The 6th Screen

What's fair is not foul

By Hannah Eaves

SF360.org editor’s note: This is the first installment of a new, monthly column by filmmaker and journalist Hannah Eaves on local digital media.

Earlier this month the Center for Social Media (CSM) and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) at American University released a report called Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video or, as it was immediately zeitgeisted by boingboing*, "HOWTO Make online videos without getting sued." For techies in the online world, "fair use," Creative Commons and net neutrality occupy the same level of heaven as bizarre sea creatures, steampunk gadgets and cryptozoology. But the paper also makes a very handy tool for ordinary Joes experimenting in the new creative freak zone of User Generated Content.

topics: art, digital filmmaking, the web

Experience

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

By Lynn Rapoport

In a small elementary school in Kafr Kara, an Arab village in central Israel, two teachers stand at the front of a classroom to deliver the day’s lesson. The topic is independence—for half the class. For the other half, it’s catastrophe. At least, that’s how the teachers, one Jewish, one Arab, seem to see it, and a classroom of small human sponges waits to see who will get the last word.

It’s not exactly just another day at Bridge over the Wadi, a bilingual, bicultural Jewish-Arab school that is one of half a handful in existence. Rather, it’s the anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state, known as Independence Day to Israelis and to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But how to tell a coherent story to children when narrating from opposing points of view is a question that surfaces repeatedly in the documentary Bridge over the Wadi, which screens in this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Directed, written, and produced by the sibling filmmaking team of Barak and Tomer Heymann — a selection of whose films are highlighted this year in a festival tribute — Bridge follows the school, located in the Wadi Ara (wadi is Arabic for "valley"), through its first shaky year of existence in 2004 and 2005.

topics: jewish cinema

In Production

Putting flash to mustache, plus: Swenson's Salton Sea adventures

By Michael Fox

SF360.org editor’s note: This is the first edition of Michael Fox’s "In Production" column on Bay Area filmmaking, which will be appearing every other week in SF360.org.

Director’s Manual, Lesson 1: The idea for a film can literally strike anywhere. Laura Lukitsch was chilling at a rest stop in Arizona in 2003, en route to her sister’s wedding in New Mexico, when a busload of men on their way to the World Beard and Mustache Championships pulled in. She took out her new camera—which she was still learning to use—and discovered it had magical magnetic properties. "They came up to me and gave me an interview because it was the biggest camera there," the San Francisco filmmaker said with a chuckle the other day on the phone. When Lukitsch showed the sequence to family and friends, she got an unexpectedly passionate response. "Guys wanted to buy the footage," she recalled. "There was more to this than meets the eye. It seemed to bring up issues of family, of tradition, of religion, even male bonding."

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, documentary

Found

Guy Maddin talks about movies, writing, his writing about movies, and the allure of Ann Savage and the Osmonds

By Johnny Ray Huston

SF360.org editor’s note: On the occasion of the opening of My Winnipeg this Friday in Bay Area theaters, we’re re-running an entertaining interview Johnny Ray Huston, arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, conducted for us with Maddin two years ago, when Maddin was the recipient of a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He also appeared at the Festival this past spring with My Winnipeg, and was back in town this month doing a live presentation for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Due to brilliant works such as his 2001 short ‘The Heart of the World,’ GuyMaddin is a more-than-worthy choice for the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, but I’d like to suggest that he also deserves praise for his writings about film. For example, ‘Death in Winnipeg,’ his account of time spent on the set of a recent TV movie about the Osmond family, is one of the best and funniest pieces of journalism my bloodshot eyes and addled brain have beheld in the past decade. That article and other scribblings by Maddin can be found in ‘From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings,’ a beautifully-designed tome featuring hyper-compressed descriptive wit that is signature Maddin. In conjunction with Maddin’s SF visit, I recently spoke to him about his second career as a film writer, as well as other topics.

topics: authors, cult cinema, directors, san francisco international film festival, screenwriting, silent film

Platform

Kibitzing with S.F. Jewish Film Festival's Stein and Fishman

By Michael Fox

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has never, in its 28 years, taken the path of least resistance. To cite the most obvious example, a hallmark of the annual program is the inclusion of several films critical of Israel. (That these movies are almost always produced by Israeli filmmakers, and financed by government grants, is irrelevant to the fest’s critics.) This year’s contrarian act is increasing the number of films and screenings in the face of a spiraling economy. The expanded lineup includes spotlights on Italian Jews During Fascism and Diversity In Israel (a multicultural, gay-straight portrait of Israel on its 60h anniversary), along with salutes to doc-making brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann and home-movie excavator par excellence Péter Forgács. The SFJFF opens Thursday with Strangers, Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv’s lusty, improvised tale of an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman hooking up in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, and continues through Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre. The lineup, including the Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Rafael schedules, is at SFJFF’s website. Executive director Peter Stein and program director Nancy Fishman spilled the beans in their office in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

topics: directors, documentary, film festivals, filmmakers, independent film, jewish cinema