Category: Q&A

Q&A

Red Vic Reprising 'Lesh Sabreen?'

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

topics: activism, arab cinema, bay area, exhibition, red vic movie house

Q&A

Borshay Liem’s Double Exposure of Korean Adoptions

Deann Borshay Liem’s terrific 1999 documentary First Person Plural recounted her experience as an orphaned Korean adoptee raised by a Caucasian family in an East Bay suburb. Only she wasn’t an orphan, and the second half of the film is devoted to locating and meeting her birth mother and siblings. A decade later, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee finds Liem revisiting her adoption and identity from another, equally compelling perspective. The Korean documents identified her as Cha Jung Hee, but eight-year-old Deann (as her adoptive parents christened her) knew that wasn’t her name. All these years later, the filmmaker determines to get to the bottom of the mystery, and find the person for whom she was substituted. Scheduled to air nationally on PBS’s “P.O.V.” in September, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee has its world premiere in the "28th San Francisco International Asian America Film Festival": http://festival.asianamericanmedia.org/ this Friday, March 12 at 6:45 at the Clay Theatre, with additional screenings Saturday, March 13 in Berkeley (Pacific Film Archive) and Sunday, March 21 in San Jose (Camera Cinemas).

topics: activism, asian american cinema, directors, documentary, immigration, sf international asian american film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema

Q&A

Sid Ganis on Hollywood South and North

From his modest start as a staff writer at 20th Century Fox, Sid Ganis has built an uncommonly long and successful career in Hollywood. The well-liked Brooklyn native gravitated to marketing and publicity, eventually working his way up to the Warner Bros. executive suite in 1977. At George Lucas’s behest, he moved to the Bay Area to spearhead Lucasfilm’s marketing of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983) and the first two Indiana Jones movies. Ganis returned to L.A. to assume the presidency of the Paramount Motion Picture Group, and subsequently joined Columbia’s senior management team before striking out on his own as a producer. His credits include the Adam Sandler flicks Big Daddy and Mr. Deeds, and Akeelah and the Bee with his wife Nancy Hult Ganis, a former journalist and documentary filmmaker. As a sign of his respect in the industry, Ganis served four terms as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science from 2005 through 2009. Ganis divides his time between Southern California and the Bay Area, where he sits on the boards of the San Francisco Film Society and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. We spoke on the phone in mid-December.

topics: bay area, hollywood, san francisco film society, world cinema

Q&A

Ehrlich, Goldsmith on Unearthing, Reclassifying ‘Pentagon Papers’

Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award nomination for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is, among other things, a validation of the documentary’s right-now relevance. In revisiting the suspenseful events surrounding the formerly hawkish military analyst’s principled decision to leak the military’s classified history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and 18 other newspapers in 1971, the Berkeley filmmakers inevitably call to mind the Bush Administration’s hyped case for invading Iraq and the media’s abdication of its responsibility to question and investigate. The Most Dangerous Man in America flows naturally from both Ehrlich’s 2002 doc The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (co-directed with Rick Tejada-Flores) and Goldsmith’s 1996 Oscar nominee, Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. I sat down separately with Goldsmith and Ehrlich at the Zaentz Media Center in December, smack between their local premiere in the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Academy Award announcement. Currently beginning its national theatrical release through First Run Features, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday, February 19, in San Francisco and Berkeley.

topics: activism, awards, bay area, documentary, oscars

Q&A

Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA

As part of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, SF MoMA has commissioned three trios of programs surveying different eras of the museum’s history of film exhibition. The first of these considers the years of 1937-1960, though really we’re interested in 1945-1954, when Frank Stauffacher’s seminal Art in Cinema series hatched a Bay Area avant-garde. Filmmakers and critics are easily overlooked, but the programmer’s work is particularly subject to forgetting. In Stauffacher’s case this is most unfortunate, as his catalyzing work not only demonstrated the radical possibility of film as (local) art, but planted the seeds for a new, promiscuous way of seeing called cinephilia. When today’s enthusiasts dart between a Michael Mann blockbuster and a Ken Jacobs shoestring revolution, they are in Stauffacher’s republic. Art in Cinema took too much of Stauffacher—the series effectively ended when he died from a brain tumor in 1955—but his garden flourished well beyond those nine years.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, san francisco museum of modern art

Q&A

Britta Sjogren brings the "women's film" paradox to the PFA

Film theory, as any media-inclined graduate student will tell you, is full of gloomy prognostications about what can and cannot be done within cinema. Many of us find the deterministic mode of much theoretical writing dispiriting. A rare few are invigorated by it; an even smaller number are able to mold their fascination into original work. Local filmmaker-scholar Britta Sjogren is one of these talents. In her 2006 book, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film, Sjogren threads her vexations with feminist film theory into a lively study of sound and voice in classical Hollywood cinema, bringing fresh curiosity and intelligence to taken-for-granted “women’s film” touchstones like Letter from an Unknown Woman and Rebecca. An acclaimed filmmaker in her own right, Sjogren is perhaps more open to contradiction than her purely theoretical counterparts. She revisits her book’s terrain with a six-week program at the Pacific Film Archive spanning a wide range of 40s conundrums and closing with her own feature debut, 1992’s Jo-Jo at the Gate of Lions.

topics: actors, audiences, authors, bay area, directors, genre films, hollywood, pacific film archive, q&a, women

Q&A

"Medicine for Melancholy" opens in the city it re-discovered

One of the most exciting discoveries of the 2008 S.F. International Film Festival was the feature debut of a San Franciscan named Barry Jenkins. Programmers, audiences and critics (including yours truly) embraced Medicine for Melancholy as a fresh, only-in-S.F. blend of romance and political philosophy. It turns out that Jenkins’ deeply personal black-and-white drama speaks to moviegoers well beyond the 415 area code. IFC Films acquired the film, and the opening week in New York City racked up the highest per-theater grosses of any picture. With two Independent Spirit nominations and a platform release that brings Medicine for Melancholy back to the Bay Area this Friday, its director now boasts a national profile. Jenkins studied film production at Florida State University before heading to the industry town of L.A. and promptly relocating here. With stunning alacrity, he wrote, shot and completed his graceful, poignant and altogether marvelous film about fleeting urban connections, black identity and invisibility, cultural adventures and this gentrified city’s lost soul.

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

Q&A

MVFF: Andy Abrahams Wilson tracks the Lyme epidemic that's "Under Our Skin"

Documentaries rarely get confused with horror films, but Andy Abrahams Wilson’s Under Our Skin has the singular ability to inspire nightmares. This elegantly crafted film is a far-ranging portrait of the underreported epidemic of Lyme disease, and the health care community’s underestimation of the disease’s effects and treatments. Blending the painful experiences of several powerfully articulate patients, from a former forest ranger to a U2 tour events manager, with a bevy of doctors that run the spectrum from risk-taking pioneers to establishment hacks, the documentary expertly balances emotion and reason. (Wilson singles out local editor Eva Ilona Brzeski for special praise.) Under Our Skin, which marks the Bay Area filmmaker’s first feature-length film after a number of shorter works, has its local premiere this Saturday and Sunday, October 11 and 12, in a pair of screenings at the Mill Valley Film Festival. We spoke with Wilson on the phone a few days ago.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the third of three articles on local filmmakers in the 31st Mill Valley Film Festival, continuing through Oct. 12.]

topics: bay area, documentary, festivals, horror, independent film

Q&A

MVFF: Marilyn Mulford and Quique Cruz excavate Chile's dark past

Claudio Cruz was a teenager in Chile and a rising musician when the military deposed Salvador Allende in 1973. Shortly after Augusto Pinochet moved into the top job, Claudio was arrested, tortured and bounced for the next year from one detention camp to another. He was then deported, rather than disappeared, eventually migrating to Northern California and adopting a new name, Quique, and creating a new life. But his scars never fully healed. The end of the dictatorship, and Pinochet’s arrest, inspired Cruz to embark on the ambitious Archaeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi, consisting of a musical suite, a book and a documentary. Veteran Bay Area filmmaker Marilyn Mulford (Chicano Park, Freedom on my Mind) collaborated with Cruz on the documentary, which has its U.S. premiere in the Mill Valley Film Festival in a pair of shows (one passed already, but one is upcoming, on Sunday, Oct. 12). Pensive, humanistic and ultimately inspiring, Archaeology of Memory uses Cruz’s quietly insistent acoustic songs, typically performed by an ensemble, as its heartbeat.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the second of three articles on local filmmakers in the 31st Mill Valley Film Festival, continuing through Oct. 12.]

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, music, political film, south american film

Q&A

Gibney going "Gonzo," part two

Editor’s note: This is the 2nd of two installments of Cathleen Rountree’s interview with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which closes the San Francisco International Film Festival Thursday.

SF360.org: Do you think Thompson has a lasting legacy? I mean in the sense that there aren’t many people practicing his art form now.

Gibney: The thing for any writer is that you have to find your own voice. So people imitate Hunter Thompson at their peril, because that was Hunter’s voice, not Writer X’s voice. You know, there’s a little bit of Hunter Thompson in someone like Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. But there’s a legacy to Hunter Thompson, or to me the legacy should be: what’s wrong with breaking the rules? We need a few more people who break the rules, but to break them carefully. What did Bob Dylan say: "To live outside the law you must be honest." Because sometimes the people in power don’t play within the rules and, worse, they manipulate the rules against those who are trying to speak truth to power.

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