Category: Insider

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Yiyun Li, the voice of "A Thousand"

Yiyun Li has earned three Master’s degrees, won the Hemingway/Pen Award for her collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and seen the title story made into a critically acclaimed film by Wayne Wang. But on the day I met her, she was always apologizing for something: being low-key about her new movie fame, about wearing mismatching socks, about admitting she cried after reading galley proofs of her forthcoming novel, The Vagrants. She even confessed with a giggle, "I’m a very apologetic person." She teaches writing at UC Davis, but today, she could be confused for a student, in bright red shirt and ragged jeans fashionably torn at the knee (although I sense she would cringe at the word "fashionably").

Her own words are written in deceptively simple English, not translated from her first language. They are exquisitely chosen and precise—with delicate, almost tender, surprising perceptions about the characters she explores: an elderly woman who discovers love for a troubled little boy, a middle-aged man engaging in adultery, a young woman pondering an abortion, a gay Chinese American nervously greeting his mom. All are set, needle sharp, in a China that is changing as an infant stock market makes a mockery of ideology.

topics: asian american cinema, authors, bay area, features

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"Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer"

It’s a constant source of delight on the festival scene—and will no doubt continue to be in the immediate future, with our own SF Docfest just around the corner—how many good documentaries are made about the most unlikely subjects. But every once in a while a subject itself proves so natural a focus that you think, “A documentary had to be made about this,” and wonder why no one thought of it earlier. I don’t mean obvious Big Issues like global warming or Iraq (two subjects that have inspired so many worthwhile docs you could program entire film festivals or class curriculums around them), but rather small slices-of-life or individual personalities who turn out to have a LOT of drama going on when you look closer. Who knew?

topics: documentary, music, reviews

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Inside the Telluride Film Festival

The Telluride Film Festival thrives on trust: Film lovers and filmmakers travel to this remote corner of Colorado from great distances and at considerable expense on blind faith—because the TFF program is a closely guarded secret until the day that the festival opens. For 35 years, the extended festival family of pass holders, filmmakers, staffers and supporters has convened on Labor Day weekend knowing that their expectations of seeing a well-curated selection of world cinema, past and present, from Hollywood to Romania to Senegal to South Korea, will be exceeded. (Surely no one arrived in town dreaming that this year’s tributees would be actress Jean Simmons and directors David Fincher and Jan Troell.)

This is my 20th TFF; I was here three times as a pass holder, and, for the past 17 years, I’ve come here as a volunteer staffer. I’m one of many: The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring. For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a “schlepper," most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he’s stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he’s acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, “There was no way I wasn’t gong to Telluride. I love working (here).”

[Editor’s note: What follows is the TFF lineup, which was announced yesterday and posted in "News" on SF360.org.]

topics: animation, directors, documentary, exhibitions, features, international film, telluride film festival

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"Days and Clouds" finds changes in the weather

It’s said those who’ve never known it think love is the key to happiness; the poor know it is money. Those who espouse the more selfless kind of love are either monks or have never known real, suffocating, no-visible-way-out poverty. Even a drop from one economic strata to another that might still be positively luxurious in the Third World can cause serious anxiety or worse in the First.

Particularly now, with the economy (are we past that “Don’t call it a recession” stage yet?) having displaced terrorism and the war in Iraq as Americans’ biggest worry, it gives pause to realize how seldom our popular entertainment deals at all with that which so often concerns us most. Namely, why are we working harder, yet it keeps getting harder to make ends meet? The U.S. bedrock is supposed to be its middle class—yet that population bulk has slipped around on less-than-terra firma lately while the rich/poor gap widens, tipping more and more working-class folk increasingly toward a future as The New Poor.

topics: italian cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

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Film Arts education program evolves with SFFS partnership

"Film Arts was started by a handful of people around a flatbed editor," says Michael A. Behrens, Filmmaker Education Manager for Film Arts Foundation, which now presents its filmmaker education classes, workshops and seminars in partnership with the San Francisco Film Society, publisher of SF360.org. "And then they made that highly expensive piece of equipment available to a larger number of people."

"Now," he says, "you can buy a $500 camera and you’re on the street making a movie." Times have changed—which is why Behrens frequently uses the word "evolution" when it comes to his vision of the filmmaker education program.

Behrens, energized by the Film Society’s recent adoption of a suite of filmmaker services previously offered by Film Arts, is finalizing a hearty schedule of classes aimed at filmmakers, to debut in mid-October.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, film arts foundation, filmmakers, san francisco film society

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Locally made "Hats Off" finds fascination in 93-years-young actress

The things we know—or think we know—about the lives and loves of Hollywood’s celebrity class are disturbing to ponder. Jennifer Aniston’s bad luck with men. Brad and Angelina’s fertility rites. Will Smith’s religious affiliations, or lack thereof—none of it’s really any of our business, but all it takes is a grocery store checkout line or a treadmill stint at the gym to get the highlights and low points in the lives of the red carpet royalty. True, it’s mostly rumor, surmise, conjecture, and fabrication, but leaving those quibbles aside, what, exactly, is it that makes Will Smith’s cushioned $20-mil-a-pic existence more curious and scrutiny-worthy than that of any of the hundreds of walk-ons, extras, and bit part players who have populated his films?
While you’re standing in line at the supermarket pondering that question—and helplessly reaching for the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad of The Hills on the cover—somewhere in New York City one of those walk-ons, a 93-year-old woman named Mimi Weddell, is navigating the cramped apartment she shares with her daughter and son, perusing a jaw-dropping collection of hats for the perfect complement to her Elizabeth Arden-styled coiffure, and preparing for one more in a decades-long series of theatrical and commercial auditions.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, sffs screen

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Film Arts Foundation's legacy of advocacy enters a second stage through SFFS

When The Big Book of Bay Area Film History is written one day, chapters will certainly be devoted to the groundbreaking experimental filmmakers of the postwar era, as well as to the delicious poison-pen letters Alfred Hitchcock shot and signed here. The Francis Ford Coppola-Saul Zaentz-George Lucas trinity will certainly get its due. But the longest chapter should go to the entity that’s had the widest and deepest influence on the local filmmaking scene: a nonprofit organization formed by 15 independent filmmakers in 1976 called Film Arts Foundation (FAF). FAF provided members with equipment, classes and a bimonthly magazine, and, for many years, hosted a film festival notable for showcasing the best of the region’s legion of documentary, experimental and fiction filmmakers. Most critically, early on the institution evolved into a mentor to makers. That legacy of support, advice and advocacy is front and center as the San Francisco Film Society (publisher of SF360.org) takes on several of Film Arts’ key functions, notably the fiscal sponsorship program, effective Aug. 19.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, exhibitions, experimental film, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, san francisco film society

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Manny Farber (1917-2008): "The Geography of Gesture"

SF360.org editor’s note: Manny Farber, 91, died at his home in Leucadia, California, at midnight, Aug. 18. Said Telluride Film Festival co-director Tom Luddy, who shared the news with SF360.org, "I can only say that Manny was a dear friend and one of my heroes, a great writer and a great painter." One of America’s greatest film critics, Farber leaves behind many other admirers and friends in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Film Society, who enjoyed Farber’s presence when he received the Mel Novikoff Award during the 2003 Festival. We welcome your comments on Farber’s legacy and life (below) and reprint Robert Polito’s article for the 2003 SFIFF catalogue in Farber’s honor.

No other film critic has written so inventively or flexibly from inside the moment of a movie as Manny Farber.

For much of his writing life Farber was branded an advocate merely of action films and B-movies—as though it might not be distinction enough to have been the first American critic to advance serious appreciations of Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann. Yet Farber resisted many noir films of the 1940s as inflated and mannerist, and he also was among the first critics to write about Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, and was an exponent of such experimental directors as Michael Snow, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol and Chantal Ackerman. As J. Hoberman has written, Farber played “both ends off against the middlebrow.”

topics: authors, bay area, cinephiles, critics, exhibitions

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Parvez Sharma and "A Jihad for Love"

Parvez Sharma might never have made his profoundly moving A Jihad for Love if he had not felt guilty about causing unhappiness to his dying mother when he told her he was homosexual.

"A lot of the religious dogma she had never really used in her entire life became part of her argument against my homosexuality," the Indian director said when he was in San Francisco to present his documentary at the Frameline film festival this past June. The film opens in the Bay Area August 22.

topics: directors, documentary film, gay lesbian cinema

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SFFS Screen: Jacques Nolot and "Before I Forget"

The single, disgruntled, been-there-done-that gay man pushing well into middle-age or beyond has a long cinematic history—albeit most of it in the closet and unflattering. Sophisticated urban audiences might have recognized that such classic character actors in Hollywood’s "Golden Age" as Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton were playing stereotype "queers," but to most audiences they were just comic-relief eccentrics too fussy or silly to have gotten married. Later on, as movies became more "frank" in the 1960s and beyond, such figures came out of the closet only to be more harshly ridiculed, painted as bitter, misogynist, untrustworthy, even homicidal. What about today? With rare exceptions, in mainstream movies he’s still on the margins, if less despisedly so, as the heroine’s nonthreatening best friend or the funny neighbor or something.

So there’s something modestly daring about the movies made so far by Jacques Nolot, a longtime French stage, TV and film actor who didn’t make his feature directorial bow until a decade ago. His latest, Before I Forget, plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting this Friday.

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

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Li Yang's hard look at China in "Blind Mountain"

There are at least two Chinese words for "blind:" "xia" for the physically impaired and "mang" for those who cannot or will not see ugly or uncomfortable truths. But director Li Yang spent years in Germany before he could make two films intended to open Chinese eyes to the wretched lives of women for sale and miners-turned-murderers in their lust for money and survival.

Unfortunately, in their new capitalist/communist world, most Chinese citizens will probably not be given the opportunity to see either the 2003 mining horror/suspense story Blind Shaft (Mang Jing) or the kidnapping and sexploitation of a college student in Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)—not because of censorship, but for the same reasons American arthouse films don’t reach their publics: commercial pressures. However, Blind Mountain, a gripping fictional tale inspired by a true case that is only one of similar thousands, will open today on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. And there is still another Li production to come: Mang Liu about the two million homeless children cast adrift on city streets begging for help.

topics: art film, asian cinema, sffs screen, sundance kabuki

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Bruce Conner, remembered

Editor’s note: In response to Bruce Conner’s death Monday, SF360.org asked those who knew him and cared about his work to reflect on the artist/filmmaker. Responding, below, are filmmakers Craig Baldwin and Lynne Sachs, curator/CalArts dean Steve Anker and New York curator/archivist Mark McElhatten.

"I was saddened by the news of Bruce Conner’s death, but not surprised, as he had been suffering for years. Of course he was an inestimably large influence on my own work, but, so much more, an intense, brilliant beacon for both the art and cinema worlds internationally—in fact, and importantly—a West Coast agent who did a whole lot to bring those two realms together. Across media, that rail-thin beatnik exercised a marvelous mastery of both concept and execution, driven by an obsessive and contrarian mind. But beyond his creative output, for me it was his subcultural sensibility that was cause for wonder—that within this cracker-white Kansas-comes-to-the-City could roil such dark and dangerous and anti-authoritarian impulses….As I think Greil Marcus said, he was the flip-side of American Gothic—had seen the Holy Ghost in the midnight sky above the stark prairie, and that terror was ever celebrated in the apocalypses of his Art."

Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema, filmmaker, Mock Up on Mu, among others

topics: art, avant-garde, bay area

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Of bunnies and backstories: SFFS Screen's "Hank and Mike"

Thomas Michael remembers well the birth of Hank and Mike, the titular blue-collar Easter bunnies in director Matthiew Klinck’s absurdist workplace comedy on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting Friday. It was a decade ago and the then 19-year-old writer/actor was spitballing ideas with the rest of the writing staff of Y B Normal?, a Canadian Comedy Network sketch show.

"I said, ‘Hey, what about an Easter bunny and I pretended to take a drag on a cigarette, ‘Those fucking kids and their fucking chocolates!’" Michael relates in a conference call with SF360.org and his writing partner and co-star Paolo Mancini. "That got a big laugh. Then Paolo and I locked ourselves in the basement for a few hours and came up with the actual characters."

topics: comedy, san francisco film society, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

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Kevin Kelly: State of Cinema address

[Editor’s note: What follows is the State of Cinema address Kevin Kelly offered an audience Sunday, May 4, 2008, at the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

Welcome, welcome, welcome! This lovely theater here got dark and I thought, "Oh, great! It’s a movie! I can just sit back." I completely forgot that I have to give a talk. I would just love to sit here. Thank you to the San Francisco Film Festival for inviting me to speak on speculations on the future of where motion pictures are going. My role, I think, is to describe what I see as a little bit of an outsider. My method for doing this is very simple: to come [at it] as an outsider. We’re sitting here in a fantastic movie theater, but in fact more people see movies in airplanes than watch them in theaters. Airplanes and portable DVDs. But the movies aren’t made, usually, with that in mind. So what I’m trying to do is listen to the technology. Carver Mead, a technologist said, "Listen to the technology; see what it wants to say." And for the next 45 minutes, what I’m going to try to talk about is what I think the technology is telling us. The technology around moving pictures, motion pictures.

topics: authors, bay area, science fiction, technology

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Cinemania at the SF International

The Jules Feiffer quote that sits at the bottom of film festival superfan Sue Jean Halvorsen’s email reads, "Movies are better than real life. If you go to enough movies — movies become real life, and real life becomes a movie." Strangely enough, Halvorsen, caught mid-festival at a pizzeria near the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, still seems firmly rooted in reality, even though—at six days into it—she’s likely already got 50 films of the San Francisco International Film Festival under her belt. A Cinevisa holder, Halvorsen has a special method for choosing her films, maintaining her energy, and seeing the absolute best work possible. She attends many festivals in San Francisco, so the complicated sorting-and-decision-making process is pretty routine by now. Her tastes are eclectic, from bleak nihilism to political nonfiction to big-budget entertainment to specific ethnic/national cinema niches. She calls the International "my window on the world (cheaper than airfare)," adding, "I love seeing the international community show up for various films—no matter how remote." SF360.org sat down over a slice to find the method behind Halvorsen’s madness in putting together a cinemaniacal film festival viewing schedule. What follows is her explanation of the highlighter-happy SFIFF mini-guide seen above.

topics: bay area, cinephiles, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: Katherin McInnis cues the carnival music

Photographer and filmmaker Katherin McInnis, a longtime Bay Area resident who recently relocated to Brooklyn, screens her most recent film, Woodward’s Gardens, in the experimental shorts program "In A Lonely Place: New Experimental Cinema" at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. A couple of years ago, McInnis, in conjunction with local exhibition space Southern Exposure and the Mission-based Neighborhood Public Radio, created an audio tour of the city blocks bordered by Duboce, Mission, 15th Street and Valencia that once comprised the grounds of Woodward’s Gardens—an elaborate 19th-century amusement park. One part zoo, one part leisure space and one part spectacle, the grounds were owned and operated by the hotelier-cum-showman Robert Woodward, who came to be known as the "Barnum of the West." McInnis was so intrigued by the transformation this urban space had undergone in just over a century that she decided to create a film version of the tour. She also offered a photo-essay on the project last year in SF360.org.

topics: bay area, experimental film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: Barry Jenkins' San Francisco story

Two young, attractive African Americans, a man and a woman, wake up in a strange house in a nice San Francisco neighborhood, avoid each other as they dress and slip out the front door in awkward silence. But Micah’s not ready to let go of Jo’. So begins Barry Jenkins’s indie debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, a graceful, poignant and altogether marvelous film about fleeting urban connections, black identity and invisibility, cultural adventures and this gentrified city’s lost soul. Jenkins studied film production at Florida State University before heading to the industry town of LA. He soon relocated to San Francisco, and with stunning alacrity wrote, shot and completed Medicine for Melancholy. Jenkins was screening the movie at a Florida festival prior to its upcoming local premiere in the San Francisco International Film Festival, so we conducted the following pithy interview via email.

SF360.org has been running a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs through May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, independent film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: Eddie Muller's muses

A self-described "cultural archeologist," Alameda’s Eddie Muller is renowned as an expert on all things noir. As founder of the Noir City, the annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival—which packs crowds into the Castro Theater to watch rarities like Edge of Doom and The Velvet Touch and pay tribute to forgotten stars like Joan Leslie—Mueller has earned a reputation for breathing new life into lost classics. At this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, Muller showcases a new talent: film directing. His debut short film, The Grand Inquisitor, pays homage to the Dashiel Hammet-style detective story, but with a twist—the investigator is a dame.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, directors, noir, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: On the breeding behind "Evolution: The Musical!"

You can think of it as The Sound of Music meets Quest for Fire, or Jesus Christ Superstar rocks Land of the Lost. However you slice it, Evolution: the Musical! amounts to some pungent cross-breeding. The most ambitious project to date from Bay Area comedians, impresarios and filmmakers Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor, a.k.a. Illbilly Productions, Evolution is the strikingly contemporary story of a sort of missing-link Romeo (Bancroft, decked out in a few fig-leafs worth of fur and underbrush) and his pent-up, tightly bonneted Juliet (Tonya Glanz, cannily evoking the fervid Amish nymphet). The forbidden romance between Wog Wog and Mary, to give them their proper names, blossoms amid a rap-inflected survival-of-the-freakest showdown between their respective homies: a tribe of Beasties (backed by Darwin himself) and a church-load of Blesseds (playing on Jesus’ team). Gleefully puerile in its comic exuberance, on the politically fraught subject of human origins Evolution: The Musical! manages a wry send-up of religious and secular pretensions. The 38-minute featurette—packed with local comedic talent including the lion’s share of the sketch troupe Killing My Lobster—will enjoy its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in a combination screening and live performance at Mezzanine for SF360 Film+Club on May 6.

SF360.org sat down for a round table discussion with Bancroft and Taylor, as well as actors and KML veterans Glanz and Jon Wolanske (who plays the petulant head of the Blesseds). This took place over email, which meant there wasn’t really a table. In fact, Taylor was apparently in the woods at the time.

topics: independent film, music, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: California Newsreel at 40

What will you do on your 40th anniversary? If you’re California Newsreel, you’ll continue to do the same as you always have: producing and distributing film and video as a means of social change. Founded in 1968, the San Francisco-based Newsreel is the oldest nonprofit, social-issue documentary film center in the United States, with a library that includes Made in L.A. (Hecho en Los Angeles), which follows three Latina garment workers through a groundbreaking lawsuit and consumer boycott; This is Nollywood, an examination of the technical, economic, and social infrastructure of Nigeria’s booming film industry; and The Other Europe, which (among other stories) looks at the 2004 deaths within a group of illegal Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, England — the worst industrial accident in Britain in 25 years.

How have audiences, and Newsreel itself, changed over the years? California Newsreel principal Cornelius Moore sat down with SF360 via email and gave his thoughts on the state of the company, film’s role as an instrument of social change, and Newsreel’s status on MySpace.

The 51st S.F. International Film Festival celebrates California Newsreel’s 40th with a panel on Bay Area political documentary May 3, and screens the CA Newsreel film Faubourg Tremé May 3, 6, and 7.

topics: african american cinema, african cinema, bay area, directors, distributors, documentary, political film, san francisco, world cinema

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SFIFF51: Craig Baldwin shoots the moon, and the desert

Craig Baldwin has slaved in the underground for some three decades, evading mainstream recognition and achieving rarefied status as a guide and shaman for other artists working on the fringes. As the longtime programmer and force of nature behind the Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access, Baldwin provides a space for radical artists trafficking in the avant-garde, and adventurous, appreciative audiences allergic to corporate media. As a filmmaker based in the Mission—about as subterranean as you can get—Baldwin has made several feature-length, obsessively crafted collage films (including the barbed political satires O No Coronado! and Tribulation 99 and the gleefully subversive takedowns Sonic Outlaws and Spectres of the Spectrum) in which he appropriates snippets from old educational films and "B" movies to construct alternative histories of American history and media. His new film, Mock Up On Mu, is an imaginary science-fiction yarn starring the actual historical figures of Jack Parson, L. Ron Hubbard, Margaret Cameron and Aleister Crowley. More of a lark than Baldwin’s previous films, and featuring a substantial amount of footage he shot, it has its world premiere April 28 at the Sundance Kabuki and April 30 at the Pacific Film Archive as part of the SF International Film Festival. We spoke to Baldwin on the phone from Minneapolis, where he was in the middle of a college lecture-and-screening tour. Our feeble typing skills couldn’t match the torrent of Craigspeak, so any non sequiturs or fleeting incoherence in the transcript can be attributed to us, not the filmmaker.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film, political film, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: The Miller Brothers on writing, pitching, acting, directing, and hitting one out of the ballpark

Right about now, San Franciscans could use a baseball story that warms hearts as opposed to chilling souls. Touching Home by Bay Area-raised identical twins Logan and Noah Miller is a largely autobiographical coming-of-age film that radiates sincerity. Two major league hopefuls contending with their alcoholic father and some bad luck round the bases of West Marin with steadfast purpose and occasional humor. More impressive than the gleam of these two new actors’ smiles and the polish of this debut film’s editing and cinematography is the chutzpah the twins demonstrated in getting actors like Ed Harris and Robert Forster to play major roles. Less likely, perhaps, than being called up to the big leagues was their capture of actor Harris’s attention in the alley of the Castro Theatre after a 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival tribute. They showed him a short trailer of their project, and a short while later, they got the call that he would be solidly behind it. The film makes its world premiere Saturday, April 26, during SFIFF51. SF360.org got a chance to ask the twins about baseball and miracles over email last week.

This week, SF360.org runs a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs April 24-May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: actors, bay area, directors, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival, sports movies

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SFIFF51: Dawn Logsdon, on new hope in an old neighborhood, "Faubourg Tremé"

One giant storm and the government malfeasance that followed transformed New Orleans into a metanym, but directors Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie dig through the rubble of the horrific disaster to find a deeper, richer history of one particular New Orleans neighborhood. It’s a storyline that, if fully appreciated and reappropriated, could not only help bolster a city rebuilding itself, but remind the rest of us why it’s so important that the ideas of this city live on. Faubourg Tremé, now better known as the Sixth Ward, was home to pre-Civil Rights-era liberty for African Americans and fertile ground for political activism as well as music and literary life. Hogsdon, who grew up in New Orleans but has transplanted to the Bay Area, exchanged notes on the making of the movie via email with SF360.org before the film’s West Coast premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: Renee Tajima- Peña's trip down "Calavera Highway''

If making a movie about one’s family could be equated with a fire-walk in August, then making a documentary about one’s partner’s family might be akin to a midsummer sauna. Yet veteran L.A. filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) signed on to a road trip with her husband from L.A. to Washington state to Texas in search of "la verdad" about the father that abandoned Armando’s mother Rosa and his six brothers several decades ago. An intimate and elegantly crafted work of cinema verité, Calavera Highway encompasses universal familial tensions, Mexican-American identity, the responsibilities of fathers (and sons) and the psychic malleability of map-drawn borders.

Tajima-Peña, who’s an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the Golden Gate Award for long-form television documentary at the S.F. International Film Festival, where Calavera Highway screens three times in early May. Via email, she talked about searching for "Calaveras" hidden in closets and elsewhere.

topics: asian american cinema, bay area, documentary, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: Johnny Symons and "Ask Not"

East Bay filmmaker Johnny Symons has a bone to pick with former President Bill Clinton. More precisely, with the policy familiarly known as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" that prevents openly gay men and women from serving in the military. Since its adoption in 1993, more than 12,000 queer soldiers have been discharged, while the remaining 65,000 are compelled to keep their sexual identity a secret. Symons, who spotlighted the hurdles of gay and lesbian Americans in Daddy & Papa and Beyond Conception, explores this under-reported situation in the straight-shooting documentary Ask Not. The title is a play on Clinton’s ill-conceived compromise, of course, and on President Kennedy’s famous inaugural-speech challenge, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." The film introduces us to discharged soldiers Alex and Jarrod on a gutsy Call to Duty speaking tour, a soldier serving in Iraq and gays and lesbians sitting in at recruiting offices to protest the law that prevents them from enlisting. "Ask Not" has its world premiere April 26 at the Castro and May 5 at the Sundance Kabuki as part of the SFIFF51.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, san francisco international film festival

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"Last for One:" SFIAAFF's Taro Goto, moving on

As the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival draws to a close, it says goodbye to one of its loyal and gracious gentlemen, Taro Goto. Goto began as the Festival’s Print Traffic Coordinator in 2000, first thinking of the position as a temporary means to stay in touch with the film community. But he stayed eight years, and leaves as the Festival’s Associate Director. As he puts it, “[The job] became an obsession.” He gave notice that this would be his last Festival one year ago, and judging by this year’s success, he is going out in style. SF360.org asked Goto to give us a personal look at what makes him happiest about this last year of his tenure.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, film festivals

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Noise Pop Film Festival

You might think the Bay Area has just about every kind of film festival, from Irish to Icelandic, from sex workers to surfing to Buddhist. But one there’s one seemingly obvious candidate that missing: A music film festival. Oh sure, almost every festival invariably includes some music-centered titles. Mill Valley, SF Indie and SF Docfest are often particularly heavy on them. Luckily for fans of alternative rock, punk, and folk-pop, Noisepop is a multimedia affair.

Once again this year, in addition to practically every extant band you’d want to see (headliners including British Sea Power, Magnetic Fields, Fu Manchu, Quasi and The Mountain Goats), an art exhibit (featuring a contribution from Yoko Ono), comedy shows, and ever-so-much-more, there are movies

Afraid there might be even one regional corner of the late ’70s through mid-‘80s punk/hardcore scene that is under-documented? Of course you are! Helping allay those fears is Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984. Actually, I was there—at least in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a lot of these bands toured. But while some of the names may remain familiar to me from a thousand D.I.Y.. handbills on telephone poles, it’s likely Naked Raygun, Effigies, Articles of Faith, Strike Under, Subverts and others will be a fresh archaeological dig for many.

topics: directors, documentary, independent film, music