Perhaps party? A night in pictures

By Laura Irvine

The digital camera revolution seemed to overtake opening night of the SF International Film Festival at moments, as an army of citizen bloggers, paparazzi, and scribes like me gathered up as much inspiration and oddity as we could find. We offer a sampling here, courtesy the SF International’s in-house photographers Pamela Gentile and Tommy Lau, and SF360’s roving eye, Laura Irvine.

A film about film for lovers of film
The spotlight hits “Perhaps Love” director Peter Ho-Sun Chan and San Francisco International Film Festival’s Graham Leggat as they introduce the first Hong Kong film to open the festival in its 49 years, a film as much about movies as love, music, dance, or geography.

China’s first musical in how many years?
Director Peter Ho-Sun Chan discussed making his highly referenced Chinese musical by way of Hollywood (his favorite films are oldies) and Bollywood (his choreographer was the highly prized Farah Khan) before bringing it back to China. A skeptical yet sentimental narrative of personal and professional reinvention, “Perhaps Love,” Chan said, was a timely story for China now, and would have worked for ’50s-60s Japan, ’70s Hong Kong, or ’80s Taiwan.

Almost a love story
Director Peter Ho-Sun Chan got at least one loud clap from a member of the audience when he stated he did not believe in true love.

Cirque du SF
A lion-dancer,

stilt-walker,

cube dancer,

and audience dancers whoop it up as the crowd gets happy on SKYY Vodka.

Is it…Satan?
Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, makers of “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey,” have Ronnie James Dio claim in their film that he first popularized the devil horns gesture, whose origins he traces to…his Catholic grandmother, not the devil. As Gene Simmons also knows, it also makes a party all the more festive.

Civic centered
Gavin Newsom and Charlotte Maillard Shultz arrive at the Castro Theatre in style for “Perhaps Love.”

04.22.2006