Category: Report

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Bay Area's Pixar rises again at Oscars

Cementing its status as the preeminent animation company of the ‘00s, Pixar won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the third time in seven years. Up director Pete Docter collected his first trophy in six trips, a stunning run that includes original screenplay nominations for Toy Story (1995), Wall-E (2008) and Up. The helium-fueled adventure was further buoyed by Michael Giacchino’s Oscar for original score, the category in which he was nominated two years ago for Ratatouille.

Pixar received five nominations altogether, including Best Picture (snagged by The Hurt Locker, directed by San Carlos native and San Francisco Art Institute alum Kathryn Bigelow), Original Screenplay (awarded to Mark Boal’s for The Hurt Locker over Docter and co-writer Bob Peterson) and Mixing.

topics: activism, animation, awards, bay area, hollywood, independent film, oscars

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The greatest finds of my generation

The harsh glare of the spotlight that brought Howl mixed reviews from critics on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival had melted into a warm glow by Saturday, when the Bay Area-made nonfiction feature played to an adoring audience at Park City’s Library venue. Programmer David Courier’s slip of the tongue as he celebrated "two of the most venerated documentary filmmakers of our time, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman" (Oscar winners for Common Threads and The Times of Harvey Milk), by praising how the two were "making their first fourway—I mean FORAY—into dramatic films" offered an appropriately irreverent frame for a film about Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet and the fate of his epic "Howl" in a 1957 San Francisco courtroom.

[Editor’s note: Continue reading entries on the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, including interviews with Bay Area makers Sam Green and the Butcher Brothers Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, critical takes on films and events of the festival, behind-the-scenes photos, as well as exclusive interviews with Bay Area Sundance staffers in SF360 Blogs.]

topics: activism, actors, authors, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

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Stephen Talbot tunes in to world music

Should Stephen Talbot be worried? He left PBS’s Frontline World, where he was a series editor and senior producer, to form Talbot Players and create and develop original media properties, including a new globe-trotting television series about world music dubbed Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders. For Talbot, it’s the kind of fantasy project he has been wanting to do for a long time. When we sat down in North Beach’s Cafe Zoetrope recently to discuss the project, Talbot had a pilot just about wrapped up and was getting ready to submit it to the heads at PBS.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, public television, tv, world cinema

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Jennifer Phang on "Half-Life" and identity

Filmmaker Jennifer Phang’s experienced more than enough culture shocks in her life to empathize with the identity challenges of the men and women in her first feature, Half-Life, which is being released via VOD and DVD from Wolfe Video and Warner Digital this month. In Half-Life’s psychological drama, part live action, part animation, Pam, the 19-year old daughter, and Timothy, the 8-year old son of an Asian American mother, try to cope with their father’s disappearance and their mother’s affair with a young white lover. In the meantime, Pam’s only friend, a Korean adoptee, trying to find some sense of individualism and self-worth, has to find a way to reveal the existence of his African American lover to his fundamentalist Christian white parents.

topics: activism, asian american cinema, audiences, bay area, diy, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, immigration, sf international asian american film festival, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

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Citizen critics found new outlets, faced challenges in 2009

The silver lining to a decade that saw traditional critics in conventional media dwindle? The explosion of socially networked citizen critics who’ve helped create a multidimensional, democratic dialogue about the movies. San Francisco, with its panoply of film festivals, has, not surprisingly, spawned a wealth of such web-based writers. We checked in with a few of these writers, some of whom call themselves bloggers, to get a snapshot of what ’09 brought the web’s way as the economy faltered, and the community tweeted.

topics: bay area, blogs, cinephiles, critics, exhibition, festivals, world cinema

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Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, world cinema, youth

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Top 10s of the 2000s

It’s no surprise that we—a group of critics, fans, exhibitors and filmmakers in the Bay Area responding to survey questions on the best films of the decade—did not arrive at a consensus. It would be a terrible sign of the aggregation era if we had. Indeed, the eclectic nature of this list proves that the long tail may continue to wag, happily, into the next decade, bringing diversity, perhaps even democracy, to a screen near you. The lists below are published in the order they were received, with director/country of origin on first mention of a film, with comments offered in a few cases. Please, offer us lists of your own in the "comments" box below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, critics, critics year end, cult cinema, curators, directors

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Top 10s of 2009: Critics, filmmakers, exhibitors, distributors and fans speak

It was a big year for 3D, but critics and film-industry folk in the Bay Area found many other dimensions in the cinema of 2009. Included in these lists we solicited from the community are not just films released this year locally, but occasionally films that have had festival-only screenings elsewhere or films made in ’08 that had local releases in ’09. We gave wide berth to our well-traveled respondents, a few of whom offered comments on films, or limited their selections to moments within films. Directors and countries of origin on films are listed on first mention; lists appear in the order they were received. And please: Join the fray. Share your own lists in the "comments" box, below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, cult cinema, curators, directors

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SF critics' group issues 2009 awards

The San Francisco Film Critics Circle (SFFCC) named its top films and filmmakers of 2009 Monday evening. Best Picture went to The Hurt Locker, and the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, was voted Best Director.

For the first time, the Circle voted on Best Animated Feature, and Henry Selick’s Coraline won from a field of strong contenders.

The Marlon Riggs Award, which honors Bay Area filmmakers who show courage and innovation, went to Frazer Bradshaw for his Sundance-premiered drama Everything Strange and New, about family/working life shot in Oakland, California, and Barry Jenkins for Medicine for Melancholy, his San Francisco-shot black-and-white portrait of two African American twentysomethings exploring each other and a changing city.

topics: animation, authors, awards, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, hollywood, independent film, women filmmakers, world cinema

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Live from Mill Valley: Woody Harrelson and Uma Thurman

Woody Harrelson is a treasure whom the Mill Valley Film Festival, according to founder/executive director Mark Fishkin, had been pursuing some years. They certainly lucked out with the eventual timing, however, since the festival’s tribute Thursday occurred amidst an unprecedented high-profile period for the busy but seldom spotlight-seeking actor.

He’s currently sitting atop box-office charts as the biggest marquee name in splatstick comedy Zombieland, in which he’s hilarious. He earned raves at Toronto last month playing a damaged, delusional loner who thinks he’s a superhero in Defendor, which Sony Classics picked up for distribution. He’s got a sizable part in the imminent 2012, Roland Emmerich’s latest world-destroying spectacular. And he’s certainly got some awards heat going for his powerful turn as a U.S. Army lifer delivering “casualty notification” to soldiers’ families in The Messenger, the excellent drama that is scenarist (Married Life, I’m Not There, Jesus’ Son) Oren Moverman’s directorial debut.

topics: actors, audiences, awards, bay area, directors, hollywood, independent film, mill valley film festival

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Walt Disney Family Museum opens in the Presidio

The Bay Area enhanced its reputation as an animation epicenter with the addition of the Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened Thursday. It would be difficult to conceive of Pixar or PDI without Walt Disney. And it’s the Bay Area’s reputation as a leader in the field, along with the fact that Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, resides in Napa, that made the Presidio’s Main Post the logical location for the new museum. “Modern day animation owes everything to Walt Disney,” says the museum’s founding executive director, Richard Benefield. “In every decade of his work, he was ahead of the curve technologically but he was first and foremost a storyteller. He used all those technological tools, the fine arts and music to help him tell stories.”

topics: animation, bay area, pdi, pixar

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SFFS and IndieGoGo integrate fiscal sponsorship with online fundraising

The San Francisco Film Society and IndieGoGo announced a partnership Monday that links the SFFS’s fiscal sponsorship program and Indiegogo.com’s online fundraising services. The agreement was conceived to expand the ability of SFFS-sponsored filmmakers to raise money and build a network online, and to streamline the process of fundraising for IndieGoGo filmmakers.

topics: directors, san francisco film society

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E-news you can use

The rapid adoption of e-newsletters by documentary filmmakers is the latest example of resourcefulness and efficiency among contemporary independents. These communiques boast a remarkable clarity of focus, even as the goal shifts over time from donations to theatrical or TV viewers to DVD customers. “A newsletter is a key piece of outreach, in large part because it allows you to create a public identity to your film,” says Ian Slattery, associate producer of the Emmy-nominated doc Soldiers of Conscience. “Your newsletter audience gets to follow the ‘story’ of your film: new awards, festivals, reviews, community partnerships, etc. This means that someone who had signed up for the newsletter on a whim on your website might realize that they are connected to a really important film that they now want to bring to screen at their school, community group, or place of worship.“

topics: activism, bay area, directors, distribution, diy, independent film, internet, social media

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Rachel Rosen returns to San Francisco Film Society

Rachel Rosen, who served as assistant director of programming at the San Francisco Film Society from 1994 to 2001, has rejoined the organization as director of programming, effective today. She succeeds Linda Blackaby, who held the post with distinction for the past eight years. Rosen was the director of programming of Film Independent (FIND) and the Los Angeles Film Festival since 2001, where she significantly increased attendance through innovative programming and a broader spotlight on foreign films.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, film festivals, hollywood, san francisco international film festival, toronto international film festival, world cinema

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Swedish muckrakers enlist local help

The Swedish filmmakers of the hot-button documentary Bananas! have retained Los Angeles attorney Lincoln Bandlow of Lathrop and Gage, a specialist in First Amendment cases, to defend them in a defamation suit brought by Dole Food Company, according to the filmmaker’s Oakland attorney Richard J. Lee, of Lee and Lawless. Director-producer Frederik Gertten and producer Margarete Jangard’s film, which screened twice in June in the Los Angeles Film Festival, documents a lawsuit filed in that city by Nicaraguan banana plantation workers accusing the multinational food company of hiding the risks of Nemagon, a pesticide known as DBCP that causes sterility in humans. Dole’s contention is that the film defames the company.

topics: bay area, documentary, environmental films, independent film, legal issues, political film

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Recession sidesteps theaters, up to a point

The economic downturn is hurting everyone, right? Yet Hollywood is on pace to break the box-office record it set last year. Likewise, the arthouses are doing steady business. Even concession sales at smaller theaters are generally level. So what’s going on out there?

Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff reports that in 18 of the first 19 weeks of 2009, the arthouse chain’s ticket sales were up from last year. Nonetheless, he says, "I don’t believe the industry is recession-proof. It’s all about the films. If there were 20 films in the marketplace no one wanted to see, they wouldn’t come to the movies. If we had great movies and we were priced out of the marketplace, people wouldn’t go either."

topics: art film, bay area, distribution, exhibition, independent film, international film, landmark theatres, red vic movie house, roxie

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SFIFF52: Golden Gate Awards uncorked, SFFS/KRF grant winner announced

The San Francisco International Film Festival handed out approximately $100,000 in cash prizes to filmmakers at its Golden Gate Awards ceremony last night at the Temple Nightclub-Prana Restaurant. It also announced the winner of the $35,000 San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant, the first in a cycle of grants that will infuse $3 million dollars into narrative feature filmmaking in the Bay Area in the next five years.

topics: awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, festivals, film arts foundation, funding, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF52: Live at the festival--"Summer" springs into action

The SF International’s Centerpiece film, 500 Days of Summer, packed a springtime Sundance Kabuki on a rainy-drizzly Saturday evening. Clouds gathered outside, but predictions of a warm and breezy evening indoors in a rom-com-world laced with humor and melancholy were dead on. Marc Webb, debuting as a feature filmmaker, demonstrated his chops as a music-video producer in a time-skewed entertainment packed with resonant music cues, from a kooky Hall and Oates-inspired dance sequence, to a karaoke version of the Pixies’ "Here Comes Your Man." The audience survived its bouts of tears and laughter to ask fairly excellent questions of director Webb and cast Zooey Deschanel/Joseph Gordon-Levitt afterward.

Gordon-Levitt, who plays a very in-love greeting card writer out of touch with the reality of the relationship he is or is not in, told the audience he was instructed to remain very "real." Said Deschanel, "Affect upon style equals affected style."

"This movie could have too easily become a cavalcade of whimsy," Webb added. "Comedy is more about humanity than a punch line."

topics: actors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, sundance, sundance film festival

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Film Society Awards Night--a wild ride with Ballard, Coppola, Redford and Toback

Francis Ford Coppola surprised the black-tie audience during Film Society Awards Night at the Westin St. Francis Hotel Thursday night by turning over the Founder’s Directing Award he received to longtime colleague Carroll Ballard.

"I would have never gotten to stage one in this business without Francis. He kept me from falling in the toilet at least a dozen times," said Ballard, who got his first solo directing job (The Black Stallion, 1979) from Coppola. Among Ballard’s other films are Wind (1992), Fly Away Home (1996) and Duma (2005).

"I’m touched, as you can imagine," Coppola told the audience, "because this is my hometown." The director replied to Ballard, "When you have the kind of god-given talent that Carroll does, you can never fall in the toilet."

topics: actors, authors, awards, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, documentary film, drama, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance, sundance film festival

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Beloved publicist Bill McLeod dies

William W. (Bill) McLeod, 59, one of the Bay Area’s most respected film publicists died at his home on March 29th, 2009, in San Rafael, California, of natural causes. McLeod’s first agency job was at Jack Wodell in 1980, and subsequently at the bay area agencies of DDB Needham, Evans Group, Publicis Dialog, Allied McDonald, and his most recent stint was at Terry Hines & Associates as Senior VP of Marketing & Promotions from 2003 to 2005.

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SF Film Society announces SF International Film Festival lineup

The San Francisco Film Society announced its full program for the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 23-May 7) Tuesday at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. SFFS Executive Director Graham Leggat called the Festival’s two weeks of programs—151 films from 55 countries—the "the jewel in the crown" of the Film Society, which now presents films year-round.

topics: actors, african american cinema, african cinema, animation, art, asian cinema, authors, avant-garde, bay area, castro theatre, critics, cult cinema, curators, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, dramatic films, environmental films, experimental film, f, festivals

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Sundance '09, breathless: award-winners, bloggers, more

A Sundance Film Festival that continued a move away from the circus-like marketing atmosphere that attached itself to the scene in the ’90s and back toward the basics of art-making celebrated a film that both looked back at the excesses of the ’90s and actively cautions us against returning to them in its awards night last Saturday. The festival’s theme was "storytime," and its Grand Jury Prize-winner in the Documentary category was Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public, which uses the topsy-turvy life of one early Internet tech visionary-turned-artist to tell the story of a media run amok. (It’s also Timoner’s second Documentary Grand Jury prize from the festival; she won in 2004 for the partially San Francisco-based tale-of-two-bands, Dig.)
The Dramatic Grand Jury Prize went to Lee Daniels’ Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire. And that film picked up two other awards as well: the Audience Award and a special acting prize for Mo’Nique. In the World Dramatic competition, Sebastian Silva’s Chilean gently class-conscious dramedy The Maid received the prize. More on the winners at Sundance. For more on the festival experience, continue reading the blog posts excerpted below, which were posted live on SF360.org’s Blogs tab during the course of the festival. For a few snapshots, see SF360’s Seen pages.

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, documentary film, genre films, hollywood, independent film, sundance film festival

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The Year in Film, 2008: Ideas, experiences, innovations

There’s certainly no shortage of ideas about the films and film trends of 2008 from the select crew of Bay Area filmmakers, critics and industry pros SF360.org polled for our Year-in-Film series. One respondent reasonably called for a device that would vaporize anyone who dared text message during a screening. Many asked for the end of shaky camerawork and comic book adaptations. Most had thoughts, fears or hopes about the oncoming era of digital distribution. The questions we asked were: What were the most/least auspicious trends of 2008? What was your favorite San Francisco-made film? Film-related event? Innovation? We also asked what films were most eagerly anticipated for 2009. As it turns out, there’s a lot to look forward to as we ring in the New Year.

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The Year in Film, 2008: Top unreleased films

Today’s feature collects the best films yet to fully arrive at a theater near you. It’s the second of our five-part Year-in-Film series, for which SF360.org polled filmmakers, critics and other industry professionals on the films of 2008. Some of today’s choices are from far-flung festivals, others were seen via one-off screenings. A few are films that already have distribution in place for 2009. All are worthy films clearly meriting more of our attention.

topics: actors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, directors, distribution, independent film

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SF DocFest announces program

SF Indiefest announced the program for its seventh San Francisco International Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) this past Tuesday at the Roxie, and it has the potential to be every bit as raucous as other festivals under the organization’s umbrella. As expected, dry social commentary is not the rule: The festival opens with Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, described as "a freewheeling personal journey inside the walls, history and mythology of Manhattan’s celebrated bohemian landmark, The Chelsea Hotel," featuring interviews with a few of the notables who’ve spent time there—Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper and R. Crumb—as well as re-enactments of some of the Chelsea’s most storied moments. The second opening feature is Kassim the Dream, about a Ugandan child-soldier-turned-U.S. boxing champion, directed by Kief Davidson. The party that follows is, it’s said, at a "secret, underground location" to be disclosed night-of at the Roxie to festival-goers.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary

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Toronto 2008: Slow food, fast festival

Every year, people grumble. Every year, someone points out how much worse it is than before. And every year, there are films that pull everyone out of the doldrums and guarantee it all continues. Welcome to the world of film festivals, and to this season’s Toronto International Film Festival in particular: bigger, brighter, more overwhelming, less intimate, and in the end, exactly as satisfying as the films each audience member happens to stumble into.

topics: art film, film festivals, film history, genre films, independent film, international film, world cinema

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Mill Valley announces 31st program

With enthusiasm for the state of independent filmmaking as well as activism in both the U.S. and the world, the Mill Valley Film Festival introduced its 31st program to the press Tuesday morning at Dolby Labs.

"There’s been a lot of discussion that the sky is falling in the independent film business," said Mill Valley’s Festival Director Mark Fishkin. "But from what we have seen this year, the state of independent film is very healthy."

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, experimental film, features, film festivals, filmmakers

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SFFS carries on Film Arts Foundation's legacy with new filmmaker services programs

The San Francisco Film Society, publisher of SF360.org, announced today at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas the launch of a new set of programs to support local independent filmmakers. Through an agreement signed with Film Arts Foundation (FAF), the programs carry on the traditions of FAF in the areas of professional education, career development, membership services, fiscal sponsorship, grantmaking, and the management of information resources.

Graham Leggat, Executive Director of SFFS, said he was pleased that "a new, vitaminized Film Society" is able to consolidate so much support for filmmaking under one roof, and spoke of the changes as a "transition of services" as opposed to a "merger" or "acquisition."

topics: bay area, directors, film history, filmmakers, independent film

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Flaherty diary: A week in the Age of Migration

Curating the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is, in a lot of ways, a film programmer’s dream—an invitation to spend a year building a week-long documentary and experimental film program with complete creative freedom, for a venerable institution, backed by an impossibly supportive staff and board. The Seminar is also a kind of social Petri dish that annually brings together a different programmer, a captive and engaged audience, and filmmakers to present and talk about their works, all in a secluded upstate New York setting where, for that week, everyone eats, lives, talks and breaths cinema. What happens during this period is the stuff of legend and lore and never what one expects.

The Flaherty is a place to explore—and explode—ideas, which is exactly what took place June 21-27, 2008, at Colgate College when I unveiled 40 films and videos to a ready, trusting, but critical audience. The theme: The Age of Migration.

topics: bay area, documentary, experimental film, features, film festivals, q&a

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"Full Grown Men" road trip reaches theaters

Not so long ago, theatrical distribution was the Holy Grail for independent filmmakers. But if you’ve been to an art house in the last six months or longer, or semi-regularly peruse the arts section of any newspaper or magazine (let alone the trades), you’re well aware that the box-office returns for foreign films, indies and documentaries are at a dangerously low ebb. So the winners who do score distribution in the current environment, like local filmmakers David Munro and Xandra Castleton’s Full Grown Men, which opens July 25 at the Lumiere, SF, experience something more akin to tempered enthusiasm than unadulterated joy. A theatrical run isn’t quite a hollow victory, but (with apologies to David Mamet) it increasingly feels less like a Cadillac El Dorado than a set of steak knives.

topics: bay area, comedy, directors, independent film

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Frameline announces program for 32nd SFLGBT Festival

The historically rich Castro Theatre—with its marquee recently revamped for the Milk biopic shoot—hosted Frameline’s announcements of its program for the annual San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Film Festival Tuesday morning. In its 32nd year, the festival runs June 19-29 at the Castro, Roxie and Victoria theaters in San Francisco, and the Elmwood in Berkeley. It opens with Affinity, based on Sarah Waters’ 1999 novel, a film Festival Artistic Director Michael Lumpkin described as a "same-sex bodice ripper." Its closing night film, the Canadian Breakfast with Scot, mixes homosexuality and hockey a story about raising a child. The Centerpiece screening at the festival is XXY, a piece of Argentinian New Cinema, which follows last year’s juried prize-winner Glue in pointing south toward a LGBT-filmmaking hotspot.

topics: film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, political film, queer cinema

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SF International's Golden Gate Awards: Alive and cooking

Food scents and film sensibilities mingled at a Golden Gate Awards evening that saw the San Francisco International moving away from a stage-presentation format into a pungent party atmosphere at the California Culinary Academy Wednesday night. With kitchen scenes as backdrop, filmmakers received and celebrated awards in a variety of categories while taste-testing from a broad buffet.

Yung Chang, with Up the Yangtze, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature, presented by storied documentarian Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk). He got the opportunity to thank two of his uncles, Wilson and Howard, who were present at the party, and asked the audience to not forget the 4 million people who’ve been relocated by the Three Gorges Dam Project. His involvement with the people he filmed has continued after shooting, and he told SF360.org that, after showing the film to one of his subjects, she said she "saw her fate" and decided to leave the quite possibly dead-end cruise-boat job she’d been working and go back to high school. The filmmakers are now helping her family financially.

topics: animation, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, features, san francisco international film festival, shorts

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"Cachao: Uno Más"

"You’re listening to Con Sabór," says KPFA DJ and Music Director Luis Medina. "I am going to be featuring an interview with one of the great masters of Latin Music, Israel "Cachao" Lopez. Cachao will be in concert tonight at Bimbo’s featuring the Cine Son All Stars with special guest Andy Garcia."

That’s how the documentary film Cachao: Uno Más opens. The Cachao tune, "Goza Mi Mambo" (Enjoy My Mambo), bubbles underneath as Luis talks on the radio and a visual panorama of San Francisco scenes—the Bay Bridge, ships, seagulls, cable cars, Muni, Victorians, and the Transamerica pyramid—all collage together.

Cachao: Uno Más gets its premiere as part of the 51st San Francisco Film Festival on Monday, April 28, at the Sundance Kabuki. It comes a few weeks after the passing on March 22, 2008, of the acclaimed bassist and Cuban music innovator at age 89 in Coral Cables, Florida. Now, what was to be a living celebration of his artistic work turns into a memorial mass paying homage to his musicality and accomplishments.

topics: documentary, documentary film institute, music, san francisco international film festival, san francisco state

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SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

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Eran Kolirin and "The Band's Visit"

Eran Kolirin is an Israeli director who made a comedy to try to understand why he feels the kind of pain that persists after someone’s arm is cut off. He is still struggling to explain just why he made a film about an Egyptian military band stranded in an Israeli desert even after “The Band’s Visit” took both Best Director and Best Screenplay prize at last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and has won raves at festivals all over the world.

topics: arab cinema