Category: Platform

Platform

Kibitzing with S.F. Jewish Film Festival's Stein and Fishman

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has never, in its 28 years, taken the path of least resistance. To cite the most obvious example, a hallmark of the annual program is the inclusion of several films critical of Israel. (That these movies are almost always produced by Israeli filmmakers, and financed by government grants, is irrelevant to the fest’s critics.) This year’s contrarian act is increasing the number of films and screenings in the face of a spiraling economy. The expanded lineup includes spotlights on Italian Jews During Fascism and Diversity In Israel (a multicultural, gay-straight portrait of Israel on its 60h anniversary), along with salutes to doc-making brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann and home-movie excavator par excellence Péter Forgács. The SFJFF opens Thursday with Strangers, Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv’s lusty, improvised tale of an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman hooking up in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, and continues through Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre. The lineup, including the Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Rafael schedules, is at SFJFF’s website. Executive director Peter Stein and program director Nancy Fishman spilled the beans in their office in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

topics: directors, documentary, film festivals, filmmakers, independent film, jewish cinema

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Catherine Breillat unveils "The Last Mistress"

In the 20 years since 36 Fillette shocked audiences with its unflinching depiction of an unhappy 14-year-old girl determined to lose her virginity on a seaside family holiday (and discovering her sexual power along the way), French author and director Catherine Breillat has carved out a reputation as a fearless provocateur. Not coincidentally, she’s a magnet for controversy, attacked in some quarters for presenting sex and the sharp-elbowed power plays between men and women in the rawest terms. But perhaps it’s the notion of a woman director pulling back the curtain on society’s ugly secrets that pushes the buttons of some critics and moviegoers, rather than the confrontational themes of works like Romance and Fat Girl. The Last Mistress, which opened the San Francisco International Film Festival in April and begins its local theatrical run Friday, is at first blush a restrained, talky drawing-room drama set in the repressed 18th century. It soon reveals itself as a fierce passion play between an independent woman (Asia Argento) and a younger man who, after 10 years, stuns her by deciding to take a wife. Breillat, still showing some of the physical effects of her 2004 stroke that delayed production of The Last Mistress, was paradoxically much more playful and cheerful this time than when she visited the festival in 2003 with Sex Is Comedy. She speaks and understands English, but we relied on a translator.

topics: directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, women filmmakers

Platform

Fatih Akin and "The Edge of Heaven"

The Edge of Heaven is 35-year-old German filmmaker Fatih Akin’s fifth feature, although by his own admission the breakout success of his last one, 2003’s Golden Bear–winner Head-On, made the process this time an uncharacteristically slow and difficult one. With The Edge of Heaven, however, Akin confirms his place as an important new voice in German cinema. The film weaves two stories together across geopolitical, cultural and generational lines: a German university professor, estranged from his Turkish immigrant father after the accidental death of a prostitute named Yeter, who leaves Germany and takes up work in a German bookshop in Istanbul; and a German woman whose relationship with her own mother is strained when she follows to Istanbul her deported Turkish girlfriend, an incarcerated political activist whose mother is the very same prostitute Yeter. (The film took the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes in 2007 and is Germany’s official entry for Best Foreign Film in the 2008 Academy Awards.) Although he himself was born and raised in Hamburg, Akin’s work draws on a cross-cultural perspective born of his Turkish roots, and indeed the German-Turkish experience plays a significant role in both Head-On and Edge. Between those two features he made a documentary on music in Istanbul called Crossing the Bridge (2005). Most recently, Akin was in New York to film a segment for the up-coming multi-director project, New York, I Love You. SF360.org spoke by phone with Akin from his home in Hamburg ahead of The Edge of Heaven’s Bay Area premiere.

Platform

Alex Gibney, going "Gonzo"

[Editor’s note: This interview first appeared in SF360.org during the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson played on closing night.]

It’s a good time to be Alex Gibney.

We met this year over egg rolls at a small upstairs bistro on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, where Gibney’s bio-doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson premiered. It was Tuesday, in late-January. That morning Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (SFIFF 2005) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary in 2006, had learned that Taxi to the Darkside, his documentary murder mystery that examines the death of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, had been nominated for an Academy Award. (It eventually won.) Another documentary he’d executive produced, No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, had also been nominated for Best Doc.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, q&a

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Ruby Yang, "A Double Life" and a double feature

Ruby Yang’s A Double Life, also known as Tongzhi in Love, is boasting its West Coast premiere at Frameline32, screening with Yang’s Oscar-winning documentary short The Blood of Yingzhou District on Saturday, June 28, 2:30PM at the Roxie Film Center. Although unable to attend the festival proper, SF360 caught up with Ruby Yang during a recent Bay Area visit to discuss what’s been called her "latest and most lyrical film yet."

In 2003, noted Chinese American filmmaker Ruby Yang, in collaboration with producer Thomas Lennon, formed The China Aids Media Project (CAMP) to promote public health in China through film, television and other visual media. Fully committed to CAMP, Yang moved to Beijing, China—where she currently resides and works—directing documentaries and public service announcements (PSAs).

topics: asian american cinema, documentary, political film, q&a, queer cinema

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Strand's Marcus Hu and Frameline's Michael Lumpkin

[Editor’s note: With Frameline Artistic Director Michael Lumpkin leaving his post after this year’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, SF360.org felt it appropriate to ask an equally storied figure in LGBT film to help mark the occasion. Strand Releasing President Marcus Hu graciously agreed to speak with his old friend Lumpkin about Frameline, queer cinema and the future of this niche festival.]

I’ve worked with Michael Lumpkin from the very inception of our company back in 1989. When Strand Releasing didn’t even have a name yet, and was based out of the Strand Theatre on Market Street, and we didn’t have any funds, Michael figured out way of getting our first film, Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer secured, helped to take care of the print shipment, helped to deal with the funding necessary to pay Mr. Brocka for the rental. Michael has done so much for GLBT filmmakers, distributors both domestic and globally, that I don’t know how an organization such a Frameline will be able to find another figure head such as him. For me, Michael has seen the rise and fall of the New Queer Cinema, he’s helped bring Vito Russo’s vision to celluloid with Rob and Jeff [Epstein and Friedman]. When Michael started the festival, he was working with short films and a few spare features that might have featured gay content and a few years back he was bringing Ang Lee in to present the San Francisco premiere of Brokeback Mountain. He’s seen the evolution of GLBT cinema and hopefully will still be involved in some degree to our industry.

LGBT cinema owes a lot to Michael’s dedication.

topics: distributors, documentary film institute, exhibitions, experimental film, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, q&a, queer cinema

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"Up the Yangtze" with Yung Chang

It is difficult not to be awed by the staggering figures that increase every day: more than 67,000 dead, five million homeless, 23,000 missing, more than 240,000 hospitalized, 10,000 children buried in the rubble of unsafe schools.

Now there is added poignancy to the question "whither China?" that is posed in Up the Yangtze, a superb documentary that examines the surreal changes taking place and the role the controversial Three Gorges Dam may play in that country’s future. The film played in Sundance and at the San Francisco International, and it opens at Bay Area theaters this week .

The glorious benefits to come with a future dam are not exactly what Mao envisioned in his poem "Swimming," which concludes: "The mountain goddess if she is still there will marvel at a world so changed."

Marvel, indeed.

topics: documentary, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

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DAWN and David Katznelson

Music industry veteran David Katznelson is a key force behind the fourth Dawn festival, an all-night baccanalia of the intellectual sort, with music, film, discussions, and performance, all coinciding with the Jewish holiday Shavuot. This year’s fest is an even bigger deal than previous ones on the local front: Its June 7 date means festival-goers get a sneak peek at the long-awaited, Daniel Libeskind-designed Contemporary Jewish Museum—along with a terrific collection of films, including the West Coast premiere of The Sons of Sakhnin United, about the only Arab-sector team playing in Israel’s Premier League, and silent Benya Krik, which is being presented with a live, original score.

Katznelson, a co-founder of the Dawn festival and this year’s co-chair (and the head of Birdman Recording Group), sat down to talk about Judaism, culture, film and the festival.

topics: art, music

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The doctor and the documentarian behind "The English Surgeon"

When The English Surgeon had its U.S. premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this month, director Geoffrey Smith and his subject, the inimitable London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, received a standing ovation from an enthusiastic and moved audience. Recent winner of the best international feature documentary prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, the film tracks Marsh’s relationship with Igor Kurilets, a Ukrainian surgeon battling the bureaucracy and corruption in his country’s state medical system. This duo of dynamic doctors teams up to assist Ukrainian patients suffering from brain tumors, which in many cases have gone undiagnosed until too late. Smith’s film also focuses on the plight of Marion, a poor man from a rural village, who might be saved from a life-threatening, otherwise "inoperable" tumor by Marsh’s expert intervention. SF360.org spoke with Marsh and Smith during the SFIFF, before they headed back out of town.

topics: directors, q&a

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"Standard Operating Procedure:" Questions and answers with Errol Morris

Transcription by Eve O’Neill.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris reaches into the murkiest of waters and somehow manages to extract clarity. His fishing expeditions have taken him from the lonely highways of Texas to the torture chambers of Iraq. What he pulls up is never the expected answer; often enough, it’s a revelation. With Standard Operating Procedure, which opened in the Bay Area last Friday, Morris forces audiences into a new understanding of the infamous torture photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and our complicity in their making. His investigative zeal traces back to the Bay Area, he said in a recent onstage conversation during the San Francisco International Film Festival. What follows is the transcript of the interview with B. Ruby Rich during his SFIFF Persistence of Vision award screening at the Sundance Kabuki April 29.

topics: bay area, critics, directors, documentary, san francisco international film festival

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Thomas Beard exposes "Live Cinema"

For decades, experimental filmmakers have actively rejected the conventions of story-driven cinema for a poetic, experiential aesthetic. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that a few avant-garde visionaries would eventually challenge the codified, calcified nature of the moviegoing experience itself, where audiences passively sit through an identical fixed presentation from Tampa to Tucson, Tehachapi to Tonapah. Their goal is to turn each screening into an act of creation, with its attendant unpredictability and excitement. Some artists, like Zoe Beloff, bring rickety, old-fashioned projectors into the room to resurrect film’s mechanical and tactile characteristics. Animal Charm does a live mix of found footage. This exciting genre of experimental filmmaking is the focus of San Francisco Cinematheque’s brand-new collection of essays and artifacts, “Cinematograph 7—Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader.” Edited by New York programmer and critic Thomas Beard, the book launches with a party and screening this Thursday, April 10, at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia (at 21st St.) featuring the aforementioned Animal Charm, SUE.C and Refraction. We caught up with Beard, whose latest venture is the weekly Brooklyn-based experimental film series Light Industry, via email.

topics: critics, experimental film

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Jeff Nichols on "Shotgun Stories"

With “Shotgun Stories,” first-time writer/director Jeff Nichols managed to build, for less than half a million dollars, a relatable story and characters with substance seen rarely in mainstream film—and the film is now on quite a roll, fresh off grand jury prize wins at both the Seattle and Austin Film Festivals, Roger Ebert’s “great discovery” at the Chicago Film Festival, and nominated for a Cassavetes Award at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards. I was particularly interested in the film’s success, as six of the principal cast and crew members of “Shotgun Stories” either teach at or graduated from the same small art college in North Carolina as me. When Nichols was visiting San Francisco for the film’s opening night appearance at SF Indiefest many many weeks back, he offered us with some insight into the creation and production of the film, which opens in SF this Friday. [SF360.org editor’s note: This article first appeared in SF360.org in a slightly different form during SF Indiefest.]

topics: independent film, sf indiefest

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"2 Husbands," one amazing race?

Tanner Shea and Zach Slow. Just a couple of San Franciscans who aim to be husbands. Thus, they launched the “2 Husbands” contest and website. On it, they ask women to post videos in consideration of becoming Zach or Tanner’s wife. You, the public, decide who will be the betrothed by voting.

As far as “catches” go, are these guys “good catches?” One of Zach’s previous public accomplishments, raising $10,000 in a bid to date Lady Sovereign, worked, but he blew every cent on one night and now The S-O-V has some bones to pick with him. Tanner, well, Tanner is gay. Still, he dreams of the perfect marriage to a woman. But if you win, you receive $50,000. The other kind of catch: 500,000 votes must be cast at the site for the results to hold up, and it costs $2 to cast each vote.

topics: q&a

Platform

Daniel Wu

Last year, when Daniel Wu came back to his native Bay Area with his directorial debut, "The Heavenly Kings," which screened at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, SF360.org contributor Jennifer Young reminded us of the joke that had been circulating online—that a Chinese law exists requiring Daniel Wu to be featured in every Hong Kong film. Still one of Hong Kong’s most prolific actors, Wu is visiting the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival this week with Alexi Tan’s "Blood Brothers." Young got a chance to visit again with the actor when the film screened at the Castro this past Friday.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, bay area, castro theatre, center for asian american media, critics, cult cinema, film festivals

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Donnie Yen, "Flashpoint"

Back in the early ’90s, every Thursday night for six years I drove across the Bay Bridge to the UC Theater in Berkeley to watch Hong Kong movies. I saw hundreds of martial arts movies, oohed and aahed over thousands of fight scenes, and developed a great affection for a myriad of HK stars. Of course I loved Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, but one of my special favorites was the ever dependable, yet exciting Donnie Yen. When “Mister Intensity” Donnie Yen was on the screen you always knew you would get a quality fight scene from a real martial artist. And in the years since, seeing Donnie Yen’s name attached to a project as an actor, action choreographer or director has always sent me straight to the theater in anticipation of more innovative, creative fight sequences. The latest Donnie Yen film to hit the States is realistic actioner Flash Point. Here Yen wears two hats—as an actor in his signature role of a dedicated cop on a mission, and as an action choreographer who stages electric fight sequences using Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). MMA, (a concept of combining the elements of multiple martial arts popularized by Bruce Lee), is Yen’s current fave style of fighting and he’s been striving to accurately represent it in some of his most recent projects. I got the chance to ask him about it on email last week.

topics: asian cinema

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"Girls Rock" with Arne Johnson & Shane King

Both Jack Black’s fictional School of Rock and Jack Black-alike Paul Green -based documentary Rock School have entertained many audiences with the notion of actually training the next generation of musically inclined kids in the arts of head-banging, hair-teasing, and amp adjustment. What Bay Area filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King discover from Portland’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls,” however, is revolution on a different scale: A camp that trains girls not to perfectly mimic the “masters” of the rock genre, but to find the unique demon screech that exists deep inside each and every one of them. Girls Rock watches a few select 8-18 -year-olds overcome the obstacles — including pressures to be thin, quiet, and Caucasian — to claim their rightful place on Earth and wail away. We got a chance to catch up with Johnson and King last week.

topics: directors, documentary, music

Platform

L.Q. Jones talks dogs and cult movies

The list of talking dog movies is a long and storied one, from Homeward Bound to Snow Dogs. But one stands head and forelocks above the others: A Boy and His Dog.

First released in 1975, the film takes place after nuclear war has destroyed the planet. The barren post-apocalyptic landscape boasts the usual packs of half-feral men chasing down unlucky women and fighting over the meager supply of food. Vic (a young pre-*Miami Vice* Don Johnson) is more of a loner; his only companion is a dog. Luckily, Blood not only talks, but is by far the smarter and more erudite of the two; he’s crucial to the boy’s survival. He also sniffs out women for Vic to scratch his post-nuclear itch with. They’re the best of friends, until Vic meets Quilla June.

topics: directors, midnight movies

Platform

Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick's "Passion & Power"

In the backroom of a Bernal Heights café where mothers and toddlers and holding court, filmmaker Wendy Slick cannot contain her own happiness at the news that a Texas law banning the sales of sex toys has been overturned, a decision made Feb. 13, 2008 — just in time for Valentine’s Day. The film she and the Bay Area’s Emiko Omori made together — a history of the vibrator — is itself a Valentine for self-loving women. “Passion & Power, the Technology of Orgasm,” opening this week at the Roxie New College Film Center and the Smith Rafael, gives Rachel Maines’ entertaining academic book on the subject a new life onscreen. Slick and Omori spoke with SF360.org about the passions behind their project, as well as using jellyfish as a metaphor and the unexpected audiences taking a shine to the film.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, producers, q&a

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Carl D. Brown and Erin Beach of "2nd Verse"

In a world where seemingly every aspiring director puts together a persona, a pitch, a press kit and a polished spiel before they’ve shot their first minute of footage, it’s downright refreshing to encounter Carl D. Brown and Erin Beach. The unassuming young director and producer, aided by associate producer Paul Morrill, spent five no-budget, trial-and-error years laboring on their feature-length debut, “2nd Verse — The Rebirth of Poetry.” The optimistic yet unsentimental doc spotlights four teenagers from the San Francisco-based Youth Speaks project who’ve discovered that writing and performing is a powerhouse way to express their identities. “2nd Verse,” which premiered this past weekend at SF Indiefest, reaches an exuberant climax at the annual Teen Poetry Slam competition, leaving audiences stirred and inspired. Needless to say, it’s the archetypal Indiefest selection, a DIY project produced on a shoestring and a half. Brown, who hails from Idaho and lives in West Oakland, and Beach, a Virginia native ensconced in San Francisco, screen their film this week at the Big Sky Documentary Festival in Missoula, Montana. I caught up with them before they had a chance to polish their spiel.

topics: bay area, directors, q&a