beginning Friday, January 8, ahead of its February broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, Pezanoski has a theory about the timeliness of Mine. “It transcends Katrina or any disaster, because it’s about how we are in the world,” she explains.

topics: activism, awards, bay area, digital filmmaking, distribution, diy, documentary, women filmmakers

Experience

After Sept. 11, 2001, a decade found its way

On September 13, 2001, I stood in a small park in downtown Toronto, shocked but confident, and spoke to Canadian television: From now on, movies would not be the same, Hollywood and indie films would change completely. Everything would be different. It had to be, didn’t it?

Well, no, as it turned out.

I was wrong.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is devoting this and the following week to coverage of the year and decade in film.]

topics: activism, argentine cinema, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, curators, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, dvd, exhibitio, tv, web, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

Experience

Shannon and Ryan own the screen in "The Missing Person"

It doesn’t happen often, but it’s always thrilling when a performer you’ve never seen or just never took much note of makes such a strong impression that you think “Who is that?!”

One such moment occurred two years ago, when Ben Affleck’s shockingly good directorial debut Gone Baby Gone featured a live-wire Amy Ryan as the missing girl’s abrasive, rather appallingly unfit mother. Another came last year, when Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road had scenes stolen whole from hardworking stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet by Michael Shannon, playing the mentally unstable neighbor’s son who nonetheless sees straight through the lies of their marriage.

topics: actors, hollywood, independent film

Experience

Wintering with the SF Silent Film Festival

You’d assume the sound of silence would be restful. But just as Simon & Garfunkel started their song on that subject with “Hello Darkness, my old friend…,” one must admit there’s room for it to be kinda creepy, too. Arriving a tad late for Halloween, this year’s Silent Film Festival Winter Event offers one long day of revivals at the Castro that’s surprisingly macabre—given that it hails from the era best remembered for the chipper and charming likes of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.

topics: bay area, film festivals, film history, hollywood, silent film

Experience

The Cockettes' celluloid afterglow still strong at 40

As a performing ensemble, The Cockettes were relatively short-lived. (So, sadly, were many members due to the AIDS crisis a decade later.) But their influence has been large, and seems ever more recognized. At present next-generation alternative S.F. theatre troupe Thrillpeddlers is passing the six-month mark with its surprise smash-hit revival of the Cockettes’ camp operetta Pearls Over Shanghai, currently extended through January 23.

It now includes an “Afterglow Floorshow” reprising numbers from other original Cockettes shows to honor the 40th anniversary of the troupe’s founding. That same milestone is marked Thursday by a one-night-only SFMOMA program you might kick yourself from here to eternity for missing.

The Cockettes on Film, at 40! sounds as good as it could possibly get for those of us too young or geographically disadvantaged to have experienced the group’s heyday in the flesh.

topics: activism, actors, diy, experimental film, film history, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sfmoma

Experience

Feast your eyes: a holiday film preview

I don’t know about you, but I know what I want for Christmas (and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, for that matter): Some decent movies. Hope springs eternal, especially at this time of year. It’s Hollywood custom now to reserve the majority of its prestige titles for an annual late onslaught, the idea being that award-bestowing organizations’ voters naturally gravitate toward whatever is freshest in their memories. In the indie sector, too, there are some goodies timed for holiday gifting.

So, here’s a glancing, far-from-exhaustive preview of what we’ve got to look forward to between now and New Year’s Day.

topics: activism, actors, animation, art film, awards, bay area, castro theatre, children's issues, comedy, critics, critics year end polls, cult cinema, directors, distributors, documentary film, dramatic films, music, musicals, roxie, world cinema

Experience

Returning to Alcatraz at ATA

Among the many empowerment movements that burgeoned in the 1960s was Red Power—an unprecedented wave of activist zeal among Native Americans who’d had their land, languages and cultures systematically taken away by the government. If the 19th-century Indian experience was defined by broken treaties, in the 20th it had suffered from dubiously well intentioned efforts to relocate and assimilate tribal peoples in mainstream society. This had the effect of cutting them off from their roots while dumping them in cities with minimal institutional support.

topics: activism, american indian film, archives, artists' television access, bay area, directors, diy, documentary, world cinema, youth

Experience

New Italian Cinema's fact, fiction, fascination

Is it soccer or politics that is Italy’s reigning national sport? Certainly the former is more beloved—but the latter arguably offers even more unpredictably suspenseful gamesmanship. The Italian political landscape frequently makes our own look flat as a Kansas cornfield. Unsurprisingly, then, that the 13th edition of San Francisco Film Society’s New Italian Cinema festival, finds the political and personal mixing more frequently than you’d find in any assortment of U.S. narrative films.

That’s certainly personified by this year’s tributee, mid-career writer/director Marco Risi. Son of the late Dino Risi, popular craftsman of robust comedies, Marco has demonstrated a strong social consciousness in the diverse projects he’s produced since the early 1980s.

topics: art film, audiences, italian cinema, san francisco film society, world cinema

Experience

A tour through Taiwan Film Days

For the regular film festival attendee, Taiwanese Cinema has been associated with three names: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and the late Edward Yang. But for three days starting November 6, the San Francisco Film Society offers a chance to see contemporary Taiwanese cinema beyond the work of those three masters.

Two of the films screening in Taiwan Film Days were official Oscar entries for the Best Foreign Language film from Taiwan. Opening-nighter Cape No. 7 (Wei Te-sheng, 2008) was 2009’s submission; it follows an unlikely rock band—unlikely in that the ages of the members range from about that of the Jonas Brothers to about the Rolling Stones.

topics: art film, asian cinema, authors, bay area, san francisco film society, world cinema

Experience

Welcoming French Cinema Now—and then

The year 2009 marks the golden anniversary of a watershed event in international cinema: The launching of the Nouvelle Vague, that agitating generation of young filmmakers (many former critics) who laid siege to the perceived creative atrophy of the French film industry, in the process having a huge influence on movies everywhere.

You can argue exactly what the first “New Wave” feature was, but in terms of popular impact, the one that first resonated around the world was undeniably François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. That 1959 classic is being revived as part of San Francisco Film Society’s second annual French Cinema Now festival, which runs the week of October 29 through November 4 at the city’s Clay Theatre.

topics: comedy, critics, dramatic films, film festivals, french cinema, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, reviews, world cinema

Experience

SFFS's first annual Cinema by the Bay festival spotlights local talent

A film festival that’s long overdue arrives tonight with San Francisco Film Society’s first annual Cinema by the Bay. A wide-ranging showcase of local filmmaking, as well as a forum for the region’s influence as subject and setting in the work of filmmakers beyond the Bay, it runs through Sunday, October 25, and encompasses the straight-ahead to the avant-garde to the tantalizingly difficult to categorize (I’m thinking Etienne!) in a four-day program of features, shorts, docs and multimedia live performance from established and emerging artists.

topics: actors, audiences, avant-garde, bay area, curators, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, dramatic films, exhibitions, experimental film, film arts foundation, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco film society

Experience

What's up, DocFest?

Fans of San Francisco’s DocFest (October 16–29), now in its eighth year, have developed a well-honed appreciation for the eccentric. Indeed, for anyone who has sampled of DocFest’s annual fare, it’s odd to think the word “documentary” could once have had the taint of the staid, the sober or the dull-but-good-for-you about it. Dull people, after all, don’t have “Roller Disco Parties” at CellSpace (October 24). But even newbies need partake of only a portion of the 50-odd (there’s that word again) films on display this year on the Roxie’s two screens to permanently dispel any lingering doubts about the proximity of documentary to good times.

topics: bay area, critics, cult cinema, documentary, music

Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival opens its 32nd

The Mill Valley Film Festival’s 2009 program features, as ever, a bounty of local work, U.S. independent features and docs, international festival favorites and children’s flicks, as well as live events and more. But what it also offers is a surprisingly potent mainstream industry presence: The headlining tribute programs offer opportunities to get a close look at A-list types more frequently seen at the multiplex than at the art house. And you know what? We approve.

That’s because the 32-year-old festival’s 2009 tributees are the kinds of starry talents that give Hollywood a good name: famous mid-career actors with depth and range, a writer-director who’s actually succeeded by appealing to the audience’s grownup intelligence, not its inner (or actual) 14-year-old Tweeting fanboy. These are the good guys. We can’t even hate them because they’re beautiful.

topics: activism, actors, african american cinema, authors, bay area, critics, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, features, film festivals, independent film, international film, mill valley film festival, music, world cinema

Experience

Tangerine dreams: Cinémathèque de Tanger showcases Morocco

No matter what you’ve heard about Tangier—that it’s a town of hustlers, bandits and drugs, or is a mecca for artists and writers from Eugene Delacroix to Henri Matisse to Jean Genet—the strange thing may be that you have heard of it at all. A town of 900,000 on the very northern tip of Africa, only 7 miles from Spain, it is neither the political nor economic capitol of any country nor the site of any major disasters. Yet it’s created an identity as a great fount of stories and light. The newest development in its narrative is that it now has its own independent cinema, the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which opened in 2007. This young institution has curated Another Border, a showcase of its archives on view at the Pacific Film Archive and closing October 1.

topics: activism, african cinema, critics, diy, documentary, pacific film archive, world cinema

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Columbia Pictures' noir lights up the Roxie

Founded in 1924, Columbia Pictures spent some decades just below the top echelon of Hollywood studios. It didn’t own its own theater chain, or otherwise command the resources that MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers or Fox could apply in lavish displays of star power, production scale and promotional oomph.

When the business began changing in the 1950s due to TV, new antitrust laws and other factors, the playing field leveled in ways that benefitted Columbia more than its glitzier, top-heavy rivals. But before then, with the occasional prestigious exception—notably Frank Capra’s films—its bread-and-butter product leaned toward the less pricey ends of the entertainment spectrum. That meant away from spectacular production numbers, costume epics and all-star ensemble pieces and toward such humbler but reliable amusements as a girl, a guy and a gun.

topics: bay area, genre films, noir, roxie

Experience

William Klein's restless mind on view at the PFA

William Klein is best known as a photographer and expat New Yorker who moved to Paris in 1948 and never looked back—well, with the notable exception of New York (life is good and good for you in New York…), a mid-1950s exhibition and photobook. It was a much-debated sensation at the time for both its unconventional technique (Klein played liberally with focus, overexposure and wide angles) and rather shocking, vivid, un-pretty view of the Big Apple’s denizens. Today, it’s considered a game-changing landmark in the medium. His subsequent fashion photography (notably for Vogue) was also strikingly innovative. His images have been shown at leading museums around the world, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art not long ago.

But in 1965 Klein got interested in filmmaking—initially abandoning still photography entirely for it.

topics: activism, art, art film, film history, filmmakers, french cinema, pacific film archive, photography, world cinema

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Telluride reveals titles in its 36th edition

The Telluride Film Festival announced its full lineup for its 36th festival, which opens Friday, Sept. 4, and runs through Labor Day Weekend. Founded in 1974 by James Card, Tom Luddy and Bill and Stella Pence, the festival takes place in a mountain village in Colorado, and is currently programmed by directors Luddy and Gary Meyer and managing director Julie Huntsinger out of offices in Berkeley, California. The festival had already announced its Guest Director for 2009, Alexander Payne, and its special celebration of legendary film critic Manny Farber. Further tributes go to Margarethe von Trotta, Viggo Mortensen and Anouk Aimée. The festival offers 24 new features in its main program alongside its always strong revivals, as well as 29 shorts and 10 documentaries in its Backlot program, which focuses on filmmakers and other artists.

topics: actors, art film, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, world cinema

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Women Make Movies Film Festival highlights Kim Longinotto

At a panel during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, film critics were asked to offer a note of hope on a film landscape often characterized as lacking—and B. Ruby Rich responded with enthusiastic praise for a filmmaker she called "unheralded" and "incredibly sensitive," Kim Longinotto. "When more and more documentaries seem to follow either individual pathologies or people who are already famous," Rich said, "it’s really important to see [Longinotto] model looking very deeply into a culture—and extraordinary women in that culture—in a way that’s actually riveting.”

Though not a household name, Longinotto has certainly been getting attention: Her films played at the Pacific Film Archive in 2006; she won the Sundance World Cinema Jury Prize for Rough Aunties this past year; and, beginning this Friday, is under the spotlight at the Women Make Movies Film Festival taking place at the Roxie Theater, which runs through September 3.

topics: activism, african cinema, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, independent film, iranian cinema, political film, women, women filmmakers, world cinema

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Julie Bridgham brings "The Sari Soldiers" to the inaugural Sausalito Film Festival

Unlikely as it may seem, the creative spark that eventually sent Julie Bridgham off to understand Nepal and make a film about it came when Bridgham was only 6 years old—from a young man who came to the U.S. for medical care and spoke at a Palo Alto alternative school she was attending.

"It was like a seed had been planted," said Bridgham, trying to explain the path that led to the remarkable documentary The Sari Soldiers, which she directed and produced with Ramyata Limbu starting in 2005, during the time of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. It was particularly dangerous for an American, a nationality viewed with suspicion by Maoists, but they gave Bridgham permission to shoot in their districts nonetheless.

topics: bay area, directors, diy, documentary film, world cinema

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PFA shines light on a Josef von Sternberg gem

Josef von Sternberg is remembered today as bringing “Continental” sophistication, sensuousness and aesthetic refinement to an industry that ultimately found him a bit too rarefied for its tastes. Of course he also brought a protégé, Marlene Dietrich, whom he made a star in The Blue Angel and directed in six more features of escalating ornateness and decreasing commercial success—movies that, when first giddily discovered, can turn a film enthusiastic into a fanatic.

topics: actors, directors, hollywood, pacific film archive, world cinema

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YBCA's "Beyond ESPN" series brings together fans of all stripes

I once got the brush-off when I mentioned to a fellow filmgoer in a theater lobby that the only festival missing from San Francisco’s international film landscape was a sports film festival. (I had just seen Bruce Beresford’s 1976 film The Club and Paul Goodman’s 2002 film Australian Rules—both involving that unique Aussie creation, Australian Rules Football.) Luckily, SF Bay Guardian Arts Editor Johnny Ray Huston did not get the same response when he brought the idea for a sports film series to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Film/Video Curator Joel Shepard. The result, Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film, is a film series that may do for the cinema of sport what the MLS is trying to achieve in the realm of soccer: Build audiences for a beloved pastime by screening/playing them in altogether new territory. Beginning August 6 and running through August 30 at YBCA, Beyond ESPN puts the sporting genre in a new context.

topics: art film, bay area, directors, documentary, genre films, hollywood, sports film, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

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"Until the Light Takes Us" and the dark world of Norwegian black metal

In the realm of crimes against humanity, there’s something particularly abhorrent about the willful erasure of history itself. Think how much knowledge of ourselves was lost when invading armies of old destroyed ancient libraries. Recall the much more recent dynamiting of the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban, one religion’s magnificent representation destroyed in the name of another. It’s not the motivating religious or conquering fervor of the assailants that will be remembered by future generations, but the ultimately pointless, shortsighted waste of something that should have endured as long as mankind.

topics: documentary, music, political film, world cinema

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S.F. Jewish Film Festival rules in favor of social justice

At first blush, this year looks a lot like last year in the extended Jewish community. Israel’s draining occupation of the West Bank and incursions into Gaza continue unabated, while Hamas ratchets its influence in the Palestinian street. The specter of an Iran with nuclear capabilities edges closer, providing ammo for Israel’s center-right supporters. Closer to home, the deep recession has American Jews as nervous as their neighbors. Meanwhile, a tentpole of 20th-century Jewish identity, the Holocaust, recedes another step into the fog of history.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, jewish cinema, political film

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The silents speak volumes at SF Silent Film Festival

When silent cinema first became voguish again via TV and occasional theatre revivals in the 1950s and 1960s, its appeal was primarily nostalgic, campy, antiquated. (This was no doubt in part to the use of cartoonishly sped-up projection that was misleading and historically inaccurate.)

But what surprised even then, and certainly does now (especially since we’ve gotten the projection thing right) is how timeless in appeal some of the films and personalities from that era have turned out to be. They stare at us from a celluloid remove of almost a century, yet the communication is as immediate as it is with whatever’s at the multiplex today. (Though I’m pretty sure Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is only going to look nostalgic, campy and antiquated in a fraction of that time.)

Case in point: 2009 S.F. Silent Film Festival calendar coverboy Douglas Fairbanks.

topics: actors, bay area, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, silent film, world cinema

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"The Greatest Year in Film" turns 70 at the Castro

What was the best year ever for painting? Music? Literature? Any answers would be arbitrary at worst, debatable at best—the truth being, of course, that these art forms are just too vast, historied and changeable for the question to be useful at all.

Yet ask when was the best year for movies (Hollywood movies, that is), and there is actually a consensus so widespread it’s gone from opinion to virtual fact. That year would be 1939, when for whatever reasons—some explicable, others just accidents of timing—Hollywood’s “golden age” went platinum, delivering so many classic features it still beggars belief they all arrived in such close proximity.

topics: actors, castro theatre, exhibition, genre films, hollywood, oscars

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Frameline33: something old, something new....

The success of anti-gay-marriage Prop. 8 shocked many people who’d assumed their fellow Californians were ahead of the national curve in terms of sophistication and tolerance. (And they were probably right, in that it took considerable out-of-state money expended on misleading, inflammatory ad campaigns to scare a narrow Left Coast majority into believing traditional marriage needed “defending.”)

topics: bay area, critics, diy, documentary, drama, exhibition, experimental film, festivals, film history, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, hollywood, horror, independent film, international film, world cinema, youth

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In the Realm of Oshima--through Jul. 18

The Pacific Film Archive continues this tribute to one of the giants of the Japanese New Wave. This week the series features two early films, Night and Fog in Japan and The Catch, as well as Oshima’s return to filmmaking in the 1980s after a long hiatus, the David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano vehicle Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

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Finding social fury "In the Realm of Oshima" at PFA

"Banish Green!" That was the self-imposed restraint director Nagisa Oshima put on himself when making his first color film (and second feature) Cruel Story of Youth (1960). Green, as Oshima goes on to explain in an essay recounting his decision, was the color he most associated with the symbolic center of Japanese domestic life: the tatami mat-lined living room, usually adjacent to a small, cloistered garden. This room had been long occupied by a previous generation of Japanese filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu (whose "pillow shots" couldn’t be greener) and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Oshima, it was a cage. "Characters, rooms, gardens were all utterly repellant," he writes, "and I firmly believed that unless the dark sensibility that those things engendered [was] completely destroyed, nothing new would come into being in Japan."

topics: critics, japanese cinema, pacific film archive, world cinema

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Another Hole in the Head looks to re-wound your psyche

Confronted by flesh-eating zombies, werewolves, or a maniac with a very sharp object, your first instinct probably would not be to laugh—unless it were that hysterical, this-can’t-be-happening type of laughter often heard greeting tax and election results. But at this year’s 6th annual Another Hole in the Head dedicated to sci-fi, horror and fantasy, catastrophic carnage meets comedy more often than not.

As moviegoers (and genre fans), have we become so desensitized to violence that it plays best as a joke? Or in the dark real-world climate of this decade, are filmmakers just helping us let off some steam by making fear seem a laughing matter? Oh, who cares—this festival is all about fun, not analyzing content. How much analysis do you expect something called Frat House Massacre or Run! Bitch Run! (sic) to withstand, anyway?

topics: bay area, genre films, hollywood, horror, independent film, reviews, roxie

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Karel Vachek's antic Czech films find a home

It’s rare indeed that you get a chance to see a director’s entire body of work—let alone one almost entirely unknown outside his or her home country. But all that is exactly what’s on offer at the Pacific Film Archive over the next four weeks, as it hosts “Karel Vachek: Poet Provocateur,” the first-ever full U.S. retrospective for this unclassifiable Czech filmmaker.

topics: documentary, eastern european film, pacific film archive, world cinema

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To a friend entering obsolescence

Dear analog,

This isn’t a eulogy, because to my mind you’re not really gone. You’ll never be gone, just like I’ll never buy a digital converter for my old TV. I don’t care what the FCC mandates! Also, as you know, I have a new TV.

I know this note won’t bring you back. I guess I just had to get my thoughts out there, into the ether, as much for you as for anyone else who might happen to receive them. I thought you’d appreciate that.

There’s an event in your honor coming up this Saturday night. They’re calling it A Wake for Analog. A handful of short experimental multimedia transmissions and a live, improvisational audio-visual performance by Oakland’s Killer Banshee, with composer and noise artist Thurston Graham. It’s all organized by Other Cinema founder Craig Baldwin—yeah, the maker of Sonic Outlaws, among so many other things, and a guy who knows whereof he programs—so I’m sure it’ll be something you’d have liked.

topics: artists' television access, bay area, diy, exhibition, experimental film, shorts

Experience

SFIFF52: "Once Upon a Time in the West," restored

In a sense, nobody has ever made movies larger than Sergio Leone. Not large in expense, epic scale, or god knows in cosmic import. But rather large in the sense of, well, tangible largeness —no one has ever quite equaled his ability to maximize the unforgiving vastness of wide open spaces and the intransigent solitude of humans hellbent on enforcing their will within that inhumane desolation. Could he have made his mark in any genre but the Western, with its innate need for harsh wilderness and stark good-vs.-evil conflicts? Perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine how. Leone’s sensibility fit the Western so completely that in the end he was almost incapable of working his way out of it.

This Sunday afternoon the SF International Film Festival presents a meticulously restored new print of Once Upon a Time in the West, there’s little risk in promising that it will be spectacular. This 1968 Italian-U.S. coproduction was Leone’s magnum opus, granted all the length, extravagance and star power he could desire. Was this fulfillment (not to mention the sheer exhaustion of marshaling such sprawling resources) so overwhelming that it made future effort near-impossible?

topics: actors, bay area, critics, directors, genre films, hollywood, international film, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival, world cinema

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SFIFF52: La Mission at el Castro--a beautiful day in the neighborhoods

San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods—and an argument can be made that there is no more lively and fascinating neighborhood in the city than the Mission. It’s a place where stories intersect: Historic murals depicting Latin American indigenous struggles butt up against well-worn Irish bars, which have themselves been transformed into trendy nightspots for a whole new demographic. Street vendors, workers for hire and school kids waiting for Muni buses share small strips of sidewalk just inches away from the slope of sunbathers at Dolores Park who offer an entry to another world altogether in the Castro.

Diverse populations, dense city: conflict naturally will occur. What’s challenging for city planners can be wonderful for film writers—especially when conflict leads as thoughtfully and passionately to resolution as it does in Peter Bratt’s opening night feature for the San Francisco International Film Festival, La Mission.

topics: actors, african american cinema, american indian film, bay area, castro theatre, diy, drama, film festivals, filmmakers, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Wisdom of the underages

Where would cinema be without friendly curiosity, mindful empathy, political engagement and impish wit? In other words, without good, old-fashioned youthfulness? Hence: Youth Bring the Truth, a showcase for promising pre-adult media-makers—including several local teenagers—from this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

Part of the idea here is for people old enough to remember vintage Whitney Houston lines like “I believe the children are the future” with ironic fondness to be reminded that it’s true, they are. Youngness is conducive, for example, to filming how it feels to witness what may be the most historic election of your lifetime while still just a year shy of voting age. All Oakland’s Sydney Paige Matterson knew during last year’s frenetic campaign season was that she couldn’t just sit back and watch. Instead, she could listen. Matterson decided to build a simulated voting booth, in which she set up a camera and recorded the Election Day musings of several fellow under-18s.

topics: actors, directors, diy, documentary, drama, san francisco international film festival, shorts, youth

Experience

Back to nature with Ben Rivers

It’s not so easy to get much attention for experimental filmmaking these days, but during just a decade of work to date England’s Ben Rivers has stirred interest on both sides of the Atlantic. He makes his Bay Area debut this week presenting in person two programs—“The Poetic Horror of Ben Rivers” at Artists’ Television Access Saturday the 28th, then “This Is My Land: Ben Rivers’ Portraits and Landscapes” via SF Cinematheque at the YBCA Screening Room Sunday night—and you can prepare yourself for a slightly dislocative experience at once tranquil and sinister.

topics: artists' television access, avant-garde, bay area, sf cinematheque

Experience

William Kentridge, synthesizing, at SFMOMA

The films of William Kentridge make up a significant and absorbing part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s enthralling survey of recent work by the acclaimed South African artist, which opened March 14 and continues through May before embarking on a multi-city international tour. In fact, his animated narrative drawings are what originally drew international attention to Kentridge in the 1990s. A central part of the breadth of invention and media on display in William Kentridge: Five Themes, these film works (in four groupings, all featuring at least some animated dimension) represent culminating elements and interests along the path of a highly productive career, based (and, to a fair extent, rooted) in his home city of Johannesburg. Bridging the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, the films form a particularly dramatic gateway into the themes and concerns of an unrepentantly political artist, a white South African of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, on the move from the local to the universal.

As will be immediately apparent to any visitor to the exhibition, Kentridge is a supremely successful interdisciplinarian and synthesizer, versed in the graphic arts, theater and sculpture as well as film.

topics: actors, animation, art, art film, avant-garde, bay area, directors, san francisco museum of modern art

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Politics get personal in "Project Kashmir"

If you were to close your eyes and only listen to the voices of Project Kashmir, you’d hear a tangle of Hindi, Urdu and Kashmiri, in addition to variously accented English. Even if you knew the place well, you probably wouldn’t be able to perceive every nuance of what’s being said. But you would be able to hear the mutual despair.

Many people who do know the place agree that it is among the most beautiful on Earth, just as readily as they disagree on who belongs there. Thus the Kashmir status quo, as one New York Times headline glibly if correctly summed it up, of “terror in paradise.”

topics: digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, independent film, political film, world cinema

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa and a cinema of disaster

The wind is always blowing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. Like the torrential rain of so many horror films that is only a road-sign for the creepy old house up ahead, the gusts that whip and toss Kurosawa’s characters are the sighs of a world in flux. Though his dizzyingly prolific filmography includes a wide cross section of genres—police procedural, family melodrama, yakuza revenge tale, supernatural thriller—the central drama of most Kurosawa films can be boiled down this: the world is changing—or has changed—and the measure of each character is how successfully or unsuccessfully they can adjust to the new parameters unfolding before them.

It is a simple conflict, in a way, but the choices and outcomes that face Kurosawa’s characters—however melodramatic or fantastic—are no less resonant with our own current political and economic climate of crisis. The choice of Kurosawa as the focus of a special retrospective by the S.F. International Asian American Film Festival, opening Thursday, is a timely one.

topics: actors, awards, bay area, center for asian american media, curators, drama, japanese cinema, sf international asian american film festival, world cinema

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Bring the Noise Pop Film Festival

A notorious 1971 print advertisement targeting counterculture types and wannabes featured Central Casting hippies behind the defiant slogan “But The Man can’t bust our music!” It was widely ridiculed because, well, it was an ad for The Man—Columbia Records, then the label of choice for Barbra Streisand, Simon & Garfunkel, Chicago and other not-so-revolutionary acts.

Fake rebelliousness remains a staple in mainstream music marketing. But who’d have guessed almost 40 years later we’d have rebounded to a pre-Summer of Love popscape in which rigid radio playlists, payola scandals and manufactured stars are the norm? Annette Funicello then; Justin, Britney, Miley and Jonas Bros. now. O Disney, you ageless bringer of da rock!

About as far from the ever-increasing corporatization of popular music as you can get is the annual dose of our very own Noise Pop Festival. In addition to about 120 live acts at citywide venues—2009 headliners including Bob Mould, Antony and the Johnsons, Stephen Malkmus, Kool Keith and Papercuts—its multimedia elements include the Noise Film Festival Film Festival, now in its 9th year.

topics: bay area, documentary, festivals, independent film, music, musicals

Experience

Fearless: Strand Releasing turns 20

Nineteen eighty nine was famously the year Amerindie cinema exploded with Sex, Lies and Videotape. But it was also the year something perhaps equally important to independent film happened: Marcus Hu, Jon Gerrans and Mike Thomas co-founded Strand Releasing, which remains an active, irreplaceable and distinctive presence on the U.S. distribution scene twenty years later. (Thomas left the company in the late ’90s.)

That anniversary is being celebrated with a retrospective of past Strand titles at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (More on it below.) But that series can only scratch the surface of a catalog encompassing over 200 features and some of the great names in film both here and around the world. Just a glance at what it’s currently got in theatres gives you an idea of its adventurousness: Brit Terence Davies’ poetic documentary-memoir Of Time and the City; Doris Dörrie’s German-Japanese seriocomedy Cherry Blossoms; Lance Hammer’s highly acclaimed Amerindie drama Ballast; Bruce LaBruce’s latest provocation Otto, or Up With Dead People; and fellow Canadian Claude Miller’s sweeping intergenerational sale Un Secret.

topics: avant-garde, awards, bay area, cult cinema, curators, digital filmmaking, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, frameline, hollywood, independent film, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

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San Francisco Silent Film Festival Winter Event

The genius of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s fourth annual Winter Event, a Castro Theater quadruple feature getting underway at noon on Saturday, February 14, is how great a way it is to spend Valentine’s Day. That is: alone in the dark for hours at a time, with your sweetheart at your side (or just alone if you don’t have a sweetheart), allowing the madcap movie entertainments of 80-plus years ago, each with live musical accompaniment, to put your relationship issues in perspective.

No, seriously. Just bear in mind and take whatever romantic affirmation you can from the fact that one of the day’s offerings (Sunrise) is co-presented by the Film Noir Foundation, and another by Midnites for Maniacs (The Cat and the Canary). As for the others, well, there’s the one in which Buster Keaton likes a girl whose entire family literally wants to kill him, before they’ve even met him (Our Hospitality); and the one with the movie-theater usher whose would-be girlfriend tells him she won’t be interested unless he’s famous, so he goes through hell to get that way, and very dubiously succeeds (A Kiss from Mary Pickford). Isn’t it romantic?

topics: actors, directors, documentary, film history, hollywood, independent film, silent film

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SF Indiefest: Seeing is disbelieving

With a roster that sprawls from horror to softcore to verite-style drama to animation and documentary, there’s one constant to the 11th edition of SF Indiefest: You won’t be bored.

While still mostly Amerindie in content, Indiefest ’09 opens with a U.K. feature (ever-unpredictable Shane Meadows’ latest grungy drama Somers Town), then detours into a mini-retrospective of Japanese “pink” (i.e., softcore) features from the last two decades. There are also efforts from Denmark (I’ll Come Running) and Italy (Waiting for the Sun). Plus a program of recent Nippon TV excerpts entitled Super Happy Fun Monkeybash!, which encompasses such merrily sadistic “reality” broadcast incomprehensibles (‘til you see ‘em) as male-female “pants-pulling matches,” “condiment battles,” champagne corks popped against genitals, human bowling balls, kitchenwear perpetually raining down on heads, and something called “No Reaction Pie Hell.”

topics: actors, exhibitions, film festivals, film history, genre films, horror, independent film

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The essay film in action

The term "essay film" has a protean quality, shifting shape as quickly as the films that it usually designates. The essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, and its importance stemmed from its engagement with history, and its challenge to the dominant forms of telling history. The essay film has often lived on the margins, but its importance, then as now, is tied not to its position inside or outside of the power structure, but to its potential for questioning that power. The Pacific Film Archive’s current series of "essay films," a collection of diverse work, offers the viewer an opportunity to adapt to the peculiar searching, questioning tone of these films.

“The Way of the Termite: The Essay in Cinema” is a traveling series curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, a member of the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Luc Godard in the early ’70s, and the maker of several later essayistic films on his own. The series takes its title from Manny Farber’s famous division between “termite art” and “white elephant art," made in an essay that Gorin cites in his program notes. He aligns film essayists with termite artists, eating through the boundaries that would contain them.

topics: african cinema, authors, avant-garde, bay area, french cinema, independent film, world cinema

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Hearing things: "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man"

Popular music fame is usually fleeting, and very hard to predict in the long run. Who’d have guessed that, say, The Velvet Underground or Nick Drake would wind up enormously influential and revered, particularly amongst other musicians? At the time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, they were just blips on the radar whose albums sold poorly.

Scott Walker is another such case, albeit one who actually lived to tell the tale and feed his latterday cult with ever-more adventurous music. That is, after a wee “nearly 20-year hiatus,” as he puts it in Stephen Kijak’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. This documentary, which opens at Landmark Cinemas Friday, is significant as more than just a well-deserved tribute and/or introduction to a fascinating artist—it’s also virtually the first time he’s allowed himself to be filmed and interviewed after decades of “Garbo-like” elusiveness. Fan David Bowie (also this film’s executive producer) isn’t entirely joking when he laughs “Who really knows anything about Scott Walker?”

topics: avant-garde, directors, documentary, music, performance

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Wim Wenders: a visit to Berlin & Beyond

Italy, England, Scandinavia and much of Eastern Europe all had their giddy cinematic “New Waves” of the 1950s and 1960s. But Germany—pretty well stymied by cultural conservatism following WWII, not to mention half the nation’s Communist oligarchy—took slightly longer to exhale fresh filmic breath.

“New German Cinema,” as it came to be called, was a movement that emerged from West German hippie experimental theater/art/film scenes, flourishing in the 1970s via several distinctive, erratic, brilliant and prolific directors. Most stellar were Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders. The latter is this year’s honoree at the 14th annual Berlin & Beyond festival.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, directors, dramatic films, exhibitions, features, german cinema, world cinema

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"Che: The Roadshow" reclaims a legend

Steven Soderbergh’s endlessly fascinating portrait of the legendary Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in action is willfully disinterested in the conventions and seductions of mainstream Hollywood movies—either biopics or war flicks—or even the dogmatic imperatives of European political cinema. Benicio del Toro’s performance is likewise neither flamboyant nor mythically heroic, nor is there a single shot designed to show him larger than life. So the Spanish-speaking Che is not aimed at the multiplex crowd or the arthouse audience. It’s a timeless gift not so much to America, north, as to our Spanish-speaking neighbors to the south, from Mexico down through Central America all the way to the tip of South America.

[Editor’s note: Che opens Friday, January 16 at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco in a roadshow engagement (ticket purchase includes a commemorative booklet and both films) with director Steven Soderbergh present opening night.]

topics: actors, political film, reviews, world cinema

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Reading between the frames: Fleming and Sturges

The rap against Victor Fleming and John Sturges is that they were competent and perhaps even skilled directors who lacked the imagination and grace that elevates craftsmen into artists. Michael Sragow’s Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master and Glenn Lovell’s Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges, both splendid new biographies by film critics with local ties, expressly aim to reestablish their subjects’ reputations. They hit that mark with varying success, but provide so much pleasure for even a casual moviegoer that it scarcely matters. Both Sragow and Lovell have a solid sense of where the legend diverges from fact, and though they tend to print both, they leave little doubt which is which.

topics: actors, archives, authors, bay area, hollywood

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Québec Film Week's unprovincial pleasures

The “other” Canada, French-speaking province Québec, suffers no inferiority complex when it comes to filmmaking. It generates arthouse megahits like the ’70s coming-of-age flashback C.R.A.Z.Y. and mainstream ones like bilingual comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop, which last year became the highest-grossing domestic release ever—surpassing even the original Porky’s. (Yes, Porky’s was officially all-Canadian, though it scrupulously avoided seeming so in order to crash the U.S. market.)

Oft overlooked abroad (in the U.S., we’ve tended to treat Canada entire as the harmless but generally ignorable neighbor), Québec’s thriving regional cinema is showcased in San Francisco Film Society’s latest mini-festival addition to the annual Bay Area movie calendar. Québec Film Week, which starts tonight, offers five days and eight features at the Opera Plaza that encompass the best of recent Québecoix moviemaking—plus one archival flick generally considered the entire nation’s greatest feature ever.

topics: canadian film, features, film festivals, san francisco film society, world cinema

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"Discovering Teuvo Tulio"

In the age of the Internet and pirated DVD, can there remain any hidden niches of international cinema as yet undiscovered by seekers of the esoteric and odd? Happily, the answer is: Yes. Thankfully, it seems there’s always some eccentric back-chapter as yet undiscovered—case in point being the Pacific Film Archive’s “Discovering Teuvo Tulio,” a four-film retrospective of works from Finland’s master of over-the-top melodrama in the 1930s and ’40s, shown in newly restored prints from the Finnish Film Archive.

You might be surprised to learn the Finnish film industry had much going on before Aki Kaurismaki (who played a major role in his predecessor’s current revival) hit international arthouse consciousness a half-century later. But Tulio had it going on, and then some.

topics: directors, pacific film archive, world cinema

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A tourist's guide to Australia on screen

At a reported cost of 120 million, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is by far the biggest Australian movie ever made. Whether it’s one of the best—or worst—will definitely be debated for a while, with some likely to consider it a sweeping, overwhelming old-fashioned romantic epic a la Titanic, while others may reject it as a steaming pile of microwaved cliches.

Few will disagree with the contention that Australia, the country, looks pretty good here—at least as good as a very period-glamorized Nicole Kidman and newly crowned Sexiest Man Alive Hugh Jackman. A few folk (certainly those at the National Board of Tourism) are hoping the movie sparks the kind of tourism uptick that scenically spectacular Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.

topics: actors, world cinema

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Global Lens on Link TV

A goat gets mixed up with a South African gang. An educated Algerian woman treks through the desert to find her unknown mother. A Lebanese girl longs for warm contact with an Israeli soldier guarding a checkpoint. And raucous sexual jokes are communicated via megaphones by chador-enveloped Arab women across barbed-wire borders. Edgy world-cinema narratives don’t often get a place at local multiplexes, but they are finding a regular spot in your home theater, courtesy Global Film Initiative’s Global Lens series 20 through January 20 on Link TV. A week-by-week guide to the series, which runs through January 15, follows.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, distributors, world cinema

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3rd I Film Festival brings Bollywood to the Bard in "Maqbool"

Unshakable standing at the peak of Western literature would be enough for some, but Shakespeare has gone on to be, in a definite sense, the greatest screenwriter too: as prolific (roughly 400 features) and posthumous (roughly 400 years) as they come. Even so, like his fellow toilers in a notoriously thankless field, the Bard has had to accept that what he originally conceived might bear strikingly little resemblance to what appears on the screen, even if the results are inspired on their own terms. 2003’s Bardian-Bollywood mash-up, Maqbool, a highlight of this year’s 3rd I Film Festival, qualifies as a fairly unexpected and intriguing re-imagining of Macbeth, featuring quite a bit of the essential story, if none of the language. But does that make it Shakespeare? The question may be beside the point.

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Lynn Hershman Leeson’s vampire vigilantes

Vampires are in constant media circulation these days, but in San Francisco auteur Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest series of short digital works, she invokes the name of the beast in a typically unexpected and restorative form. Curing the Vampire is a group of interview films, commissioned by Tate Intermedia in Great Britain, with very real, vital people who combat “vampiristic irresponsibility” on an international level. The subjects work in science, music, culture, technology, and media activism and include Gilberto Gil, Tropicália musician and Brazil’s Minister for Culture; human rights activist and writer Elena Poniatowska, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, credited with having identified “the aging gene”; and Lawrence Lessig, the mastermind behind Creative Commons. All engage in forward-thinking, media-savvy approaches to information access and living life to its fullest.

topics: art, avant-garde, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary

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"Christmas on Mars"--on Halloween

It’s always encouraging when sheer weirdness is rewarded, and the quarter-century survival of Flaming Lips—perhaps indie rock’s equivalent to Parliament/Funkadelic, with Wayne Coyne its bizarro-genius George Clinton—is one such oasis of willful eccentricity in a sea of formulaic audio product.

They’re not studied hipsters; they’re from Oklahoma City, after all. Their psychedelia leans in pop and avant-garde directions, not that Phish-y “jam band” direction that makes me empathize with Cartman of South Park’s frequent cuss “Damn hippies!” They write actual, frequently catchy songs without ever risking MTV Buzz Bin embrace. (Except sole hit single “She Don’t Use Jelly” 15 years ago.) Their live shows are famously berserk. Their album titles are absurdist koans (I’m divided between Clouds Taste Metallic and In a Priest Driven Ambulance as personal fave.) They are possibly the least “industry” act ever to have won three Grammys, or have a hometown alley renamed after them. They wrote a song for Sponge Bob! What’s not to like?

topics: independent film, music, roxie, science fiction

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"Secrecy" pries open a debate

No one knows the precise number. Estimates run as high as one trillion. Whatever the exact amount, it’s both staggering and potentially dangerous. Is this more about dollars and deficits? Wars and bailouts? Not this time. It’s documents—a veritable mountain of them—generated by the federal government, classified as secret, and stashed out of sight of American citizens at a rate of tens of thousands per day.

Is this a big deal? Only if you think democracy requires transparency, or an open society openness. Most people do. That even goes for the government intelligence professionals arrayed on one side of Robb Moss and Peter Galison’s deliberative, atmospheric and engrossing documentary, Secrecy, receiving its theatrical premiere this week as part of a new San Francisco Film Society initiative, SFFS Focus: Investigative Documentary.

topics: directors, documentary, political film, san francisco film society

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SF DocFest's carnival of nonfiction filmmaking

The extreme, the strange, the silly and surreal all have big seats at the SF DocFest table. You can tell just by looking at its audience, which more typically resembles the folks you hung out with at the bar last Friday than the ones who were canvassing for public power outside. They are there to have a good time, and they do. They read the program notes and said, “That looks cool!” about a majority of the film descriptions. They were not on drugs at the time.

This is the festival where you can find features about professional balloon artists (Twisted: A Balloonamentary), lupine-themed mini-golf theme parks (Bunnyland), Sasquatch obsessives (Bigfoot: A Beast on the Run), evangelical Christian Elvis impersonators (Elvis in East Peoria), and a guy who decides the only way to turn his 400-lb. life around is by taking 13 months to get from San Diego to NYC on foot (Fatman Walking). There are in-depth looks at the worlds of competitive college debating (Debate Team), teen jump rope (Jump!), Olympic synchronized swimming (Synch or Swim), and game show contestancy (Come on Down! The Road to ‘The Price is Right’), on which latter we learn (among other things) about recently retired longtime host Bob Barker’s terror of being aggressively hugged by overexcited winners.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary film, exhibitions, independent film

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Mill Valley Film Festival's Maher moment

When you’re, say, 14, movies that “everyone” is dying to see come pretty often—they’re most likely the latest megabuck action-fantasy or comedy toy opening Friday at every multiplex in the land. As one gets older, such occasions grow fewer. Taste changes, people have more important things to do (is there a parent alive who hasn’t sighed “Oh, I can’t remember the last time we got out for a movie”?), and so much of the Hollywood fare available to most seems such—kidstuff.

But this week there is, in fact, a movie everyone I know is dying to see. It goes “wide” on Friday, but opens the Mill Valley Film Festival Thursday night. There’s no doubt every cranny of the Smith Rafael Film Center could be filled by locals who can’t wait even those extra few hours before its first regular commercial matinees. That movie would be Religulous, the desperately awaited (by some) and already vehemently decried (by others) film by director Larry Charles (Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and star/provocateur Bill Maher .

topics: actors, directors, documentary film, features, mill valley film festival

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Baloney Sandwiches with no cheese: Ted V. Mikels' wild world at the Clay

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great backstage drama, The Red Shoes (1948), Boris Lermontov, the controlling impresario behind a famous ballet company, asks the up-and-coming dancer Victoria Page why she wants to dance. She snaps back with the question, “Why do you want to live?” I imagine that director Ted V. Mikels would give the same response were he asked why he makes movies. “It takes your guts and your entrails and your soul to make a film,” Mikels proclaimed in an interview in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It takes everything you possess within you!”

topics: directors, documentary film, genre films, horror, how-to

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Curating the curators at Bay Area Now 5

Bay Area Now, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial exhibition, has developed a deserved reputation for presenting an energetic survey of current Bay Area artistic practice. YBCA’s film/video curator, Joel Shepard, programs the film portion of the exhibition, and over the years he’s showcased a survey of contemporary Bay Area film, commissioned new work from locals like Bill Daniel and Ellen Bruno and focused on live cinema. This year Shepard curates Bay Area film curators.

topics: cult cinema, curators, documentary film institute, experimental film, features, genre films, yerba buena center for the arts

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Room for thought at SFMOMA

A film in a darkened theater commands our undivided attention, but a video installation in a museum doesn’t have the same effect. Living so long with the insidious remote control, plus the steady erosion of attention spans, has made us impatient and intolerant of any program that isn’t entertaining us NOW! Frankly, we’re so allergic to boredom that a mere instant of stasis or confusion is enough to send us hopping to another channel, or fleeing to another room. The adjacent installations of computer-generated video by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer currently on display at SFMOMA require more time than most to reveal themselves, and it’s the rare visitor who sticks around that long. Are the peripatetic hordes missing out on some fantastic secret of the universe? I daresay no. Yet I consider it my public duty to encourage anyone who checks out the show in its last month to slow down their meter and get on its rhythm.

topics: art, exhibitions, sfmoma

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Mountainclimbing in the Tenderloin

"A maverick Bay Area filmmaker since his involvement in the Cine Manifest collective starting in the early ’70s, Rob Nilsson was a visible name in the larger Amerindie world during its formative years, with such titles as Northern Lights and Heat and Sunlight," writes Dennis Harvey. "For the last 15 years or so, however, he’s devoted most of his time to one project, albeit a massive one: The ’9@Night’ series, a nine-feature cycle of loosely interwoven tales largely about life in San Francisco’s undersides, improvised and acted by a mix of professional actors and those trained via Nilsson’s Tenderloin workshop program. While individual Night films have premiered at film festivals (many at Mill Valley’s) over recent years, only now has this alternately raw and stylized, grandly ambitious series been available to view in its entirety." With ’9@Night’ ready to play in full at several venues Bay Area-wide (the Roxie and Smith Rafael will be showing all titles, while select screenings are coming to the Parkway and Cerrito), SF360.org asked this veteran indie auteur for his thoughts, which he gamely and intelligently offers here.

topics: bay area, directors, features, independent film

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"The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" visits the PFA

The now-beloved film noir genre of Hollywood’s 1940s and 1950s didn’t have a name until the French gave it one—they were just ordinary "crime mellers" or "gangster movies" to American audiences and critics who didn’t think twice about any artistic merit they might have until much later. Likewise, the "hardboiled" novels and short stories of the era (going back to the 1930s) was mostly considered disposable pulp fiction. A few authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were (and are) more highly regarded, but the majority—even relatively successful ones—hardly attracted much attention at the time. If lucky, they found some degree of real appreciation later on, most often posthumously. People like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford are considered legends now, but that would scarcely have seemed a logical outcome to them while alive.

David Goodis was one of the fairly-successful-then-forgotten ones. (As one internet "noir" bookseller’s biography succinctly puts it, "The lives of Goodis’ protagonists tend to mirror his own: Early promise, squandered.")

topics: authors, genre films, noir, pacific film archive

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"The Exiles," a return engagement

Despite a handful of more sympathetic portrayals (as in Anthony Mann’s 1950 The Devil’s Doorway), Hollywood’s record on Native American imagery before the late 1960s was one of condescension when not outright "savage" caricature. And that’s just counting the thousands of period-set Westerns—in movies about modern life, American Indians simply didn’t exist.

Ergo there was a startling sense of discovery for viewers when Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles premiered in 1961 at the Venice and San Francisco International film festivals, then other such showcases over the next couple years. This long-in-making naturalistic drama was an unvarnished look at "twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles, California."

topics: american indian film, directors, filmmakers

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Andrea Kreuzhage & Someguy riffle through "1000 Journals"

[SF360.org editor’s note: This interview first appeared during the San Francisco International Film Festival, where 1000 Journals played this past spring. It opens this Friday, Aug. 1, at the Roxie.]

In 2000, a San Francisco graphic designer with the humble pseudonym of Someguy had a wildly ambitious brainstorm. He put a thousand blank journals out into the world in stages, opening the spigot on a torrent of contributions encompassing everything from knocked-off diary entries to poignant confessions to obsessively crafted art. Nonetheless, after three years, only a single completed book of 220 pages had made its way back to Someguy. The 1000 Journals project has mushroomed in the intervening years, inspiring both a book drawn from journal entries and a documentary, 1000 Journals, that tracks down participants around the globe and raises a host of fascinating questions about creativity, collaboration, community and communication. We sat down with Someguy and first-time director Andrea Kreuzhage, a German producer who’s lived in Los Angeles since the mid-‘90s, during the first of three screenings of 1000 Journals in the S.F. International Film Festival.

topics: art, authors, bay area, directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Experience

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

In a small elementary school in Kafr Kara, an Arab village in central Israel, two teachers stand at the front of a classroom to deliver the day’s lesson. The topic is independence—for half the class. For the other half, it’s catastrophe. At least, that’s how the teachers, one Jewish, one Arab, seem to see it, and a classroom of small human sponges waits to see who will get the last word.

It’s not exactly just another day at Bridge over the Wadi, a bilingual, bicultural Jewish-Arab school that is one of half a handful in existence. Rather, it’s the anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state, known as Independence Day to Israelis and to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But how to tell a coherent story to children when narrating from opposing points of view is a question that surfaces repeatedly in the documentary Bridge over the Wadi, which screens in this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Directed, written, and produced by the sibling filmmaking team of Barak and Tomer Heymann — a selection of whose films are highlighted this year in a festival tribute — Bridge follows the school, located in the Wadi Ara (wadi is Arabic for "valley"), through its first shaky year of existence in 2004 and 2005.

topics: jewish cinema

Experience

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Back at the Castro this weekend for the 13th year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents a variety of titillating titles, showing 12 feature films over 2 1/2 days. I’ve attended each SFSFF since its start in 1996, and can always feel the sincere passion for these classic films exhibited by everyone involved. The perfect marriage of form and content, the Festival makes sure to get the best 35mm prints of films both famous and bizarre, as well as world-class musicians to accompany all the films, which are shown in a bona fide film palace built in 1922.

This year’s lineup includes such silent icons as Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies and flapper Colleen Moore, but also lesser-known characters such as Chief Buffalo Long Lance, the supposed Blackfoot chief who, well, wasn’t. This year’s film directors famous as well as infamous include Tod Browning, René Clair, Carl Dreyer, King Vidor and William Desmond Taylor (yes, the victim of the never-solved murder with suspects including three film actresses, one stage mother and the GM of Paramount Pictures).

topics: bay area, film festivals, silent film

Experience

"The Gits," the movie

Every campus, every city, probably everybody you know has stories to tell about the rock band that didn’t Make It, but should have. Most often they fall apart—despite all potential and local fandom—due to interpersonal problems, financial stress, or because certain members simply move on to other locations and professions. Whenever talent goes unfulfilled, it’s sad. But it’s seldom as tragic as in the case of The Gits, a Seattle band on the verge of major-label signage and potential greatness when lead singer Mia Zapata was murdered in 1993.

topics: documentary, independent film, music

Experience

The world of "Derek" at Frameline32

It goes without saying that sexuality is never far from the surface of Derek Jarman’s films, something he himself is clear enough accounting for in the lengthy 1990 interview which forms the backbone of Isaac Julien’s documentary portrait Derek. Over the sepia, postwar home movies that Jarman worked into films like The Last of England (1988), the artist recounts getting caught in bed with a boy during prep school and being "raked over the coals" for it—something which caused him to redirect any sexual energy he had into painting and collecting into his twenties, and later persisted in the vacuum-sealed air of solitary fixation in which his films seemed to play out. Later, accompanying shots of nubile lads and Scorpio Rising (1964) leather, Jarman emphasizes his desire to have sex in public as a kind of a revenge on the society which would repress his desires—a neat enough corollary for the let-it-blurt axiom of his serviceable film style. This contrast between amour fou and a rigid sense of self-preservation rivets Jarman’s collected works, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from Derek, a documentary tribute which does not seek to enlarge or complicate the filmmaker’s legacy so much as succor its loss.

topics: art film, directors, documentary, experimental film, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Experience

Frameline rides Argentina's new wave

Last year’s Frameline First Feature Award winner was Alexis Dos Santos’ debut Glue (2006), an overall festival favorite, and one that SF Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment Editor Johnny Ray Huston wryly observed as "yet another example of how new Argentine cinema […] continues to stretch the time and space dimensions of the word new." It had already been a half decade since 2001, Argentine film’s watershed year at film festivals abroad and the year the entire industry—and country—suffered through a catastrophic economic collapse. The state-subsidized film schools that had nurtured members of the ’90s new wave were forced to close and many in the film industry fretted over what seemed like a foreclosed future.

topics: argentine cinema, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Experience

SFFS Screen at Sundance Kabuki

When executive director Graham Leggat announced last April that the San Francisco Film Society would open its year-round screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on June 13—a Friday by this year’s calendar—he added that for SFFS, at least, it would be an auspicious date. Even before the first film has spooled, you don’t need to be draped in garlic or packing rabbits’ feet to believe him. The Film Society (publisher of SF360.org) has reason to be optimistic about its new undertaking, which hopes to significantly contribute to the spectrum of art and specialty films now available at Bay Area theaters.

topics: art film, documentary, exhibitions, features, film festivals, independent film, san francisco film society, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, telluride film festival

Experience

San Francisco Black Film Festival's 10th

Last month Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy, a locally produced fiction feature that premiered at the SF International, made much of the gentrification, "urban renewal" policies and other factors that over decades have made San Francisco perhaps the U.S. city with the lowest percentage of African American residents. Particularly noted was a massive campaign against "blight" in the 1960s Fillmore District—essentially destroying one of the nation’s historic centers of black life, culture, art and economic growth.

This month, the SF Black Film Festival is doing its bit to right that wrong, using for the first time as a primary venue the newly Sundance-owned and remodeled Sundance Cinemas right there at the old neighborhood’s Fillmore and Geary center. It’s a landmark year for SFBFF in other ways as well, as 2008 marks its 10th anniversary with the most expansive program yet. Flagging the theme "10 Years, 10 Days, 100 Films," the fest encompasses two long weekends (June 4-8 and 11-15) as well as several other event locales, including Yoshi’s and the Rasselas Jazz Club on Fillmore itself, plus the African-American Arts and Culture Complex on Fulton and the Museum of the African Diaspora downtown.

topics: african american cinema, african cinema, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, features, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema

Experience

SFIAF: "Mordake" and week two -- reviewed, previewed

Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s new solo chamber opera, starring acclaimed tenor John Duykers, is enjoying a thrillingly intimate world premiere this week under the banner of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Based on the deeply weird story of 19th-century scion and medical curiosity Edward Mordake (driven to suicide by the residual visage on the back of his head of his female "evil twin"), Mordake packs a multisensory punch inside a tightly knit, highly portable production—one clearly unwilling to sacrifice opera’s theatrical grandeur to avant-garde budgets.

Thanks, in part, to Mordake’s use of some contemporary video technology and an exquisite design concept, it doesn’t have to. Sets, properties, costumes and lights are all kept to a lean but choice minimum in a production that takes supreme advantage of a prerecorded electronic score as well as a striking interactive visual panorama featuring a video motion-sensing program designed by German engineer Frieder Weiss.

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, experimental film, opera

Experience

Jimmy Stewart at 100

When the late 1960s brought about radical change on many fronts to a hitherto somewhat fossilized—and suddenly bejeezus-scared—Hollywood, many observed that an entirely new breed of movie star was emerging. Instead of the glamazons and broad-shouldered he-men that dominated before, we now had stars as quirky, flawed and non-glam as Dustin Hoffman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Elliott Gould, Glenda Jackson, Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, Donald Sutherland, George Segal and so forth. They were actual leading men and women, not just the character actors, comedy relief or stage-exiled talents they might have been just years before.

topics: actors

Experience

Finding Warren Sonbert

Unlike most experimental filmmakers, Warren Sonbert’s collected works have had the benefit of full retrospectives at major museums (San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, New York’s, Guggenheim) and a strong preservation effort. These garlands were posthumous, coming after the artist died of AIDS in 1995, but accord on this scale is rare for an underground moviemaker, no matter the biographical fillings. An avid traveler, opera buff and cinephile, Sonbert dipped into many cultural niches without subscribing to any particular dogmatism. Beginning as a teenage prodigy amidst Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sonbert brought his Bolex camera to bear on his life, tastes and milieus. He’s sometimes simplistically referred to as a "diarist" filmmaker, though Sonbert developed more over time than the term implies. As his films moved from outsider pop to symphonic polyvalence, their overlaid and often contradictory tones and themes inscribed a uniquely capacious cinema.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film

Experience

Asia Argento, in full flower

Motherhood has supposedly had a slowing-down effect on Asia Argento, though at present evidence points rather wildly to the contrary. Not only does she star in this week’s San Francisco International Film Festival official opener, Catherine Breillat’s costume intrigue The Last Mistress, she also figures heavily in two other SFIFF features. Both are programmed in the culty "Late Show" section: Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara’s most acclaimed film in years, and The Mother of Tears, a latest horror opus directed by her own fan-idolized gorehound dad Dario Argento. A couple weeks ago yet another vehicle opened commercially, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, which is entirely dominated by her feverish and highly physical performance.

Conventional logic might suggest all this visibility means it’s "breakthrough" time for Asia Argento, that moment when an actor goes from being a familiar face to a marquee name that can singlehandedly draw folks into the multiplex, or at least the arthouse. (In Europe she’s already quite well-known.) But as her project choices among other things bear out, Argento probably isn’t very interested in becoming a "star" in the conventional sense. In fact, she seems the girl most likely to run from any such fate.

topics: actors, genre films, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival

Experience

Will 'The Thrill' Viharo's 'Thrillville' turns 11

One man’s camp is another man’s trash. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any event, this is the endless, bruising debate among cinephiles: What “distinguishes” the painfully bad stuff—the misfires of talented artists, the hack work of lesser mortals, the by-the-numbers cookie-cutter crap—from the low-rent gems, the bizarre one-offs, the twisted genre riffs, the pinnacles of unintentionally hilarious bad taste? With the latter we have entered the exalted province of Will “The Thrill” Viharo, the fez-festooned impresario of the monthly East Bay cult-movie extravaganza “Thrillville.” In anticipation of his 11th anniversary show April 10 at the Cerrito Speakeasy, featuring the 1958 chiller “It! The Terror From Beyond Outer Space” (whose plot was ripped off by “Alien,” it’s widely maintained), we hobnobbed with Viharo over a mug of joe. “Garbage to me is anything with Tom Cruise,” he explained. “Trash to me is anything with Tura Satana. Trash is something you keep and recycle; garbage is something you use then throw away. I prefer trashy films; they have a longer life.”

topics: cerrito speakeasy, cult cinema, directors, exhibitions, genre films

Experience

Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival

Who says it’s not easy being green? If you ask the folks behind the Bay Area-based Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival, engaging films with positive and eye-opening ecological themes can not only be easy but high fun. And they’ve been proving it since 2004, with an annual spate of short films covering a gamut of environmental subjects and stylistic approaches while studiously avoiding the doomy.

“We’re living at a time when we need stories that connect people, bring them together and inspire hope,” explains festival director and founder Zakary Zide. “We wanted to reach out and be more inclusive.” Doing so meant highlighting the humor, adventure and sheer wonder of the natural environment and the place of human beings in it. Rather than targeting single issues like global warming or the coming water crisis, EarthDance aims to be a bridge between art, nature and science. In that sense, says Zide, “It’s not even political.”

topics: environmental films, exhibitions, experimental film, film festivals, oakland museum of california

Experience

SFMOMA's "Nonwestern Westerns" series

Until they started falling out of fashion in the 1960s, Westerns were pretty much the bedrock of the American movie industry. Whole studios had been created to churn ‘em out like “Bronco Billy” Anderson’s in the East Bay. (Fremont’s Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum still shows silent films year-round in his honor.) The Great Train Robbery, considered the first real narrative movie using cross-cuts, close-ups and other then-innovative techniques, was a Western.

topics: asian cinema, genre films, italian cinema, reviews, san francisco museum of modern art, westerns

Experience

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival 2008

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is always nothing less than enticing. There’s pre-show dinner in Japantown; the noisy, neon-colored anticipation of a big show at the Castro; and you might drop in on a film like My Secret Cache (Shinobu Yaguchi, SFIAAFF 1998) for nothing more than the words "Japanese" and "comedy," and have one of the worst laughing-fit moments of your life when the heroine, escaping from a holdup, runs into trouble (two words: air bag).

Or you might buy a ticket for The Dream Catcher (Ed Radtke, SFIAAFF 2000), not expecting much more than a darkened theater and the occasional Junior Mint, and leave struck by the impressionistic feeling of how painterly, wide-open spaces compare to an identity that’s open to interpretation.

The 26th annual SFIAAFF, playing from March 13–23 in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose, kicks off with Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, based on the book by Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li (currently a visiting professor at Mills College).

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, directors, film festivals

Experience

'A Genuine Tribute to Peter Bogdanovich'

There’s a scene a third of a way into Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film Targets (1968) in which the director seems to directly address his future critics. The film, an early mash-up of serial killing and cinematic reflexivity made under Roger Corman’s watch, stars an aging Boris Karloff as a romanticized version of himself. A slick-haired Bogdanovich stands in to play the part of…the young celluloid-mad director trying to revive the Karloff character’s star with a couple of quickies for an independent producer. I’m not sure even the Coen Brothers would be arch enough for such a ploy, but Bogdanovich plays it beautifully in a scene in Karloff’s hotel room. One of the old actor’s first films, The Criminal Code (1931, directed by Howard Hawks), plays on television, and Bogdanovich’s director is immersed within moments. Before long, he’s shushing the real actor in favor of his black-and-white likeness.

topics: castro theatre, critics, directors, dvd, exhibitions

Experience

Danny Glover, "Honeydripper," and us

Danny Glover is 61 years old, a born-and-raised San Francisco resident. He’s best known to the masses by far as the calm co-star to a much crazier (both on- and off-screen, it seems) Mel Gibson in those Lethal Weapon movies, though he (and we) would probably cite his best work as being elsewhere, in films seen much less widely.

One of them might well turn out to be Honeydripper, which opens this Friday. An all-too-rare instance these days of a (more or less) starring vehicle for him, this latest from writer-director John Sayles—a filmmaker whose track record of pro-labor projects must have made him simpatico with the longtime unionist actor—casts Glover as Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, piano-playing proprietor of the titular blues joint in 1950 rural Alabama. Facing financial ruin, he needs a big windfall, fast. So he creates one, claiming that he’s secured a show from famed (if fictive) electric guitarist Guitar Sam. But the latter doesn’t turn up as promised, forcing Pine Top to try saving his club via a desperate gambit.

topics: african cinema, directors, documentary, political film, san francisco

Experience

Cinema, Israeli style

Israel turns 60 in May, and the anniversary will be celebrated in this country with acres of Op-Ed space devoted to sober analyses of how the Jewish state long ago lost its idealism. It’s true that the nation is no longer defined absolutely by Zionism, the secular nationalist movement that was endorsed worldwide (except by the Arab states) as details of the Holocaust emerged in the weeks and months after World War II. Likewise, Israel’s socialist values, embodied by a kibbutz system that enjoyed mythological status until the late ’70s, have given way to the greed, selfishness and corruption endemic to most capitalist societies, young or mature. But even as the country has become a typically affluent Western society, its cinema has retained its status as a crucial component of the national dialogue. Israeli films serve as both conscience and instigator, possibly because artists are able to exert influence in a country of just 7.3 million people. (Movies in this country are produced almost exclusively for entertainment and socialization, in case you hadn’t noticed.) But Israeli movies have been exposed to even bigger audiences in recent years, garnering praise, prizes and distribution deals on the international festival circuit. With the current and imminent release of “The Band’s Visit, “Beaufort” and “Jellyfish” in the U.S., on the heels of last year’s “Close to Home” and “The Bubble,” the wave has reached our shores.

topics: directors, independent film, jewish cinema, oscars

Experience

Undying love for George A. Romero

It probably wasn’t George A. Romero’s original dream to become semi-famous for movies about the flesh-eating undead. Yet arguably no American director has creatively given so much to the horror genre as he — or gotten so little back, at least in financial terms. Does he actually like making zombie flicks every few years? Or is it just the one reliable commercial fallback in a career that’s perpetually gotten the short end of the mainstream-funding stick?

topics: directors, lists