Insider

Inside the Telluride Film Festival

By Hilary Hart

The Telluride Film Festival thrives on trust: Film lovers and filmmakers travel to this remote corner of Colorado from great distances and at considerable expense on blind faith—because the TFF program is a closely guarded secret until the day that the festival opens. For 35 years, the extended festival family of pass holders, filmmakers, staffers and supporters has convened on Labor Day weekend knowing that their expectations of seeing a well-curated selection of world cinema, past and present, from Hollywood to Romania to Senegal to South Korea, will be exceeded. (Surely no one arrived in town dreaming that this year’s tributees would be actress Jean Simmons and directors David Fincher and Jan Troell.)

This is my 20th TFF; I was here three times as a pass holder, and, for the past 17 years, I’ve come here as a volunteer staffer. I’m one of many: The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring. For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a “schlepper," most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he’s stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he’s acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, “There was no way I wasn’t gong to Telluride. I love working (here).”

[Editor’s note: What follows is the TFF lineup, which was announced yesterday and posted in "News" on SF360.org.]

topics: animation, directors, documentary, exhibitions, features, international film, telluride film festival

Experience

Mountainclimbing in the Tenderloin

By Rob Nilsson

"A maverick Bay Area filmmaker since his involvement in the Cine Manifest collective starting in the early ’70s, Rob Nilsson was a visible name in the larger Amerindie world during its formative years, with such titles as Northern Lights and Heat and Sunlight," writes Dennis Harvey. "For the last 15 years or so, however, he’s devoted most of his time to one project, albeit a massive one: The ’9@Night’ series, a nine-feature cycle of loosely interwoven tales largely about life in San Francisco’s undersides, improvised and acted by a mix of professional actors and those trained via Nilsson’s Tenderloin workshop program. While individual Night films have premiered at film festivals (many at Mill Valley’s) over recent years, only now has this alternately raw and stylized, grandly ambitious series been available to view in its entirety." With ’9@Night’ ready to play in full at several venues Bay Area-wide (the Roxie and Smith Rafael will be showing all titles, while select screenings are coming to the Parkway and Cerrito), SF360.org asked this veteran indie auteur for his thoughts, which he gamely and intelligently offers here.

topics: bay area, directors, features, independent film

Insider

"Days and Clouds" finds changes in the weather

By Dennis Harvey

It’s said those who’ve never known it think love is the key to happiness; the poor know it is money. Those who espouse the more selfless kind of love are either monks or have never known real, suffocating, no-visible-way-out poverty. Even a drop from one economic strata to another that might still be positively luxurious in the Third World can cause serious anxiety or worse in the First.

Particularly now, with the economy (are we past that “Don’t call it a recession” stage yet?) having displaced terrorism and the war in Iraq as Americans’ biggest worry, it gives pause to realize how seldom our popular entertainment deals at all with that which so often concerns us most. Namely, why are we working harder, yet it keeps getting harder to make ends meet? The U.S. bedrock is supposed to be its middle class—yet that population bulk has slipped around on less-than-terra firma lately while the rich/poor gap widens, tipping more and more working-class folk increasingly toward a future as The New Poor.

topics: italian cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

In Production

A missing Fishbone and the pitfalls of marriage

By Michael Fox

One of the more encouraging trends in documentary these days is the eagerness of filmmakers to twist, shake, rattle and roll that most clichéd of genres, the rock doc. Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler’s portrait of the venerable Southern California punk-funk outfit Fishbone, Everyday Sunshine, aims to blend history, performance and character study into an acutely dramatic, if not radical, brew. "When you’re doing any sort of biography, it’s kind of difficult to veer too much off the path of the traditional music documentary," Metzler concedes. "That said, we’ve been focused on making this film not a VH-1 ‘Behind the Music’ doc but something along the lines of Crumb. A portrait of the artist with their own quirky sensibility."

Anderson introduced Metzler to Fishbone’s music, as well as the idea of making a movie about the band, and the San Francisco duo began filming two years ago. Anderson was the outreach coordinator for The Real Dirt on Farmer John, and Metzler was making the festival rounds with (Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (co-directed with Jeff Springer, who’s editing Everyday Sunshine). They landed a wild catch in the Fishbone saga, even by rock’n‘roll standards.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, features, music, women filmmakers

Insider

Film Arts education program evolves with SFFS partnership

By Chris Wiggum

"Film Arts was started by a handful of people around a flatbed editor," says Michael A. Behrens, Filmmaker Education Manager for Film Arts Foundation, which now presents its filmmaker education classes, workshops and seminars in partnership with the San Francisco Film Society, publisher of SF360.org. "And then they made that highly expensive piece of equipment available to a larger number of people."

"Now," he says, "you can buy a $500 camera and you’re on the street making a movie." Times have changed—which is why Behrens frequently uses the word "evolution" when it comes to his vision of the filmmaker education program.

Behrens, energized by the Film Society’s recent adoption of a suite of filmmaker services previously offered by Film Arts, is finalizing a hearty schedule of classes aimed at filmmakers, to debut in mid-October.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, film arts foundation, filmmakers, san francisco film society