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SFIFF51: Barry Jenkins' San Francisco story

Two young, attractive African Americans, a man and a woman, wake up in a strange house in a nice San Francisco neighborhood, avoid each other as they dress and slip out the front door in awkward silence. But Micah’s not ready to let go of Jo’. So begins Barry Jenkins’s indie debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, a graceful, poignant and altogether marvelous film about fleeting urban connections, black identity and invisibility, cultural adventures and this gentrified city’s lost soul. Jenkins studied film production at Florida State University before heading to the industry town of LA. He soon relocated to San Francisco, and with stunning alacrity wrote, shot and completed Medicine for Melancholy. Jenkins was screening the movie at a Florida festival prior to its upcoming local premiere in the San Francisco International Film Festival, so we conducted the following pithy interview via email.

SF360.org has been running a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs through May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, independent film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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SFIFF51: California Newsreel at 40

What will you do on your 40th anniversary? If you’re California Newsreel, you’ll continue to do the same as you always have: producing and distributing film and video as a means of social change. Founded in 1968, the San Francisco-based Newsreel is the oldest nonprofit, social-issue documentary film center in the United States, with a library that includes Made in L.A. (Hecho en Los Angeles), which follows three Latina garment workers through a groundbreaking lawsuit and consumer boycott; This is Nollywood, an examination of the technical, economic, and social infrastructure of Nigeria’s booming film industry; and The Other Europe, which (among other stories) looks at the 2004 deaths within a group of illegal Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, England — the worst industrial accident in Britain in 25 years.

How have audiences, and Newsreel itself, changed over the years? California Newsreel principal Cornelius Moore sat down with SF360 via email and gave his thoughts on the state of the company, film’s role as an instrument of social change, and Newsreel’s status on MySpace.

The 51st S.F. International Film Festival celebrates California Newsreel’s 40th with a panel on Bay Area political documentary May 3, and screens the CA Newsreel film Faubourg Tremé May 3, 6, and 7.

topics: african american cinema, african cinema, bay area, directors, distributors, documentary, political film, san francisco, world cinema

Insider

SFIFF51: Dawn Logsdon, on new hope in an old neighborhood, "Faubourg Tremé"

One giant storm and the government malfeasance that followed transformed New Orleans into a metanym, but directors Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie dig through the rubble of the horrific disaster to find a deeper, richer history of one particular New Orleans neighborhood. It’s a storyline that, if fully appreciated and reappropriated, could not only help bolster a city rebuilding itself, but remind the rest of us why it’s so important that the ideas of this city live on. Faubourg Tremé, now better known as the Sixth Ward, was home to pre-Civil Rights-era liberty for African Americans and fertile ground for political activism as well as music and literary life. Hogsdon, who grew up in New Orleans but has transplanted to the Bay Area, exchanged notes on the making of the movie via email with SF360.org before the film’s West Coast premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, san francisco international film festival