Report

Flaherty diary: A week in the Age of Migration

By Chi-hui Yang

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

Report

"Full Grown Men" road trip reaches theaters

By Michael Fox

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

Found

You, the Man, and "CSNY: Deja Vu"

By Dennis Harvey

"Shut up and sing!" has been the historied catcall—sometimes less politely worded—for audiences who are fans of a particular artist’s music but take umbrage when their onstage patter gets a little "too political." It was even used as the title of a documentary about the Dixie Chicks, whose mouthing off about our current President famously got them kicked off conservative-leaning country radio.

It’s just possible, however, that no one has yet hurled that epithet at Neil Young, country-, bluegrass- and heavy-rock-influenced as his music has often been. I mean, what could they be surprised by? From "Ohio" (about the Kent State killings of student protestors) to "This Note’s For You" (a catchy riposte to rock’s product-endorsing, corporate-concert-sponsoring nature) and beyond, Neil has always aimed a cranky finger at The Man.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, political film, sundance kabuki

Take Two

Arghya Basu evokes the mystical and everyday in "A Listener's Tale"

By Max Goldberg

If the Castro Theatre is the church of San Francisco cinephilia, then the Yerba Buena screening room is surely its laboratory—it’s only too fitting that leading curator Joel Shepard is spotlighting the idiosyncratic programming voices of five San Francisco independents for the museum’s upcoming Bay Area Now exhibition. Besides rounding up important international features (e.g. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) and oddball retrospectives (e.g. Phil Chambliss: Arkansas Auteur), Shepard also has a penchant for screening otherwise unhyped films which do not hew to typical genre norms. A case in point is A Listener’s Tale, a lovely if unclassifiable mixture of ethnography and poetic reverie which screened at last winter’s Rotterdam Film Festival.

In spite of the earnest attempts of academic critics to problematize both the conception and consumption of filmed representations of indigenous "others," filmmakers have been drawn to exotic cultures and landscapes since the Lumière Brothers first introduced lightweight cameras.

topics: bay area, documentary, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Platform

Catherine Breillat unveils "The Last Mistress"

By Michael Fox

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