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Global Film Initiative: Funding the bigger picture

Cinephiles and cineplexers alike, hungry for something new, could do worse than The Legend of the Holy Net Potato. The forthcoming first feature by young Kerala-based filmmaker Vipin Vijay (winner in 2007 of Rotterdam’s prestigious Tiger Award for his Malayalam documentary, Video Game) concerns a cyborg versed in black magic with a sideline as a computer hacker. Mixing an epic sensibility with a shrewd grasp of the man-machine age, the script blends local storytelling traditions, autobiography, the occult and Internet piracy into an idiosyncratic journey of self-discovery that promises to be as polymorphously postmodern as it is inherently particular. Indeed, despite the global-village tint cast by the computer screen, it is its cultural rootedness and local flavor that make Potato anything but everyday cinematic fare—and manna from heaven to an outfit like the Global Film Initiative.

Vijay’s difficult-to-categorize offering was just one of ten full-length feature film projects awarded completion funds this spring as part of Global Film Initiative’s twice-annual granting cycle, which targets filmmakers from countries in the developing world.

topics: art film, bay area, documentary film, funding, international film

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Vertigo Celebrates 50 Years of Acrophobia, Fear of Flying and San Francisco

Not many movies call for a celebration of their anniversaries (did anyone celebrate the 50th anniversary of Citizen Kane?), but Vertigo is an exception, especially in this self-absorbed, any-excuse-for-a-party town, for what many have called “the ultimate San Francisco film.” Celebrations have already occurred in the way of screenings, and more are planned, notably a renovation of one of the movie’s key locations.

The actual birthday of Alfred Hitchcock’s magnum opus can be traced to Friday, May 9, 1958, the day of the world premiere, which took place at the Stage Door theater On May 8, the day began, typically, overcast and gray. A train from Los Angeles pulled into the station at Third and Townsend, and off stepped Kim Novak. A crowd of fans and reporters was waiting for the film’s star, who, at the age of 26 had already been featured on the cover of Time. The overcast light only highlighted the fact that her blond hair had a hint of lavender that day.

topics: bay area, film history, genre films

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From SF to Jerusalem and back with Muayad Alayan and Christian Bruno

Muayad Alayan, a 24-year-old filmmaker from the only remaining Arab neighborhood in West Jerusalem, was not even aware there was such a think as Palestinian cinema until, as a teenager, he came to the Bay Area to visit his brother and sister. Later, after a stint at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, he returned to San Francisco as a film student at City College. Among his teachers was local filmmaker Christian Bruno, who this year traveled to Jerusalem as the director of photography for Alayan’s Lesh Sabreen? (Why Sabreen?, now taking donations).

"I liked him immediately," remembers Bruno of their first meeting at City College. "He was really attracted to cinema in a way that someone raised on Jean-Luc Godard could only be. He was the youngest person in the class, but he struck me more as somebody in their late 20s or 30s." The two kept in touch sporadically afterward, until one day Alayan called on Bruno to recommend a DP for a feature he planned to shoot in his hometown. Bruno immediately volunteered. "Mostly because I was interested in working with him," he says. Beyond the logistical nightmares both before and while shooting in Israel and the occupied West Bank (discussed by Alayan below), Bruno found the task of filming in Israel/Palestine at once eye opening and familiar.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, middle eastern film

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Guy Maddin talks about movies, writing, his writing about movies, and the allure of Ann Savage and the Osmonds

SF360.org editor’s note: On the occasion of the opening of My Winnipeg this Friday in Bay Area theaters, we’re re-running an entertaining interview Johnny Ray Huston, arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, conducted for us with Maddin two years ago, when Maddin was the recipient of a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He also appeared at the Festival this past spring with My Winnipeg, and was back in town this month doing a live presentation for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Due to brilliant works such as his 2001 short ‘The Heart of the World,’ GuyMaddin is a more-than-worthy choice for the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, but I’d like to suggest that he also deserves praise for his writings about film. For example, ‘Death in Winnipeg,’ his account of time spent on the set of a recent TV movie about the Osmond family, is one of the best and funniest pieces of journalism my bloodshot eyes and addled brain have beheld in the past decade. That article and other scribblings by Maddin can be found in ‘From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings,’ a beautifully-designed tome featuring hyper-compressed descriptive wit that is signature Maddin. In conjunction with Maddin’s SF visit, I recently spoke to him about his second career as a film writer, as well as other topics.

topics: authors, cult cinema, directors, san francisco international film festival, screenwriting, silent film

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You, the Man, and "CSNY: Deja Vu"

"Shut up and sing!" has been the historied catcall—sometimes less politely worded—for audiences who are fans of a particular artist’s music but take umbrage when their onstage patter gets a little "too political." It was even used as the title of a documentary about the Dixie Chicks, whose mouthing off about our current President famously got them kicked off conservative-leaning country radio.

It’s just possible, however, that no one has yet hurled that epithet at Neil Young, country-, bluegrass- and heavy-rock-influenced as his music has often been. I mean, what could they be surprised by? From "Ohio" (about the Kent State killings of student protestors) to "This Note’s For You" (a catchy riposte to rock’s product-endorsing, corporate-concert-sponsoring nature) and beyond, Neil has always aimed a cranky finger at The Man.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, political film, sundance kabuki

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In Memoriam: Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

Bruce Conner, the great, irascible and ever-evolving San Francisco–based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away on July 7, 2008. The prototype for much of today’s repurposed art, Conner’s gauzy assemblages of salvaged materials, such as doll parts and nylon stockings, attracted much art-world attention in the late fifties. His landmark film, A Movie (1958), made from scraps of newsreels, soft-core porn, and B movies, augured the future of another form, the music video. Conner moved to the Bay Area in 1957 and quickly became a significant member of the lively Beat community, forming his own makeshift group of funk artists, the Rat Bastard Protective Association. In the ’60s, Conner could be found at the Avalon Ballroom designing light shows; when the ’70s punk scene emerged, Conner was there as well, capturing the dark vitality of the music in the photographs exhibited here. Throughout these countercultural trends, Conner continued to work in many media—drawings, photography, films, sculptural objects—creating powerful works summarized in an ambitious 1999 touring survey, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story. To further highlight his crucial influence, A Movie was placed on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Bruce Conner’s association with BAM/PFA goes back many years. (Continued, below, by clicking "more.")

Editor’s note: Pacific Film Archive Video Curator Steve Seid wrote this note to accompany the Berkeley Art Museum’s Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens show (see photo above), which runs through Aug. 3, 2008.

topics: bay area, experimental film

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Niles Essanay's Voguing eunuchs and raving madmen

Squint your eyes as you walk down main street Niles and you can almost see Charlie Chaplin with his paramour, Edna Purviance, strolling over to the local Nickelodeon to catch a film in 1915. Not much looks changed in the historic town of Niles (now a part of the conglomerate city of Fremont—but don’t call it Fremont in front of Niles locals.) Having just spent three invigorating days in Niles watching crowds cheering as world-class musicians improvised brilliantly to films from the years between 1903 and 1917, I can report that silent films are alive and well.

topics: bay area, silent film

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SFFS Screen offers a new Eric Rohmer

Though grouped with the Cahiers du Cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers who comprised the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer is eight years older than Jacques Rivette, ten years the senior of Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, and was a full dozen years ahead of Francois Truffaut. Even so, Rohmer was still working as an editor at Cahiers when Truffaut and Godard had their respective breakthroughs (The 400 Blows, Breathless). By the time Rohmer joined their ranks, Truffaut was in a brief post- Jules and Jim (1962) wilderness and Godard was toying with Marxism. Rohmer’s capacious behavioral inquiries couldn’t help but seem somewhat aloof by comparison—though certainly not insensitive to the moral reckonings embedded in quotidian actions and thought processes.

topics: art film, directors, french cinema, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki

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Hong Sang Soo on the SFFS Screen

For South Korean director Hong Sang Soo, it’s the road often traveled that makes all the difference. Where Hong’s films frequently go is toward dichotomies—"life" vs. "death," "clean" vs. "unclean"—while dancing around the ambivalent partners of intimacy and isolation. Hong’s films are full of come-hither gestures followed by bodies retreating once the fleeting desire is consummated, yet this consummation never brings satiation. Hong’s characters always wander away, as if slightly fearful or disgusted following attainment of what they thought they wanted. Those of us who appreciate Hong’s films know not to expect resolution. Fulfillment comes in the delayed gratification that happens days later as your mind meanders along the paths of Hong’s characters realizing the significance of something as everyday as the accidental gifting of an umbrella or a scarf given to a sick child only to be taken back soon after.

topics: asian cinema, directors, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki

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Screen test, San Jose

Brendan Lott’s Memories I’ll Never Have, currently showing at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, makes use of the Internet in inspiring ways. He has culled photos from social networking sites. You know these photos. As Lott describes, they are often of people who may have had a little too much to drink. Lott sends a URL of the image to southern China where it is meticulously reproduced as an oil painting and paid for through PayPal. Then Lott receives the paintings and displays their photorealistic glory in shows likes this one. How inspiring is it? Suffice to say that the paintings look so great, are so funny and beautiful and the process seems so easy (perhaps too easy) that everyone I spoke to who saw the show asked the same thing: "How much does it cost to get one of those paintings made?" I don’t want this to turn into a plug for commissioning oil painting reproductions in China, but let’s just say it is very reasonable.

topics: art, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, exhibitions

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"Wall-E:" June 7

The latest charmer from writer/director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) is Wall-E, about a robot who discovers passion in his quest for Eve. It opens later this month, but the San Francisco Film Society is screening a benefit at HQ: Pixar Animation Studios’ own theater. Tickets are only being sold until noon, Thursday, June 5. More at SFFS.

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Q&A: Alex Rivera, "Sleep Dealer"

Alex Rivera’s debut feature Sleep Dealer was developed at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program labs and won the 2002 Sundance/NHK award and a 2004 Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. It then moved on to win two major awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Rivera and David Riker won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for outstanding achievement for their screenplay and Sleep Dealer was also the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award to the filmmaker provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Sleep Dealer was selected "for its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction."

While screening as part of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, the U.S. distribution rights for Sleep Dealer were picked up by Maya Releasing, which intends a theatrical distribution in February 2009. This decision was being reached even as the charmingly kinetic Alex Rivera and I sat down to discuss his film.

topics: directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, science fiction, sundance, sundance film festival

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"Palestine: Interior/Exterior"

Watching Kamal Aljafari’s astonishing film The Roof (2006)—a work at once explicitly personal, coolly contemplative, and full of coruscating protest—is to recognize a marvelously intuitive artist and the momentum of a larger cinematic movement at the same time. In its hour-long exploration of two Palestinian family homes inside Israel, that of Aljafari’s parents’ house in Ramleh and his grandmother’s house in Jaffa, The Roof recalls the social-psychological landscapes and formal strategies of such filmmakers as Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad and Rashid Masharawi without ever feeling merely derivative of them. Rather, The Roof registers a potent new cinematic voice while offering more proof that today’s Palestinian cinema is one of the most vital anywhere.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film, kino21, political film

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Why skaters heart Spike

Most of the kids you see tooling around the streets on skateboards these days don’t know this, but there was once a time when spotting a professional skateboarder in a movie or on television was about as likely as finding a hundred bucks on the ground. But that was a long time ago. Skateboarding’s popularity has boomed a thousand-fold over last ten years and skate-related media coverage is now ubiquitous. It’s great for money-minded professional skateboarders and for large corporations, but skateboarding’s mainstream presence just seems strange to people like me who have been skating their entire lives. On one hand you have the MTV extreme sport stuff—the Rob and Big show, The Life of Ryan, the X-games, etc. And on the other you have contrived docu-dramas, like Larry Clark’s Kids, that treat skate-culture as a symptom of urban decline. It’s interesting stuff, but none of it has anything to do with skateboarding. Thank god for Spike Jonze, the patron saint of real skateboarders and the only real “skate director” out there.

topics: directors, san francisco, san francisco film society

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Q&A: Ira Sachs on the making of "Married Life"

Ira Sachs’ third feature Married Life, which opens this week, is a balloon-pricking look back at that ostensible last stand of all-American nuclear-family wholesomeness, the ’50s. (Well, to be fully accurate, the year given as setting is 1949.)

It stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Cooper as a long-term marital pair, Rachel McAdams as the young thing he’s besotted with, Pierce Brosnan as his profoundly self-interested “best friend,” and David Wenham in a role whose significance can’t be revealed without spoiling a plot twist.

There are a fair number of twists in this adaptation (by Sachs and Oren Moverman) of John Bingham’s novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven. It eventually becomes as much a retro-noirish crime thriller as it is a wry satire of complacency and intrigue in the pre-“swinging”—but still restless ‘n’ randy—sexual climate of Eisenhower-era suburbia.

topics: directors

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The San Francisco Irish Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Irish Film Festival begins this Wednesday at the Roxie with a slate of narratives and documentaries imbued with Ireland’s particularly unique sense of time and place in the modern world; the people, the pubs, and that iconic, green pastoral landscape.

Irish actor and comedian Pat Shortt stars in the opening night film Garage (rhymes with ‘carriage’ when said with the appropriate accent) though the film utilizes his talents less for comedic value and more for his ability to believably portray the subtle mannerisms of Josie, the well-meaning, deeply lonely town simpleton. This is the second collaboration by director Leonard Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran, whose first feature Adam & Paul, was a similar, heavily character-driven narrative marked by what seems to be emerging as a thematic trademark: sympathetic characters in inescapably tragic situations. Garage took home the C.I.C.A.E. Award at Cannes in 2007.

topics: actors, directors, documentary, independent film, irish cinema, oscars, shorts, sundance film festival

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Kiarostami firsts, plus "Five"

Abbas Kiarostami has won many awards, from the Palme d’Or at Cannes to the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement award at the 2000 San Francisco International. Most surprising to anyone not familiar with the director’s work is that he has achieved it all without the help of professional actors. But that’s about to change, as the legendary director is embarking on a project with Juliette Binoche. Certified Copy was supposed to have begun shooting in March in Italy, but has been postponed until May, 2009, to accomodate schedules.

In the meantime, the director is completing work on his new feature, Shirin, based on a legendary Persian love story about an emperor’s wife who gave her heart to a humble lover, Ferhad, with tragic results. Starring in this one, Kiarostami told me in a telephone conversation, “will be 110 Iranian women from the ages of 18 to 80.”

topics: asian cinema, iranian cinema

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SF Indiefest diary

I tend to overbook myself and 50 percent of the time, it prevents me from getting anything done. Case in point: Last night I decided I was going to take in a triple feature at the Roxie for purposes of Indiefest coverage. It made sense at the time.

A sucker for music documentaries of all kinds, I showed up at “Electric Heart — Don Ellis,” at 5 p.m. to begin my six-hour movie-watching marathon. Ellis immediately reminded me of a 1970s Peter Gabriel. Specifically pre-“So” Peter Gabriel, when he had officially broken away from Genesis but not yet had huge commercial success, when he was experimenting with complete abandonment using the sounds and limitations of the instruments at his disposal, with tones, with electronics, and heavily influenced by world music.

topics: cult cinema, exhibitions, film festivals, independent film, music, sf indiefest