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

Insider

Locally made "Hats Off" finds fascination in 93-years-young actress

By Lynn Rapoport

The things we know—or think we know—about the lives and loves of Hollywood’s celebrity class are disturbing to ponder. Jennifer Aniston’s bad luck with men. Brad and Angelina’s fertility rites. Will Smith’s religious affiliations, or lack thereof—none of it’s really any of our business, but all it takes is a grocery store checkout line or a treadmill stint at the gym to get the highlights and low points in the lives of the red carpet royalty. True, it’s mostly rumor, surmise, conjecture, and fabrication, but leaving those quibbles aside, what, exactly, is it that makes Will Smith’s cushioned $20-mil-a-pic existence more curious and scrutiny-worthy than that of any of the hundreds of walk-ons, extras, and bit part players who have populated his films?
While you’re standing in line at the supermarket pondering that question—and helplessly reaching for the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad of The Hills on the cover—somewhere in New York City one of those walk-ons, a 93-year-old woman named Mimi Weddell, is navigating the cramped apartment she shares with her daughter and son, perusing a jaw-dropping collection of hats for the perfect complement to her Elizabeth Arden-styled coiffure, and preparing for one more in a decades-long series of theatrical and commercial auditions.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, sffs screen