Category: Platform

Platform

Sam Green Brings 'Utopia' to Sundance

Sundance was just days away when I found Sam Green deep in preparation for the live performance of his latest piece, Utopia in Four Movements. But even as he was ironing out the final kinks, he found a few minutes to walk me through the greatest dreams and worst nightmares of the 20th century, offering up the connections between an American exile in Cuba, the world’s largest shopping mall, which lies dormant in China, the history of Esperanto and the work of forensic anthropologists. In the years since The Weather Underground earned him an Oscar nomination, Green’s moved away from the traditional documentary format into more experimental narratives and offbeat shorts, such as lot 63, grave c, a melancholic look at the legacy of Altamont victim Meredith Hunter. His new work, a live-music infused, first-personal tour through a century of dashed hopes finds Green pushing boundaries of all sorts.

[Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in SF360’s Blogs. Green performed Utopia in Four Movements to adoring crowds at Sundance this past week. He added an epilogue to the story as the festival was closing.]

topics: activism, directors, diy, documentary, oscars, performance, sundance

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Michael House's translation of Tati debuts at YBCA

Riding the crest of the Tati tsunami hitting our shores—two retrospectives, one at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the other at Pacific Film Archive this month, along with arthouse screenings of M. Hulot’s Holiday — is an outstanding documentary, The Magnificent Tati. It’s by Michael House, who lived in San Francisco for 12 years before moving to Paris, where he and his wife, Julie, have lived for the past decade. House still considers himself a San Franciscan, however, and returned to San Francisco to complete the final stages of The Magnificent Tati in collaboration with Kim Aubry’s ZAP Zoetrope. (Aubry used to be the Head of Post Production at Zoetrope Studios and is a long-time collaborator with Francis Ford Coppola.) House phoned me from Paris to converse on the upcoming premiere. The Magnificent Tati has its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at YBCA on Sunday, January 24, 2010, 2 p.m., with the director in attendance.

topics: actors, composers, critics, directors, documentary, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, photography, q&a, world cinema

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George Csicsery aces "Hard Problems"

With more than 25 documentaries to his credit, George Csiscery is arguably the most prolific filmmaker in the Bay Area. Born in Germany after the war to Hungarian parents, Csicsery came to the U.S. in 1951. He majored in comparative religions at U.C. Berkeley and film production in S.F. State’s graduate program. A frequently published journalist and essayist as well as a screenwriter and filmmaker, Csicsery scored his biggest hit with Where the Heart Roams (1987), a feature doc about romance novelists and their devoted readers that traveled the festival circuit and aired on P.O.V. Since the mid-‘90s, most of his films have focused on mathematicians and scientists. Hard Problems: The Road to the World’s Toughest Math Contest, one of three docs Csicsery completed in the last two years, tracks the selection and success of the high school students who represented the U.S. in the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad in Slovenia. Currently airing across the country via American Public Television, Hard Problems airs locally at 6 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 10; 11 p.m. Monday, Jan. 11 and 5 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 12 on KTEH-Channel 54. An accomplished writer, Csicsery acceded to an interview via email.

topics: authors, bay area, distribution, diy, documentary

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Eavesdropping: the year in quotes

Opening today: two weeks of reflection on the Year in Film and the Decade in Film by Bay Area critics, writers and filmmakers. Below are some of the pithier thoughts by Bay Area industry stalwarts (and a few select others) as quoted in a variety of publications, from the New York Times to Variety to SF360.org. We know this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the Bay Area’s impact on the national/international filmscape: Please offer your own quotables, or collected wit/wisdom, in the Comment Box at the article’s end.

topics: activism, actors, bay area, directors, diy, documentary, jewish cinema

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David Thomson revisits "Psycho's" critical moment

Fifty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock shot the shower scene in Psycho. Try not to think of Norman Bates, or his mother, or Anthony Perkins, when you hear “Don we now our gay apparel” —especially Dec. 23, when Psycho and Frenzy conclude the Castro Theatre series “Hitch For the Holidays.” Critic and historian extraordinaire David Thomson’s slender new book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books, $22.95), is a delicious and incisive commemoration of the film’s golden anniversary. Thomson spans the negotiations that gave Hitchcock creative control (and a financial windfall), drops in nuggets from the production and delivers a brilliant analysis of the film’s structure, scenes and shots. As the title suggests, the British-born, San Francisco-based writer also invokes the genteel world of movies before Psycho and catalogs the savagery that followed, from Polanski and De Palma to Red Riding, a British trilogy airing in February on IFC. We recently sat down for a civilized chat in his living room.

topics: authors, bay area, critics, cult cinema, film history, hollywood

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With movement and image, Catherine Galasso pays dual homage

Roy Sullivan was inordinately familiar with occupational hazards. The late Shenandoah National Park ranger (and Guinness record-holder) was zapped by lightning seven (!) times. This weirdly tormented figure is the inspiration for Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, a performance piece by rising choreographer, dancer and video artist Catherine Galasso that integrates live movement with projected images. Attracted by our vibrant dance community (touted by fellow Cornell grad Chris Black) and experimental film scene (ditto, per close friend and filmmaker Sam Green), Galasso began her professional career in San Francisco. Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice plays Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 12 and 13 at SOMArts Cultural Center under the San Francisco Film Society’s cross-platform and new-technology umbrella, Kino-Tek. In honor of her father, award-winning composer Michael Galasso (Séraphine, In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express), who passed away in September. Glasso will perform a new solo dance, Simmer, as the curtain raiser. We caught up with the artist via email in the midst of her intensive rehearsals.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, dance, documentary, experimental film, music, world cinema

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David Sherman brings desert exposé to S.F. oasis

For a decade and a half, multi-hypenate David Sherman was a major figure in San Francisco’s vigorous experimental film scene. A probing artist, Sherman’s numerous films included the 1997 Whitney Biennial selection Tuning the Sleeping Machine. A tireless curator, the Tucson native and his future wife Rebecca Barten founded the 30-seat Total Mobile Home microCINEMA in the mid-‘90s, presenting more than 120 shows during its five-year run. Sherman was also the administrative director of venerable Canyon Cinema and—yes, there’s more—taught at California College for the Arts. Marking his first trip to town with a new film since he and Barten moved to Bisbee, Arizona (80 miles southeast of Tucson) shortly after the millennium, Other Cinema unspools the underground premiere of Wasteland Utopias in a rare Sunday show on Dec. 6. He gave us the scoop on Wilhelm Reich and other shadowy figures on the phone and via email.

topics: bay area, curators, directors, diy, exhibition, experimental film, world cinema

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Frazer Bradshaw on the evolution of "Everything Strange and New"

It’s a testament to the programming staff at the Sundance Film Festival that first-time feature filmmaker Frazer Bradshaw’s low-key, Oakland-shot domestic drama was chosen to debut there last January. It makes a bold impression without brand names or buzzwords—working instead with solid performances and an inventive score to convey a dissonance between the inner and outer lives of a working-class man. Bradshaw appeared with other outliers and innovators, including Laurel Nakadate, Scott Sanders and David Russo, on a panel I moderated at that festival last year. (The film premiered locally at the SF International in the spring.) I recently got the chance to catch up with Bradshaw over email. His film opens at the Roxie on December 4 with a weekend benefit for co-star Luis Saguar, who passed away this past summer.

topics: actors, directors, diy, film festivals, independent film, sundance film festival

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Gerald Peary on the rise and fall of the film critic

Will the last film critic please turn out the lights? For a century, film critics have separated the wheat from the chaff and made the case for great films. But who will make the case for them? Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary takes the task for this dying breed of writer in his feature-length documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. The film tours the rise, fall and reorientation of film criticism in the United States, from early silent-era plot summarizers who make way for the daily newspaper reviewers of the ’30s, who are replaced by auteur-theory debaters of the ’60s, who are succeeded in turn by the alt-weekly thinkers of the ’70s who, finally, face end times via the past decade’s upsurge in bloggers. What’s most interesting about the film is its take on the changes in public consciousness of both the movies and criticism itself. (And to his credit, Peary prioritizes the wry over the dry, even giving Andrew Sarris the opportunity to dish on his adversary Pauline Kael, who was not above gay-baiting her rival in the early stages. Sarris’s retort: "I took one look at Pauline, and she was not Katharine Hepburn.") In addition to the iconic Sarris, interviewees include The New Republic’s stately Stanley Kauffmann, self-starting phenom Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews), pop-and-academic theorist B. Ruby Rich, Boston Globe daily reviewer Wesley Morris, the Los Angeles Times’s sometimes embattled Kenneth Turan and breakthrough newspaper-to-TV critic Roger Ebert. SF360.org got a chance to sit down with Peary first in his visit to the San Francisco International Film Festival last spring (where he spoke on a panel I moderated) and more recently, in the storied lobby of the Roxie Theater, where the film opened Friday. A few excerpts from the discussion follow.

topics: authors, critics, film festivals, film history, q&a, world cinema

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Russell Merritt animates the archives for SF International Animation Festival

Celebrating the Bay Area’s status as a hotbed for animation creators as well as enthusiasts, the now annual San Francisco International Animation Festival kicks off Wednesday, November 11, with an historic live event that features Lawrence Jordan among others. It then officially opens Thursday, November 12 with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s fantasy featuring George Clooney. And it continues through the weekend with experimental shorts, commercial features and family cartoon classics that push the boundaries of the medium. Among them are rarities gleaned from the archives: Walt Disney’s Alice Comedies, a series of Disney shorts produced between 1923 and 1927, in which a live-action girl is inserted into an imaginary cartoon world. J.B. Kaufman and Russell Merritt, authors of Walt in Wonderland and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies will introduce a selection of films and lead the program, presented with the help of the Walt Disney Family Museum. Merritt, a lively raconteur and Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley, where, for over 20 years, he has taught animation, art-house cinema and film history, will share a portion of his vast knowledge of film lore, Disney and otherwise, with the audience. First, he offered a preview for SF360.org readers. (SFIAF runs November 11-15; the Alice Comedies program takes place November 14, 1 p.m. at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema.)

topics: animation, archives, avant-garde, music, san francisco film society

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Parker and di Napoli on parody and high art in "(Untitled)"

If you were intrigued by Ben Lewis’s documentary The Great Contemporary Art Bubble at the recent San Francisco DocFest, or if you’ve picked up one of the copies available throughout the San Francisco Public Library branches of Sarah Thornton’s compelling anthropological study of the contemporary art world, Seven Days in the Art World, you will definitely want to check out Marin-based director Jonathan Parker’s latest film, which played the SF International this past spring and opens in the Bay Area this coming Friday. The hilarious romp through the comic fodder available in the world of conceptual art and atonal music, (Untitled) is a film destined to be seen in the theater for the benefits of the sound systems theaters provide; its sound design, provided by San Francisco local Richard Beggs, is integral to the film—as is the score provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning new music composer David Lang. I sat down briefly with Jonathan Parker and co-writer Catherine di Napoli (also a Bay Area local) to discuss (Untitled) and the following is a snapshot of what transpired.

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

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Robert Mailer Anderson on the Mendo madness of "Pig Hunt"

After ripping it up at various genre fests (most recently winning Best Feature at the Royal Flush Festival in New York), Bay Area indie horror Pig Hunt settles in for a theatrical run at the Red Vic Movie House Friday, October 30.

Ideal Halloween fare, it’s a giddy, unpredictable mashup of elements that finds a carload of San Francisco yuppie types getting in way over their heads on a hunting expedition up north. Among the gory perils their rapidly dwindling number face are angry hillbillies, defensive pot growers, a menacing rural guru with a whole lot of ‘wives’—oh, and one 3,000-pound "hogzilla" known as The Ripper.

SF360 spoke with Pig Hunt’s co-scenarist (with Zack Anderson) Robert Mailer Anderson, a San Francisco resident who’s worn many hats, from gallery owner to novelist. This new hat is certainly his bloodiest.

topics: authors, bay area, critics, cult cinema, horror, independent film

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"Sorry, Thanks" lavishes love on the Mission

From the steep slope of 22nd Street down to La Taqueria, from the Attic to Boogaloos, Dia Sokol and Lauren Veloski’s droll and charming Sorry, Thanks showcases the Mission to glowing advantage. Veloski (producer and co-writer) was born and raised in the Bay Area and knows the territory, while Sokol (director and co-writer) mapped the terrain of seriocomic relationship movies as producer of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Mutual Appreciation. Sorry, Thanks follows the dating stutter-steps of a young woman (Kenya Miles) unattached for the first time in eons, and the amusing antics of a passive underachiever (Wiley Wiggins) barely present in his long-term relationship. Talky without being pretentious—or precious—the film glides gradually from gently absurd comedy into a poignant look at commitment and responsibility. We caught up with the filmmakers via email ahead of the Bay Area screenings of Sorry, Thanks October 11 and 12 in the Mill Valley Film Festival, and October 24 in the first annual SFFS Cinema by the Bay festival in San Francisco.

[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in advance of the film’s MVFF screening.]

topics: bay area, cinephiles, directors, distributors, film festivals, independent film, mill valley film festival

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Dave Eggers, Spike Jonze and the making of 'Wild Things'

Where the Wild Things Are is directed by Spike Jonze from a screenplay by Jonze and Bay Area-based writer Dave Eggers, based on the classic 1963 picture book by Maurice Sendak. The original story concerns an unruly boy who runs rampant through his house dressed in a wolf suit and is banished to his room without his supper. Alone and disgruntled, he sails to the land of the Wild Things, a ragtag band of hulking, unpredictable monsters. Max conquers them “by staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once," and he is made “the King of all Wild Things," dancing with the monsters in a “wild rumpus”. However, he soon finds himself lonely and homesick, and he returns home to his bedroom, where he finds his supper waiting for him, still hot.

topics: art, authors, bay area, children's issues, directors, features, screenwriting

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Pamela Jean Smith brings home movies to the big screen

Home movies have been around since the Lumières, and there’s no doubt their fascination goes beyond the den. Though often made for private reasons, they are treasure troves of culture ephemera and social history. Most of all, they speak loss (the French refer to them as "films-souvenirs"). The home movie represents a distinct ecology of moving images, incorporating domestic life, travelogue, ritual and relaxation. When every family has its own private archive, what is the role of the public one? Pamela Jean Smith, a film preservationist at the Pacific Film Archive, has spearheaded the Berkeley chapter of Home Movie Day, an event used to raise awareness of the endangered legacy of amateur celluloid. After many months of fielding submissions, she’s prepared a public program for October 17. Among its other pre-YouTube mementos, the show will pay special tribute to home movies shot in Kodachrome, the rich-hued film stock recently discontinued by Kodak. Increasingly, celluloid itself is part of the home movie’s fable of days gone by. Smith agreed to talk about the selection process for Home Movie Day and how it broadens her mission as a film preservationist.

topics: archives, audiences, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, pacific film archive

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Joe Berlinger on the impact of "Crude"

From upstate New York to Arkansas to the Bay Area and far beyond it, Joe Berlinger’s films, many with co-director Bruce Sinofsky, have been fascinating, cinema verite-style entertainments. Though they’ve investigated crimes big and small, paved the way for new reads of verdicts and, surprisingly enough in the case of the two Paradise Lost films, built movements, the films have never been prosecutorial in style or didactic in nature. They are primarily curious about relationships, misdeeds and the bizarre trappings of very specific subcultures. They don’t default to talking heads, statistics, graphics or the essay format, yet they’ve solved some of the gnarliest puzzles imaginable. Berlinger’s latest, Crude, could be seen as departure, given its antagonist is Chevron, and it does include a seated interview or two. But its power comes from its measured to approach to all sides. Its primary target is a surprise—in that it implicates American culture as a whole for remaining ignorant of moral crimes being committed elsewhere. As Berlinger prepared for a trip west, to speak on a panel curated by San Francisco Film Society Saturday, September 26, at the Lumiere (more on Slippery Slopes: A Forum About Crude and the Investigative Functions of Film, below), SF360 spoke with him about the drama before, during and after the creation of Crude.

topics: activism, directors, distribution, diy, documentary, environmental films, independent film, latin american cinema

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Franny Armstrong's S.O.S. to the world

Franny Armstrong is a force of nature. Boundlessly energetic and impassioned about something most people only joke about—saving humankind—Armstrong gained a strong following at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where she’s screened two films. Her latest, The Age of Stupid, tackles the effects of climate change, and offers a plea to all who will listen: Change your ways. The plea goes public in a massive way this coming Monday, when The Age of Stupid makes its debut to the world, screening from a tent in New York, to 115,000 people in 400 movie theaters across the country. The evening features 40 live minutes with Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson, Mary Robinson, Armstrong herself, the star of the film Pete Postlethwaite, and other leading thinkers, celebrities and political figures from around the world. Audiences will hear from scientists working in the Himalayas and Indonesian rainforest via live satellite link and from a group of children speaking from the very room in Copenhagen in which all our futures will be decided at the UN climate summit in December. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke will wrap up the evening with a short acoustic performance. Armstrong allowed us to conduct an interview with her via internet chat.

topics: activism, bay area, directors, diy, environmental films, music, political film, public, san francisco international film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema

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Cory McAbee returns with "Stingray Sam"

Marin-born Cory McAbee no longer lives in San Francisco, but he hasn’t fully left the Bay Area building yet. Anyone who saw his long-running, unique high-concept comedy/cabaret act-cum-rock band The Billy Nayer Show—yes, McAbee “played” Billy—was unlikely to forget it. And the Red Vic Movie House has kept that memory alive with regular bookings of The American Astronaut, the 2001 instant cult movie he wrote, directed and starred in. It was a low-budget B&W sci-fi western musical surreal camp extravaganza. No one ever accused McAbee of lacking imagination.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film, filmmakers, independent film, music

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Mountain high: Telluride's Bay Area behind-the-scenes staff

The Telluride Film Festival is world renowned for the unique and selective quality of its program and for the filmmakers who make the arduous trek to the southwest corner of Colorado each year. But some of the most interesting people are behind the scenes—and many of them live in the Bay Area. SF360 had the opportunity to interview 15 of the 50 Bay Area staffers in the week leading up to opening night, as they arrived by plane, train and automobile to prepare for the 36th TFF. Each year the Telluride staff is reminded that “you’re not paid enough to have a bad time,” so we wanted to find an explanation for the high recidivism of the Telluride family for the festival that this year’s Guest Director, Alexander Payne, calls the “older, non-druggy Burning Man.”

topics: activism, actors, festivals, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, international film, world cinema

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Ellen Schneider raises Active Voice

As executive director of American Documentary, Inc., the parent of PBS’ venerable P.O.V. series, Ellen Schneider oversaw what was and is the biggest platform for documentaries in America. In the late ’90s, she went on to spearhead the Television Race Initiative, which uses national TV broadcasts as the starting point for ongoing community dialogue about race relations. Schneider took the next step in her crusade to maximize the impact of social-issue documentaries in 2001 by founding the San Francisco-based strategic communications company Active Voice. The organization employs seven full-time staff and several consultants to devise campaigns for a client list that, at this writing, comprises eight active projects, four in the “legacy” phase and a dozen in some stage of development. We sat down with Schneider at Active Voice’s South of Market office to learn more.

topics: activism, curators, distributors, diy, documentary, funding, san francisco film society

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Fate intervenes for Goldthwait with "World's Greatest Dad"

Bobcat Goldthwait: For some, the name conjures wonderful memories of Police Academy movies and watching him do stand-up in that same squealing Officer Zed voice. For others, it rouses horrible memories of…the same thing. A young talent who’d appeared on David Letterman by age 20, Goldthwait blew up huge in the mid 1980s. By decade’s end, his pop culture moment had expired with a vengeance. The general thinking was he could only do one thing—and everybody had gotten tired of that thing.

topics: actors, bay area, comedy, directors, diy, genre films, hollywood

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Judy Bloch moves on after 29 years at PFA

For nearly 30 years Judy Bloch has been behind the classy film publications at the Pacific Film Archive, producing some of the best film annotation in the world, as a writer, editor and guiding presence. She recently retired from UC Berkeley and took a job managing publications for SFMOMA. We asked her about her life and times at PFA.

topics: art, art film, authors, avant-garde, bay area, critics, directors, pacific film archive, world cinema

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Seiji Horibuchi pulls back the curtain on VIZ Cinema

The opening of a new theater that isn’t a multiplex is an exceedingly rare event these days. Raise a glass to VIZ Cinema, a built-from-scratch venue located in the New People building in Japantown. The complex, opening Sat., Aug. 15, is dedicated to Japanese pop culture, from art to fashion to film. VIZ Cinema fills the bill with live-action movies and anime, highlighted by U.S. premieres, director retrospectives and special series. A free outdoor screening of Kamikaze Girls in the Japantown Peace Plaza Friday night, Aug. 14, launches the New People scene, while VIZ Cinema christens its downstairs screen the next night with 20th Century Boys: Beginning of the End. Seiji Horibuchi, founder and chairman of VIZ Media, offered his thoughts on the new venture via email.

topics: animation, anime, art film, bay area, genre films, japanese cinema, world cinema

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How Scary Cow co-op is making indie filmmaking in SF a little less frightening

"People hear stories about Robert Rodriguez or Chris Nolan," says Scary Cow founder Jager McConnell, and think that all it takes to make a movie is "a camera and an idea." But Rodriguez, he points out, "had a whole town helping him make his movie." San Francisco’s Scary Cow, which calls itself an indie film co-op, aims to be that "town," offering experience, people, money and equipment to aspiring filmmakers with ideas to burn. It currently has 200 filmmakers paying monthly fees and 20 films in progress. Film teams are formed via something of a speed-dating process in which ideas are pitched and crews find films they’d like to work on. The co-op has screened films at a variety of theaters in both the Bay Area and beyond it. We caught up with McConnell over email and he explained how Scary Cow’s been working since its inception in 2007.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, diy, documentary, dramatic films, shorts

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Post-PFA, Shelley Diekman reflects on a well-spent life

Shelley Diekman is one of the lucky ones, blessed with the gratifying and rewarding chance to merge her avocation with her vocation. A transplant from the midwest in the mid-‘70s, she was delighted by the wealth of cinematic viewing options in Bay Area theaters and soon segued from avid filmgoer to producer’s assistant to filmmakers cooperative manager to programmer, eventually settling into and making her mark as the Pacific Film Archive’s publicist. The publicist’s job is to talk up other people, but what was always revealed about Shelley herself as she worked was her love of film, appreciation of filmmakers, depth of knowledge of the history and craft of cinema, calm demeanor and thoroughness. Now that she’s free of the publicist’s mantel SF360.org asked Shelley to exercise a new muscle and talk about herself and how she plans to take full advantage of her new personalized lifetime pass to PFA—worth it’s weight in gold to a cinephile.

topics: bay area, experimental film, film history, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, pacific film archive

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Berkeley-based writer Barry Gifford's wild screen-rides continue

A peripatetic childhood laid fertile ground for the heated imagination of Berkeley-based author Barry Gifford. His father was in the rackets and Gifford grew up in hotels, rarely attending school, while traveling through the South with his mother. The characters he met during his formative years may not have been as lurid as those who populate his fiction, but his early experiences no doubt shaped his sensibility. A prolific novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Gifford may be best known for his fruitful collaborations with David Lynch. The pair met in 1989 when Lynch decided to adapt Gifford’s Wild at Heart, one of the Sailor and Lula novels. The relationship continued with Hotel Room, a movie Gifford wrote and Lynch directed for HBO (1993) as well as Lost Highway, a film they wrote as a team. Since then, Gifford has traveled extensively and, to some extent, lived out the Kerouac myth while continuing to turn out screenplays, fiction and short stories that are irresistible to filmmakers. The Hughes Brothers (The Book of Eli) have committed to The Old Days, based on Gifford’s short story. Gifford co-wrote the script for The Phantom Father, a film adapted from a memoir about his father, slated to make the rounds of the festival circuit early next year. The Imagination of the Heart, the seventh and final installment of the Sailor and Lula books, was published in May and a compendium of the entire series is due out next spring. More info on all of it at Gifford’s own site. I got a chance to catch up with him for SF360.org last week.

topics: art film, authors, bay area, directors, genre films, hollywood, noir, screenwriting

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Anita Monga enriches the SF Silent Film Festival

Film programmer Anita Monga has been enriching the local film experience and expanding horizons for audiences since she started, first at the Roxie Cinema and later at the York Theater, nearly 30 years ago. But it was during her tenure at the city’s grand movie palace, the venerable Castro Theatre, that she really made her mark, shepherding the venue to international prominence while working with distributors, festivals and filmmakers, developing eclectic programs and ongoing festivals such as Berlin and Beyond and Noir City. (Her partnership with Noir City’s Eddie Muller has helped turn that event into an annual rite of passage for noir aficionados and led to the establishment of a preservation initiative.) Since her departure from the Castro in 2004, Monga hasn’t looked back. When not juggling her various roles in sundry cities, she’s currently acting artistic director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which runs this weekend at the Castro. True to Monga tradition, this year’s 12-program lineup, with plenty of live musical accompaniment, promises to be provocative, adventurous and fun.

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, silent film

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Kutner and Goldstein’s comic "Snake" flashes tongue at Frozen Film Fest

The sexually opportunistic and charmingly amoral scoundrel—think Paul Newman in Hud, Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge or Warren Beatty in Shampoo—has long been a movie archetype. At this point in our evolution, when the lout with the one-track-mind is considered hopelessly offensive and immature, Adam Goldstein’s brazen turn as a wanton womanizer in The Snake is admirable for its gutsiness. The feature debut of Goldstein and co-writer and co-director Eric Kutner, The Snake is an unapologetically impertinent, made-in-S.F. comedy that marks its creators as resourceful wiseguys. They smartly matched Goldstein’s shamelessly aggressive slimeball with a parade of women wise to his shtick, turning him into a persistent, lie-spewing loser who’s pretty much always the butt of the joke. The Snake, which premiered at South by Southwest and has its S.F. premiere Friday, July 10, at the Roxie as part of the Frozen Film Festival, is genuinely funny and, ultimately, unexpectedly mature. I emailed a batch of questions to Kutner and Goldstein, and here’s what I got back.

topics: actors, bay area, comedy, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, film festivals, independent film

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Richard Levien, from "Immersion" to "La Migra"

New Zealand transplant Richard Levien, a longstanding fixture of the San Francisco indie film community, has until recently been known primarily as an editor. That changed forever during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival when Levien’s directorial debut Immersion won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Short. Shortly thereafter, Levien was named as the first recipient of a $35,000 award from the first SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant for the script development of what will be his first narrative feature, La Migra. Both projects focus on the tribulations of immigrant children trying to live normal lives in the United States in the face of stigmatization, xenophobia and an often-vindictive legal code.

topics: actors, bay area, children's issues, digital filmmaking, diy, drama, exhibitions, film festivals, funding, immigration, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

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Cary Cronenwett’s "Maggots and Men" debuts at Frameline

A case could be made that Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men isn’t just the most unique work in the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, a.k.a. Frameline33, but of any festival all year. The black-and-white experimental narrative revisits the 1921 rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in post-revolutionary Russia, infusing the sailors’ jovial camaraderie and political determination with a poetic trans- and homosexuality. A lovely, bittersweet film that never takes itself too seriously, the hour-long Maggots and Men has its world premiere Sunday, June 21 at 1:30 p.m. at the Castro. Cronenwett was born and raised in Oklahoma, and moved to the Bay Area in 1993 after college. It was here that he transitioned from female to male and discovered film, though any connection may or may not be coincidental. We conducted our interview by email after a lengthy preliminary phone conversation.

topics: actors, bay area, film festivals, film history, gay lesbian cinema, sf international lgbt film festival

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Tom Shepard's 'Whiz Kids' blinds us with science

Back in the ’80s, when Thomas Dolby climbed the charts with a novelty video and radio hit, Tom Shepard was a Colorado adolescent carving an identity as a science prodigy. Now an accomplished San Francisco documentary maker, Shepard revisits the overachieving, hyper-ambitious world of science-obsessed high school seniors in his new film, Whiz Kids. The emotion-charged, feature-length work follows three teenagers through the nerve-wracking run-up and pressure-packed competition of the annual Intel Science Talent Search. Like his previous films, Scout’s Honor and Knocking (co-directed with Joel Engardio), Whiz Kids is propelled by young people at crucial junctures in their lives. Shepard moved to New York for two years during production and post to be closer to both his subjects and his collaborators, the renowned doc duo of editor Jane C. Wagner and cinematographer Tina DiFeliciantonio.

topics: bay area, documentary film, independent film, youth

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Weimberg/Ryan on conflict and conscience

Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan are a Berkeley-based filmmaking team whose 30-year professional and personal partnership has produced a resume of award-winning commercial and social-issue documentaries, working with a roster of clients that would be the envy of many production companies. Their foray into mainstream network programming, The Story of Mothers and Daughters and Fathers and Sons, a pair of documentaries that aired during primetime on ABC, gained them access to an audience largely unavailable to independent filmmakers. Both have feature-film experience—Weimberg on Colors, Godfather III, Ryan on Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi— and have worked separately on other projects as editors/producers/directors for hire. But, throughout their career, they’ve maintained a passionate commitment to social-justice filmmaking. Their latest project, Soldiers of Conscience, made with the cooperation of the U.S. Army and narrated by Peter Coyote, is an exploration of the volatile moral dilemma confronting soldiers in wartime: To kill or not to kill? It aired on POV last October and is screening at the Roxie June 8, as part of the Burning Fuse Film Festival. Weimberg and Ryan will be in attendance.

topics: bay area, directors, diy, documentary, political film

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Lawrence Jordan: to infinity and beyond

For more than 50 years, Lawrence Jordan has been one of the leading lights of American avant-garde cinema. His work as a maker, exhibitor and advocate of filmmaking and art was and remains essential to a filmmaking movement in the ’50s and ’60s that writers such as P. Adams Sitney refer to as the American Underground Cinema. Throughout and across his films, Jordan developed a cosmology that seems all his own. Gallery Extraña presents an exhibition of film still prints and a diorama created by Jordan beginning June 5, a date that just happens to coincide with the maker’s 75th birthday. The gallery also presents a preview of the documentary Lawrence Jordan and the premiere of Jordan’s newest film, a 12-hour collage epic, Circus Savage June 13. Jordan was kind enough to talk with us by phone, where he proved to be extremely open to discussing any topic with candor and modesty. His sly brilliance is masked a bit by his disarming charm.

topics: art, avant-garde, bay area, exhibition, experimental film

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Dinner and a movie discussion with Igor Sinyak

In Paris, moviegoers routinely go out afterward for a repast, a drink and an animated discussion of the merits and themes of the film just seen. But what if you live in or around San Francisco, are an aficionado of foreign films and all of your friends are Leonardo DiCaprio fans? Who do you see and debate Waltz with Bashir or Gomorrah with? Software engineer Igor Sinyak resolved that dilemma by founding Subtitles & Subtleties under the auspices of the Young Professionals International Forum of the World Affairs Council. The target audience, as you no doubt inferred, is people in their 20s and 30s attracted by a blend of socializing and informed conversation. A recent outing took them to the world premiere of the Russian film God’s Smile, or The Odessa Story with director Vladimir Alenikov present at the Jewish Community Center. Upcoming outings are planned for films including Fados, Departures and Three Monkeys.

topics: audiences, bay area, diy, film groups, world cinema

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Bruce Goldstein, from NY to SF to "Con"

Whether it’s the low road of finding little girls to scream like Fay Wray at the sight of King Kong or the high road of promoting great French films, Bruce Goldstein is the indispensable man for all cinema seasons. There have been gimmicks galore and a soupcon of chutzpah as he picks and chooses anywhere from the Three Stooges to Last Year at Marienbad to show at New York’s fabulous repertory theater, the Film Forum. Along the way, Goldstein has won France’s Order of Arts and Letters medal and recently the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Mel Novikoff Award given to an individual or institution "whose work has enhanced the public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema."

It’s a little off that particular beaten track, but Goldstein’s latest timely challenge to the Cannes Film Festival is his current Con Film Festival at the Forum featuring the warden of Sing Sing Prison, who he brought in to introduce 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis.

topics: bay area, cannes film festival, castro theatre, exhibition, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, independent film, san francisco international film festival, world cinema

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Elliot Lavine, revisiting the old haunts

Elliot Lavine, who’s been a fixture on the Bay Area film scene since moving from Detroit to San Francisco in 1975, returns to his old stomping grounds at the Roxie to guest curate "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." The program of 28 obscure, bona fide film noir that Lavine affectionately describes as "cheap, lowdown and tawdry," coincides with the underground publication of his book of the same name. The series, which includes Blind Alley, one of two noir shorts that marked the beginning and end of Lavine’s foray into filmmaking, runs May 15-28, with a pre-opening bash on May 14.

topics: authors, bay area, noir, roxie

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SFIFF52: Lourdes Portillo--visionary, sleuth, activist and "Persistence of Vision" awardee

The San Francisco-based and internationally acclaimed documentarian Lourdes Portillo once told an interviewer, by way of explaining her approach as a filmmaker, that she hated the obvious. For three decades, in films like Señorita Extraviada, La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead, and The Devil Never Sleeps, Portillo’s camera has continually taken us beyond the obvious—those things lying in the way of our vision of the world and each other—to contemplate the unnoticed, disregarded and unexpected. A truly independent filmmaker who has consistently worked outside the main avenues and currents of the industry, Portillo is an apt recipient of the
52nd San Francisco International Film Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award Monday, April 27.

topics: awards, bay area, diy, documentary, film festivals, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Chris Felver's "Ferlinghetti" captures an icon

Chris Felver has kept up a friendship with doyen of local poets and founder of City Lights Books Lawrence Ferlinghetti for almost 30 years, and his new film Ferlinghetti is the product of that friendship. Combining footage that Felver has collected over the years with a few archival gems, Felver traces the life of his antiauthoritarian subject from his days as a Navy serviceman in World War II, through the landmark First Amendment trial sparked by his publishing of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, to the more recent use of City Lights’ upstairs windows as billboards protesting the Bush Administration’s wars. Interviews with writers like Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and Dave Eggers testify to Ferlinghetti’s wide-ranging and continued influence.

Best known for his work as a photographer, Chris Felver’s enduring project has been a documentation of the creative life through a wide-ranging series of portraits of poets, musicians, artists, writers and filmmakers. His subjects smile back from the page in the warm poses that fill books like Beat and The Importance of Being, and he has also published tomes devoted to Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. As he states below, he sees his photography and filmmaking as pieces of the same process, and his newest work on Ferlinghetti appears as the natural continuation of a decades-long project circled around the poet. Ferlinghetti screens at the San Francisco International Film Festival (Tue., April 28, 6 p.m. and Thurs., April 30, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki, Wed., May 6, 6:30 p.m., PFA). I spoke with Felver on the phone as he walked through Union Square in Manhattan, a day after Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 90th birthday.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the last in a series of Q&A interviews with select Bay Area filmmakers featured in the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

topics: authors, avant-garde, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, photography, poetry, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Yun Suh finds revolution in a Jerusalem watering hole

Sneaking through a hole in the border fence between Israel and Palestine may seem like a high-risk way to have a nightlife, but for Boody, a young man living in Palestine, it’s the only way to get to Shushan, Jerusalem’s lone gay bar. City of Borders, the debut film by Bay Area filmmaker Yun Suh, follows several characters who have found a second home at the bar. The film testifies to the intolerance that members of the LGBTQ community face in addition to all of the other walls, physical and social, separating people in the region. City of Borders screens in the Documentary Competition at the "San Francisco International Film Festival": (Sun., April 26, 2 p.m., PFA, Thurs., April 30, 9:30, Mon., May 4, 9:15 and Wed., May 6, 12:15, Sundance Kabuki). Yun Suh answered my questions over e-mail during her time off of her day job, as an assignment editor for KRON.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is part of a series of Q&As with local Bay Area filmmakers whose work is screening the SFIFF52.]

topics: center for asian american media, diy, documentary, film arts foundation, funding, gay lesbian cinema, political film, san francisco international film festival, youth

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SFIFF52: Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider follow SF schools' immersion students

The making of most documentary films is an immersive experience. So it’s only natural that Bay Area filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, who’ve been working together as Patchworks Films for years, turn their video cameras to subjects in which they are already immersed. (It was childbirth after they had kids in Born in the U.S.A.; it was Orthodox Jewish life after an old friend’s religious conversion in The Return of Sarah’s Daughters.) That their latest project, Speaking in Tongues, is about immersion itself is only a coincidence. It just so happens the particular kind of education their children are receiving—Cantonese-English dual-language immersion at Alice Fong Yu—is one of the pioneering projects of the San Francisco Unified School District. The film they premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival this weekend and next (Sun., April 26, 3:15 p.m., Sat., May 2, 3:30 p.m., Thurs., May 7, 2:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki) follows the stories of four public school children (not their own) studying Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish along with their English. At a time when the U.S. border anxieties are at odds with the need for greater international cooperation, the film looks at what it means to give children the opportunity to become fluent in a second language through public school. The film plays in the Documentary Competition.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is part of a series of Q&As with local Bay Area filmmakers whose work is screening the SFIFF52.]

topics: diy, documentary film, filmmakers, san francisco international film festival, youth

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SFIFF52: Jim Granato on the fascinating journey behind "D tour"

Local filmmaker Jim Granato, whose movie D tour follows the band Rogue Wave and its ailing drummer Pat Spurgeon, on tour and on dialysis, has been on a bit of a road trip himself. Just back from screenings in Indiana, Florida and points East, Granato now brings his movie to the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it screens in competition for a Golden Gate Award in Documentary (Fri., May 1, 9 p.m., Mon., May 4, 3:15 p.m. and Thurs., May 7, 5:15 p.m.). Aptly named, D tour turns out to be less rock band/rock star road-show than a grimy tale of working class musicians and the healthcare system, as Spurgeon drags his dialysis kit on a glamour-less cross-country journey from show to show and couch to couch. Along the way, the narrative itself almost gets subverted as the story takes some unexpected and heartbreaking turns. A movie that starts as one man’s story of survival while chasing a dream ends up being just as much about community, sacrifice, and the complicated emotions around organ donation. I spoke with Granato in person a few weeks back.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is part of a series of Q&A interviews with Bay Area filmmakers featured in the San Francisco International Film Festival 2009.]

topics: bay area, digital distribution, diy, documentary, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Light and Saraf follow Tenderloin stories in "Empress Hotel"

Local filmmakers Allie Light and Irving Saraf have collaborated on over a dozen films and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for In the Shadow of the Stars, a backstage look at the performers of the San Francisco Opera. The Emmy-winning Dialogues with Madwomen, another entry on their formidable resume, casts a personal glance at seven women (including Light) who have suffered not only from different forms of “madness," but also at the hands of the patriarchal institutions that tend to smother women along with their ailments. The duo’s latest film Empress Hotel, was only a BART ride away from their Bay Area home. It delves into the lives of the residents at the titular building, a Tenderloin housing facility and part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Direct Access to Housing program for the recently homeless. The film makes visible an area many city dwellers may only experience in the fringe of their consciousness and provides insight into the lives of the residents within. Roberta Goodman, the manager of the building and a co-producer on the film, maintains an on-screen presence throughout, engaging generously with the residents and filmmakers. Empress Hotel screens at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival (Sat., April 25, 3:15 p.m., Mon., April 27, 6 p.m., and Wed. April 29, 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki). Irving Saraf answered questions about the film by e-mail.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the second in a series of Q&As with the Bay Area filmmakers in the 52nd SF International Film Festival.]

topics: bay area, documentary, independent film, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and a "New Muslim Cool"

Award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who’s worked as a staff producer at KQED-TV for the past decade, on and off, has investigated the territory between the personal and the political in a range of documentaries, broadcast segments and short films. Her latest documentary, New Muslim Cool, focuses on Hamza Perez, whose life is a crucible of disparate urban influences. Though raised as a Puerto Rican Catholic, Perez, a Pittsburgh-based hip hop artist and former drug dealer, converted to Islam and turned his life around. The film follows him as he interacts with his community and family and offers up the occasional hip hop performance. New Muslim Cool screens in the Documentary competition during the San Francisco International Film Festival (Sat., April 25, 2 p.m., PFA, Sun., April 26, 3 p.m. and Mon., May 4, Sundance Kabuki). It also airs June 23 as part of the POV series on PBS.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the first in a series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers featured in SFIFF52.]

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, san francisco international film festival

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Michael Jacobs "Audience of One" reaches out at the Roxie

When the question is "What would Jesus do?" the answer is rarely "Make a $200 million feature film." A spiritual quest becomes…questionable in Michael Jacobs’ Audience of One, which follows Pentecostal Pastor Richard Gazowsky and his flock engaged in the creation of an ambitious, multi-million dollar sci-fi-feature that answers not to any studio head, but to God. Like Chris Smith’s American Movie, Jacobs’ Audience captures an unlikely independent auteur chasing a directing dream. That it sometimes turns into a nightmare is only to be expected. The film, which follows the group from Ocean Avenue HQ to Italy to Treasure Island, played SXSW, New Directors/New Films and the SF International in 2007, and made its Roxie debut last week. We caught up with San Francisco-based filmmaker Michael Jacobs over email.

topics: actors, bay area, genre films, independent film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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Livin' la vida Arnold with Lyndall Grant

Finding a niche in the entertainment/film industry may not be easy for anyone, but for some, the challenges are unique. Lyndall Grant, who trained to be an actor in the Bay Area, was reminded at every audition that he couldn’t exactly dissolve into the role because…. he looked just like the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger. Demonstrating great flexibility and a little imagination, Grant decided he’d just go with it—bought the Ray-Bans and played the only part he was seemingly fit for. If living in San Francisco—a city where local cover bands like AC/DSHE and MANdonna are more respected than their mainstream counterparts—can teach you anything, it’s that a little identity tweaking can be great for your career. This past month, I caught up with this Bay Area professional tribute artist, who just took a role as "The Governor of California" in the film 2012 with Amanda Peet and John Cusack.

topics: actors, bay area

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Cary Joji Fukunaga on the (very) Bay Area story behind "Sin Nombre"

Cary Joji Fukunaga thinks it might be easier to draw his own family tree than try to untangle the many strands—Japanese, Swedish, Romanian, Argentinian, Mexican, French—enlivening his life. They made for a very tall, handsome 31-year old who enjoys equally the company of Latin American friends and what he calls his "surrogate Israeli parents" in Los Angeles. They also hint at why his film Sin Nombre is about complex families —those in Mexican gangs and those traveling immigrants looking for a better life in the U.S.

topics: bay area, drama, independent film, sundance, world cinema

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The buzz on H.P. Mendoza's "Fruit Fly"

H.P. Mendoza launched his career with an unlikely topic for a movie musical—a group of twentysomethings trying to escape the cemetery capital of the world. Perhaps equally surprising is the fact that Colma: The Musical, which he composed, wrote and co-starred, became a surprise indie hit in 2006. Now, he’s back with another musical, Fruit Fly, this time as a director and composer of the film’s 19 original songs. Mendoza’s twin root systems in music and film are inseparable and have served him well. Shot in HD over a 20-day period in the Castro and Mission neighborhoods Fruit Fly reunites Mendoza with Colma vets—cinematographer Richard Wong and leading songstress, L.A. Renigen. Renigen plays Bethesda, a Filipina performance artist who searches for her birth parents, tries to get her career off the ground and, as Mendoza once did, lives in a San Francisco artist commune, whose tenants are a rainbow coalition of ethnicity and sexual orientation. Mendoza is currently working on a non-musical: a dark comedy about Proposition 8. Fruit Fly, which was funded by the Center for Asian American Media, has its world premiere March 15 at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

topics: actors, bay area, center for asian american media, independent film, music, musicals, sf international asian american film festival

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Epps' "Black Rock" unearths buried Alcatraz history

On a damp, rainy night last week, Kevin Epps took 250 supporters, sponsors and friends on a cruise back in time. Although in many ways this trip to Alcatraz resembled the excursion taken by thousands of tourists over the years, there was one crucial difference: The San Francisco filmmaker was premiering his latest documentary, The Black Rock, and the focus was on the African American prisoners and guards who lived on the island from 1934-63, when it was a federal penitentiary. The screening was framed by a tour (we forgot that Park Rangers working the Alcatraz gig are themselves performers as well as historians) and a panel discussion that focused on the uneven number of black males incarcerated since 1980. In his new film, Epps (who debuted with a splash in 2003 with Straight Outta Hunters Point) brings to light a largely forgotten sliver of fascinating, infuriating history and imbues it with both indignation and sadness. The Black Rock plays Friday, February 27, through Thursday, March 5, at the Red Vic Movie House in the Haight. We got the lowdown from Epps via email.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, documentary, exhibitions, red vic movie house

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Daniel Davila maps intersections of "Harrison Montgomery"

The main character of Harrison Montgomery never speaks (let alone sings) the words, "Girl, there’s a better place for me and you." Yet Daniel Davila’s S.F.-set debut feature assuredly mirrors the theme of The Animals’ defiant anthem "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." The tale of a young bottom-rung Tenderloin drug dealer with aspirations of becoming an artist, the film charts from every angle the gulf that separates hardnosed reality from dreams of a better life. What sets Harrison Montgomery apart is its mix of tones; it unfolds in the gritty terrain of Rob Nilsson’s 9@Night series, but often adopts a tone of absurd realism that evokes memories of the indie amateur-heist flick Palookaville (itself inspired by the seriocomic masterpiece Big Deal on Madonna Street). With Martin Landau providing ace support as the eccentric codger downstairs, Harrison Montgomery screens one more time, February 20, in S.F. Indiefest. We conducted this interview via email with Daniel Davila, now based in Los Angeles.

topics: actors, bay area, directors, distribution, genre films, hollywood, independent film

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Stephane Gauger on "Owl and the Sparrow," and a new view of Vietnam

When 6’ 3" Stephane Gauger arrives for an interview with his all-American look, wearing a baseball cap inscribed with "The Jimi Hendrix Experience," it’s hard to imagine him as director of a film designed to be a "love letter to the city of Saigon." Just the word Saigon summons up long-forgotten images of the longest war in U.S. history, but for Gauger, it’s his birthplace, son of a Vietnamese mother and an American father of German descent who moved to Vietnam in 1966.

Still there’s no reflection of that country’s beleagured history in Owl and the Sparrow, his fable-like movie starring Thuy, an indomitable 10-year old orphan who tries to seek her own way in the big city and finds friendship with a lonely flight attendant and a teen-age caretaker of elephants in a zoo that is his haven from the urban hustle and bustle. The film plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting Friday.

topics: asian cinema, bay area, independent film, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

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SF Cinematheque: New year, new direction

San Francisco Cinematheque, the storied organization that began in Bruce Baillie’s yard nearly five decades ago, has weathered many storms—transformations in technology, funding, exhibition and distribution—that have left avant-garde film culture twisting in the wind at times. Through it all, Cinematheque could be relied upon to continue presenting the edgiest work in town to the edgiest audiences. After roughly two decades of guidance from Steve Anker, now a dean at CalArts, Cinematheque shifted leadership a number of times in the past decade, from Steven Jenkins, currently the San Francisco Film Society’s director of finance and administration as well as an author and cultural critic, to Caroline Savage. (An earlier version of this article neglected to mention the deep influence programmer Irina Leimbacher had on the institution.) It enters a new era this year under Jonathan Marlow, a filmmaker and former Board member who draws on his film industry experience in both the non-profit and for-profit realms, and is closely collaborating with Steve Polta (a ten-year veteran of Cinematheque) and new program director Vanessa O’Neill. SF360.org had the opportunity to join in on a conversation about Cinematheque’s past and present when Steven Jenkins lunched with Marlow at Caffe Centro last fall. (The conversation was subsequently amended to add in a few key details.) The spring Cinematheque season begins this coming Wednesday, February 4, with Ken Jacobs’ Razzle Dazzle.

topics: authors, avant-garde, bay area, directors, experimental film, sf cinematheque

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Eddie Muller, Noir City and the lure of troubled times

Author, raconteur, commentator and former newspaperman Eddie Muller launched Noir City, an annual San Francisco-based festival of noir, seven years ago, and it’s attracted an avid following, both in the Bay Area and beyond. (It now tours many U.S. cities). A self-described “second generation San Franciscan, product of a lousy public school education, a couple of crazy years in art school and too much time spent in newspaper offices and sporting arenas," Muller has built a small empire around his passion for this dark, cynical, highly stylized brand of storytelling. He says his career as an "ink-stained, fourth estate wretch” sidetracked his early ambition to become a filmmaker, but this year, he brings the two worlds together with "Newspaper Noir," a tribute to and lament for the heyday of print journalism. The films, presented in nightly double bills, feature the usual suspects: an assortment of criminals, hard-bitten editors, lethal femme fatales with betrayal and skullduggery on their minds and ordinary Joes, losers driven by despair and sucked into a vortex from which there’s no escape. For Noir City 7, which runs January 23-February 1 at the Castro Theatre, Muller and co-curator Anita Monga acquired several one-of-a-kind 35mm prints struck by the studios especially for the festival. SF360.org got a chance to speak with Muller this past month, after he’d returned from a film-scouting mission to South America.

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, cinephiles, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir, performance, producers, world cinema

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Wendy Levy, Sundance and the politics of participation

We all know that the Sundance Film Festival, which opens Thursday in Utah, has films. But for the industry population that attends Sundance annually, the action is off-screen—not only in the hallways where air kisses reign, but in the worldly, wonky panels where filmmakers earnestly share ideas and experiences, and generate enough memes to populate a metroplis. One of the most interesting discussions this year will be the one hosted Thursday, January 22, by Wendy Levy, Bay Area Video Coalition’s Director of Creative Programming. She’ll be introducing BAVC’s Producers Institute for New Media Technologies to a no-doubt awestruck audience at the New Frontier on Main. While "interactive" may be the buzzword behind an ambitious project like The Producers Institute—where directors experiment other communication platforms to give new kinds of depth, breadth and reach to their projects—it’s also the clear descriptor for the whirlwind force leading it. Levy, a veteran of many nonprofits (including Film Arts Foundation) and a filmmaker herself, is as engaged and interactive as they come. She seemed the perfect person to offer not only thoughts on the program she’s presenting at Sundance on PI and what’s being called the "New Documentary Movement" —but to also offer a short Sundance primer before this year’s festival.

topics: digital filmmaking, directors, distribution, documentary film, political film, producers, q&a

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Debra Chasnoff goes back to school with "Straightlaced"

In eighth grade, Debra Chasnoff was already a tall, attractive brunette with beautiful blue eyes, who yearned to be noticed by a boy named Sammy but he didn’t have eyes for her. Although she had a crush on him, what he saw and wrote in the class yearbook was "To the girl who gets As in French class. I don’t know how or why."

Now a 51-year old prize-winning filmmaker and the mother of two boys, 14 and 20, Chasnoff laughed as she recalled being "devastated" by Sammy’s comment. "The thing he had noticed about me was that I was really smart and not that I was someone appealing to him. I felt a lot of pressure because I was smarter than you were supposed to be if you were a girl."

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, film history, gay lesbian cinema, oscars, political film

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Pamela Harris and GFEM link funders with filmmakers

Here’s a bolt of good news for filmmakers and media arts groups reeling from the spiraling economic reports. This month, Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media (www.GFEM.org) launched the GFEM Media Database. This key component of the membership organization’s Web site is designed to provide foundations and government funders with an easy-to-navigate inventory of high-level projects in their spheres of interest and influence. It’s not open to every filmmaker, however. I got the big picture from Oakland-based program director Pamela Harris via email.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, features, funding

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Jon Else on acts of creation

(Editor’s note: SF360.org is reprinting an interview from 2007 with Jon Else, whose Wonders Are Many played this week in PBS’s Independent Lens series.)

One of the deans of Bay Area documentary filmmaking, Jon Else is a first-rate cinematographer, writer, producer and director. His films include Cadillac Desert, Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, Open Outcry and Sing Faster: The Stagehands Ring Cycle. The Day After Trinity, his saga of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer’s secret development of the atom bomb, won the doc prize at Sundance in 1981 and packed the big house at the Kabuki 23 years later when Else was feted with the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award. Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic blends that chapter of World War II history with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars’ staging of a new opera on the subject. (Wonders Are Many had its first of several SFIFF50 screenings Sat., Apr. 28 at 9 p.m. at the Castro.) One morning last week, Else and I staked out a corner of KGO’s lobby to chat.

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, documentary, exhibitions, film festivals, san francisco international film festival

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New at Frameline: K.C. Price

For a large chunk of Frameline’s 32 years of existence, Michael Lumpkin captained the preeminent San Francisco queer media arts organization. When he departed to forge new trails at the conclusion of this year’s S.F. International LGBT Film Festival, the board picked K.C. Price to take over as executive director. Price was the managing director of the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, the building that houses Frameline and several other local film organizations, and his resume includes stints as the development director at Frameline and the STOP AIDS Project. Price’s fundraising experience should be an asset amid a spiraling recession that’s expected to roil nonprofit arts groups in the coming year. We met the new guy in the Frameline offices last week to find out what was on his plate.

topics: castro theatre, directors, documentary, experimental film, features, festivals, film arts foundation, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

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Sragow dishes on 'An American Movie Master'

During his tenure at the San Francisco Examiner, Michael Sragow was one of the most respected and popular film critics in town. Ensconced at the Baltimore Sun since 2001, Sragow has inevitably fallen off the radar of most local moviegoers (even in the Internet age). The December 9 publication of his years-in-the-making opus, Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Pantheon, 656 pages) provides a splendid opportunity to get reacquainted with one of the most knowledgeable, enthusiastic and cogent writers about American film. Can’t place Victor Fleming’s name? Read on.

topics: actors, authors, awards, bay area, directors, film history, hollywood

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Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black make a "Milk" run

Somewhere buried among my files, I have an inch-thick folder of newspaper clippings mapping Hollywood’s marathon on-and-off flirtation with the dramatic deeds and death of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. That checkered history—the movie-deal machinations, not the life and legacy of the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the U.S.—is finally rendered moot with the long-awaited arrival tomorrow night of Gus Van Sant’s vivid, vibrant Milk. The movie revisits a pivotal and still-relevant era in Bay Area history and, more so than last year’s Zodiac, deserves to be seen and discussed by local filmgoers. I interviewed Van Sant and the young screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who are collaborating next on an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s Haight-Ashbury-fueled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the day after the film’s star-studded premiere at the Castro Theatre.

topics: bay area, festivals, gay lesbian cinema, sf international lgbt film festival

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Scott MacDonald's "Canyon Cinema" book--both history and how-to

In his overlapping careers as a historian, a curator, a teacher and a critic, Scott MacDonald has arguably done more than anyone to champion the American experimental cinema. He is the author of numerous books, including five volumes of informed, illuminating conversations in his ongoing series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press). His latest work, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, published by UC Press in January, details the formation of the revered Bay Area artists’ collective in the early 1960s and its subsequent status and ongoing success. Packed with fascinating source material, from memos to drawings to a fan letter from John Lennon to Bruce Conner, the book is a scintillating blend of artists’ philosophy, irreverence, scholarship and whimsy. We posed a set of questions via email to MacDonald, currently a visiting professor at Hamilton College and Harvard University. We’re reposting the interview, which originally ran in early September, to mark his peripatetic visit to the Bay Area this week. MacDonald will introduce a quartet of shows honoring the films and makers of Canyon Cinema beginning Friday and Saturday, November 21 and 22, at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, followed by a San Francisco Cinematheque show Sunday, November 23, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a Pacific Film Archive program Tuesday, November 25.

topics: authors, avant-garde, bay area, distributors, experimental film

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David Thomson rounds up 1,000 unusual suspects

The publication of a new book by David Thomson, the British-born film historian and essayist who’s called San Francisco home for many years, is always cause for celebration, and not just because of the hours of illumination and provocation that await the movie-mad reader. The author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and daring studies of Warren Beatty, David O. Selznick, Orson Welles and Nicole Kidman blends a breadth of knowledge with an abiding admiration for talent that has the magical side benefit of reviving our faith that a young filmmaker is on the verge of emerging with a masterpiece. Have You Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Random House), which hit bookstores a couple of weeks ago, devotes one wondrously irreverent page apiece to an iconoclastic array of movies beginning with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and concluding with Zabriskie Point. A new Thomson book also provides an excuse to sit down for an expansive conversation about the auteur Sylvester Stallone, the great Cavalcanti film—well, the many great films—he didn’t include and why he eschews being called a critic.

topics: actors, art film, authors, bay area, hollywood, world cinema

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Susan Oxtoby: From Cinematheque Ontario to Pacific Film Archive

It’s hard to believe that it’s already three years since Susan Oxtoby came down from Canada to join the Pacific Film Archive as senior curator, stepping into the seat the beloved Edith Kramer filled for more than two decades. As the director of programming at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario since 1997, and a curator before that, Oxtoby organized a veritable flood of filmmaker retrospectives from G.W. Pabst to Rithy Panh, national cinema overviews, thematic series (such as Film and Architecture, Dante and the Cinema and The Sound of Silent Cinema) and special events. Oxtoby began her career as a filmmaker with All Flesh is Grass (1988) and January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary (1992), and worked as a researcher, archivist, sound recorder and picture editor for experimental and documentary films. We lounged in the sun outside the BAM/PFA building a few weeks ago, and talked about a life in film. One of Oxtoby’s series, I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying, is currently playing at the Pacific Film Archive, with Ning Ying in person. (More at the PFA.)

topics: avant-garde, bay area, cinephiles, directors, experimental film, pacific film archive, world cinema

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Lance Hammer on beauty and "Ballast"

Lance Hammer’s debut feature, Ballast —now playing in San Francisco—premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival to resounding critical fanfare, winning prizes for best director and cinematography. It followed with awards in Buenos Aires, Boston and the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where I had the opportunity to sit down with producer-director-writer Hammer to discuss the film’s impressive structure. Since our conversation, Hammer’s film has been navigating the hazardous waters of distribution and has—as indieWIRE states it—"steadied its course" by opting out of a distribution deal with IFC Films in order to self-distribute through the film’s production entity, Alluvial Film Company, along with Steven Raphael’s Required Viewing. This brave maneuver places Hammer in the vanguard of independent filmmakers strategizing new models for theatrical self-distribution.

topics: directors, distributors, independent film, q&a

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The Arab Film Festival's Michel Shehadeh touts a cinema renaissance

If there was ever a time when Americans needed to hear a cross-section of voices from the Arab world, it’s now. Sure, the 12th annual Arab Film Festival, as always, is a celebration of community and identity and the art of cinema. But it also provides an all-too-rare window onto the Arab street without CNN obscuring the view. We sat down with executive director Michel Shehadeh, who joined the festival earlier this year, for a wide-ranging interview. First, though, some program highlights: The festival begins Thursday, October 16, with Waiting for Pasolini, a comedy about a Moroccan village’s interaction with an Italian film crew. A pair of Sundance award-winners, the crowd-pleasing Captain Abu Read (October 17 at the Clay and October 18 at the Camera 12 in San Jose), Jordan’s first-ever feature and (needless to say) its submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the inspiring Palestinian rap doc, Slingshot Hip Hop (October 24 at the Shattuck in Berkeley), make their local premieres. The list of guest filmmakers includes Slingshot’s Jackie Salloum and Khadija Al-Salami, the Yemeni director of the wrenching documentary Amina (October 26), about a death-row inmate convicted of murdering her husband. The Arab Film Festival runs through October 28 at various locations in San Francisco, October 18-19 in San Jose, October 23 in Oakland and October 24-26 in Berkeley. For ticket information, call the festival office at (415) 564-1100 or go to the festival’s web site.

topics: arab cinema, documentary film, features, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, international film, political film, q&a

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Jack Stevenson and "The Superstars Next Door"

If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco—for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong—and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark.

topics: curators, digital filmmaking, yerba buena center for the arts

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MVFF: James Savoca's "Around June" casts its spell around Potrero Hill

[SF360.org Editor’s note: We are publishing interviews with as many of the Bay Area filmmakers in this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival as we can find. Look for more installments after the festival gets underway, Oct. 2.]

It used to be standard for San Francisco to be portrayed in movies as a magical, mythical and slightly mysterious place where transformation could take place anywhere. Writer-director James Savoca takes a stab at reviving that rep with Around June, a dreamy-gritty fable that traces the offbeat romance between a Rapunzel-like Potrero Hill girl and a sweet but broke Mexican immigrant. Between her bullying father (Jon Gries of Napoleon Dynamite and mentally challenged uncle (Brad William Henke), June (Samaire Armstrong of "Dirty Sexy Money") has no room to forge a new life—until she chances to meet Juan Diego (Oscar H. Guerrero) in a gentle rainstorm. Around June strikes a poetic but unsentimental tone, aided by well-placed slices of Charlie Canfield’s watercolor-influenced animation. Savoca, a former actor and playwright, directed the indie features Sleepwalk (2000) and The Crooked Corner (2005) in his native New York before relocating to San Francisco two years ago. With his angular features and staccato New York accent, he evokes comparison with the late, great John Cazale. We met up at the Mechanics’ Institute downtown a few days ahead of Around June’s sold-out world premiere this Friday, October 3, at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

topics: bay area, directors, features, q&a

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Stephen Parr's Oddball Films

Stephen Parr licenses film and video footage, and currently presents some of the best film screenings in town with his Oddball Films series. He has also invented a wide variety of after-hours venues, owned a small press and run burlesque shows. I shouldn’t be surprised that entering Parr’s office at Oddball Films is not quite, well—normal. Upon arriving at his Capp Street office, and having been instructed NOT to ring the bell, I call a cell phone number and someone happens to be leaving the building. I am told to walk in and go to the top of the stairs. As the outside door closes, I find myself in pitch darkness. Stairs? After feeling the walls, I fumble my way up to a carpet-covered door. One step in and I am surrounded with 6,000 sq feet of floor-to-ceiling films cans and the ’30s era 17 Reasons sign. Parr’s work is currently being appreciated in the Bay Area Now 5 series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in a screening of Euphoria this coming Thursday.

topics: archives, directors, exhibitions, film

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Ariella Ben-Dov dips into the Madcat archives

What do women want to watch? With Diane English’s recent unfunny and product placement-filled re-make of The Women hitting theaters last week, Hollywood’s answer, predictably, is more of the same. Thankfully there are curators like Ariella Ben-Dov, whose Madcat Women’s International Film Festival has long provided a platform for fiercely independent and experimental women filmmakers, whose work often refuses to be defined by the label “women filmmaker.” Ben-Dov’s curatorial practice has also made a point of expanding Madcat’s audience beyond already faithful cinephiles. On the eve of the 12th anniversary of Madcat, the only avant-garde women’s film festival in the United States, I spoke with Ben-Dov over the phone from New York, where she’s adjusting to her new position as director of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History, about expanding the San Francisco-weaned Madcat Festival, the power of watching a film in an audience and the uncanny return of Beverly Hills 90210. The Festival (more on the schedule at Madcat’s web site) gets underway Sept. 19 at Artists’ Television Access and continues with the lively El Rio barbecue-enhanced screenings the following week.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, experimental film, film festivals, international film, women filmmakers

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Stephen Olsson and Link TV

Nestled in a quiet office between Telegraph Hill and the Embarcadero in San Francisco’s Waterfront District, hard by the advertising agencies and KGO, Link TV provides a wide-angle antidote to the standard television news mix of hit-and run stories and doltish commercials. The free public-interest channel, founded in 1999, aims to inform Americans about corners of the globe, notably the Middle East, that tend to be oversimplified or ignored by other broadcast media. Link TV’s programming encompasses international documentaries, music, news and culture, from works that might be familiar to regular film festivalgoers to pieces that never received any U.S. exposure. Its lineup of original programming includes the highly respected "Mosaic," a daily digest of news from the Middle East, and "Global Pulse," a three-to-five minute daily segment. Link TV flies under the radar hereabouts because it’s only available to San Francisco cable subscribers on weekends. (The educational access channel, Comcast 27, is the place to find Link TV beginning midnight Friday through 7 a.m. Monday. Check out the Web site, www.linktv.org, for more information.) The core audience of five million weekly viewers gets the channel via satellite, on channel 375 on DirectTV and 9410 on Dish network. We sat down with Stephen Olsson, a veteran Bay Area documentary maker and Link’s senior director of original programming, to get the scoop.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, political film, tv, world cinema

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Exhuming history with "The Judge and the General"

[SF360.org editor’s note: The Judge the the General opens in Bay Area theaters this week—the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley (Aug. 12), the Roxie (Aug. 14) and the Smith Rafael (Aug. 17). It airs Aug. 19 on P.B.S.‘s P.O.V. series. This interview originally ran when the film played the SF International Film Festival this past spring.]

Character development is essential to any film, but in documentary, it’s particularly challenging to depict. With The Judge and the General, Bay Area filmmaker Elizabeth Farnsworth and co-director Patricio Lanfranco vividly portray the kind of character transformation that alters not just an individual’s life, but the course of history. Judge Juan Guzmán, whose family supported Pinochet, is given the job of investigating the General’s crimes— which he does, surprisingly, with vigor. The film watches him dig up the most gruesome of histories, touch decaying bones, and find out a truth he was skeptical existed in a powerful documentary about Chile’s past and present. As part of our Bay Area filmmakers’ series as the San Francisco International Film Festival gets underway, SF360.org asked Farnsworth some introductory questions over email last week.

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

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Canyon Cinema's Dominic Angerame

Filmmaker Dominic Angerame, the executive director of experimental/avant-garde film distribution company Canyon Cinema, seems that rarest of artists: someone who can level-headedly run a business and keep it profitable, as well as create highly personal, dynamic art. It’d be hard to find anyone willing to take on the everyday labor of film inspection, office work and filmmaker politics for as little compensation as he does: When he joined in 1980, "everyone was getting paid about $3 an hour," while in 2006, he had to battle to renegotiate his salary to an amount barely in line with San Francisco’s cost of living. But his commitment to the company, and the experimental art form, is 27 years strong and still going.

Originally from Albany, New York, Angerame lives in North Beach (the subject of two of his upcoming films, "two short comedies about coffee-shop living") and is a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute. His film Anaconda Targets (2004), footage of a 2002 military operation recorded aboard a United States gunship helicopter, screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006 as part of the Whitney Biennial. He participated in an email exchange with SF360.org this past winter.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, documentary, experimental film, features, gay lesbian cinema

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

Platform

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