North Korea, cataloged: In a festival filled with archival treasures, a 2009 film about the North Korean women's national soccer team, 'Hana, Dul, Sed....', reminds us how important it is to preserve rare contemporary images for the future. (Photo courtesy SFIAAFF)
SF International Asian American Film Festival Visits the Archives
By Adam Hartzell
A theme that emerged in this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) was the importance of archives in the film world. The existence of film archives and restoration facilities all have a part to play in the films of Lino Brocka (who received retrospective treatment in the fest), Kim Ki-young’s 1960s classic The Housemaid, Ruby Yang’s documentary A Moment in Time (about Chinese American movie houses of old San Francisco), documentaries such as Aoki and State of Aloha that make heavy use of archival footage to tell their non-fiction narratives, and even an Austrian director’s film about representatives of the North Korean women’s soccer team, Hana, Dul, Sed….
topics: activism, asian american cinema, asian cinema, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, blogs, sf international asian american film festival
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Mother from another planet: Bong Joon-ho's 'Mother' offers a host of new mixed-genre elements. (Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures)
Bong Joon-ho's Latest, 'Mother', Pleases
By Dennis Harvey
Already one of the heroes of South Korean cinema’s recent creative renaissance, Bong Joon-ho had an international success well beyond arthouse parameters with 2006’s The Host. That delightfully old-fashioned (albeit with up-to-the-moment CGI effects) sci-fi monster movie with a distinct local flavor managed what so many similar Hollywood exercises fail to do: Deliver thrills and spectacle without stinting on character involvement, social commentary, humor or even poignancy.
topics: actors, asian cinema, directors, genre films, world cinema
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Social Media and Storytelling
By Fernanda Rossi
Dear Doc Doctor: All this new social media takes time. Lots of time. In the end, will my Facebook posts, tweets or blog entries help me with the story I’m trying to tell? Or is it just more promotional work I have to do to keep the film going? I want to be a filmmaker not an Internet nerd.
topics: activism, authors, diy, documentary, women filmmakers
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Instruments of change: A new documentary looks at how the Louisville Orchestra rose to prominence more than a half century ago. (Photo courtesy filmmaker)
Hiler and Brown's ‘Music’ Salutes Symphonic Visionary
By Michael Fox
The so-called culture war is over, and the reactionaries have won. I recall with nostalgia Jesse Helms’ condemnation of the NEA for funding Marlon Riggs’ queer-centric Tongues Untied, and the late East Bay filmmaker’s blisteringly eloquent response. Such public right-wing remonstrations are no longer necessary, for the simple reason that 30 years of overt and covert pressure have cast a permanent chill on Federal and state arts organizations. I daresay the anti-intellectual denigration of culture and higher education, a cornerstone of the Reagan-Bush-Bush Era, is an unacknowledged factor in the current decimation of the public university system (which is conveniently blamed on the Great Recession). In this climate, Jerome Hiler and Owsley Brown III’s Music Makes a City is nothing short of a revelation. Now in its finishing stages, the documentary revisits the remarkable mid-century revival of Louisville, Kentucky, in the wake of the Great Flood of 1937.
topics: activism, composers, directors, documentary, music
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Palestinian filmmaking by way of SF: Director Muayad offers advice to actress Hanin Tarabiya on set in Jerusalem. (Photo courtesy Christian Bruno)
Red Vic Reprising 'Lesh Sabreen?'
By Robert Avila
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
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