Experience

"The Greatest Year in Film" turns 70 at the Castro

By Dennis Harvey

What was the best year ever for painting? Music? Literature? Any answers would be arbitrary at worst, debatable at best—the truth being, of course, that these art forms are just too vast, historied and changeable for the question to be useful at all.

Yet ask when was the best year for movies (Hollywood movies, that is), and there is actually a consensus so widespread it’s gone from opinion to virtual fact. That year would be 1939, when for whatever reasons—some explicable, others just accidents of timing—Hollywood’s “golden age” went platinum, delivering so many classic features it still beggars belief they all arrived in such close proximity.

topics: actors, castro theatre, exhibition, genre films, hollywood, oscars

In Production

The horror, the horror: ‘Tweaker With an Axe’

By Michael Fox

Flynn Witmeyer’s debut feature sports a title you’d expect to see on a one-sheet mockup at the market in Cannes or a grindhouse marquee on Market St. back in the day. Tweaker With an Axe is the epitome of high concept, but its cast of gay and lesbian characters sets it apart from the pack of comedic suspense thrillers. Or does it? “The characters’ sexuality isn’t part of the story,” Witmeyer says. “They just happen to be gay and lesbian. That’s one of our interests in doing this film. Our interest is to make genre films—horror or sci-fi or fantasy—that incorporate gay and lesbian characters. We want to see more representation of gay and lesbian characters in cinema.”

topics: actors, bay area, diy, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, horror

The Edit Room

Documentary story structures that funders love

By Karen Everett

We all know an editor who needs to get out of the edit room more often. (I just have to look in the mirror.) I recently had the delightful and heady experience of being on the other side of the fundraising table, giving the thumbs up or down to a slew of documentary directors seeking money for their works-in-progress.

topics: bay area, diy, documentary, hbo, how-to, itvs, sundance

Platform

Richard Levien, from "Immersion" to "La Migra"

By Jennifer Preissel

New Zealand transplant Richard Levien, a longstanding fixture of the San Francisco indie film community, has until recently been known primarily as an editor. That changed forever during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival when Levien’s directorial debut Immersion won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Short. Shortly thereafter, Levien was named as the first recipient of a $35,000 award from the first SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant for the script development of what will be his first narrative feature, La Migra. Both projects focus on the tribulations of immigrant children trying to live normal lives in the United States in the face of stigmatization, xenophobia and an often-vindictive legal code.

topics: actors, bay area, children's issues, digital filmmaking, diy, drama, exhibitions, film festivals, funding, immigration, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

Review

Suspense, stillness, and beauty in "Three Monkeys"

By Dennis Harvey

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director prize at Cannes last year for Three Monkeys—which opens on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Friday—it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. He’d been winning awards since his first feature (1997’s Kasaba a.k.a. Small Town), including prior Cannes ones for Distant (2002) and Climates (2006), while Clouds of May (1999) was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.

That’s pretty heady achievement for a 50-year-old director who’s only worked in film since 1995 (debuting with the short Koza), and whose five features to date haven’t yet fully distracted him from his other creative pursuit as a photographer. (It’s a craft that’s very much present in the painstaking beauty of his films’ typically stationary shots.)

topics: directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema