In Production

Connie Field readies magnum opus on anti-apartheid movement

By any measure, the long-awaited release of Have You Heard from Johannesburg? shapes up to be one of the major documentary events of 2010. Connie Field’s massive eight-and-a-half-hour series about the global human rights campaign that impelled South Africa to abolish apartheid in the early ’90s is beyond ambitious, encompassing 135 interviews spanning five continents and acres of archival footage from a vast array of sources. Now, maybe every doc maker has a crisis of confidence somewhere in the course of his or her project, but Field set herself up for a double scoop of nail-biting moments. “I would wake up in the middle of the night asking myself, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’” the East Bay filmmaker confides. I believe that is what is called a rhetorical question.

topics: activism, african cinema, bay area, cinematography, digital filmmaking, directors, distribution, diy, documentary

Experience

Tangerine dreams: Cinémathèque de Tanger showcases Morocco

No matter what you’ve heard about Tangier—that it’s a town of hustlers, bandits and drugs, or is a mecca for artists and writers from Eugene Delacroix to Henri Matisse to Jean Genet—the strange thing may be that you have heard of it at all. A town of 900,000 on the very northern tip of Africa, only 7 miles from Spain, it is neither the political nor economic capitol of any country nor the site of any major disasters. Yet it’s created an identity as a great fount of stories and light. The newest development in its narrative is that it now has its own independent cinema, the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which opened in 2007. This young institution has curated Another Border, a showcase of its archives on view at the Pacific Film Archive and closing October 1.

topics: activism, african cinema, critics, diy, documentary, pacific film archive, world cinema

Experience

Women Make Movies Film Festival highlights Kim Longinotto

At a panel during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, film critics were asked to offer a note of hope on a film landscape often characterized as lacking—and B. Ruby Rich responded with enthusiastic praise for a filmmaker she called "unheralded" and "incredibly sensitive," Kim Longinotto. "When more and more documentaries seem to follow either individual pathologies or people who are already famous," Rich said, "it’s really important to see [Longinotto] model looking very deeply into a culture—and extraordinary women in that culture—in a way that’s actually riveting.”

Though not a household name, Longinotto has certainly been getting attention: Her films played at the Pacific Film Archive in 2006; she won the Sundance World Cinema Jury Prize for Rough Aunties this past year; and, beginning this Friday, is under the spotlight at the Women Make Movies Film Festival taking place at the Roxie Theater, which runs through September 3.

topics: activism, african cinema, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, independent film, iranian cinema, political film, women, women filmmakers, world cinema

Critic's Notebook

Lee Isaac Chung on "Munyurangabo" and the language of film

Early Hungarian film theoretician Béla Bálazs, like many others witnessing the transition from silent films to "talkies," saw cinema as a wordless language, or a visual one. Bálazs was disturbed by the coming of sound and speech, viewing it as a second Tower of Babel that would destroy the universality of cinema. Yet, 85 years later, despite newspaper headlines that would make you believe we are all being ripped apart, cinema— through gestures, emotions, and empathy—remains a universal language.

One can’t help but think about the concept of cinematic language, as well as spoken language, when talking with filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. Prior to making Munyurangabo —which is set in present-day rural Rwanda, and the first film in the Kinyarwandan language—Chung spent 3 months in China without a translator making a film. He also has created shorts in different languages, and now has his sights on Germany for a future project. The transparency of divisions through spoken language is resonant in his work.

[Editor’s note: Munyurangabo plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki through June 18.]

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

Review

An odd couple for new times in "Goodbye Solo"

While short-attention-span editing, comic book-derived content and crass commercialism have been dumb-sizing audiences for years, a few U.S. filmmakers are now conspicuously moving in the opposite direction entirely. And some viewers are actually welcoming the change. Their box-office numbers might not underwrite much more than the craft service, driver and personal assistant budgets on the average CGI-dominated Hollywood sequel, but movies by Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), Thomas McCarthy (The Visitor) and even those mumblecore types have won more than just critical acclaim. They seem to speak to audiences who not only respond to intimate, unflashy character studies of very ordinary people, but seem outright relieved by an aesthetic whose pacing doesn’t risk triggering an epileptic attack.

One of the newest and most notable practitioners of this stripped-down filmic and narrative style is Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian American filmmaker whose features Man Push Cart and Chop Shop were minimalist slices of modern working-class life in a classic neorealist tradition, authentic and almost invisibly crafted. His latest prompted kingmaker Roger Ebert to pronounce Bahrani “the new great American director” a couple weeks ago.

topics: actors, african american cinema, african cinema, directors, diy, hollywood, independent film, world cinema

Report

SF Film Society announces SF International Film Festival lineup

The San Francisco Film Society announced its full program for the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 23-May 7) Tuesday at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. SFFS Executive Director Graham Leggat called the Festival’s two weeks of programs—151 films from 55 countries—the "the jewel in the crown" of the Film Society, which now presents films year-round.

topics: actors, african american cinema, african cinema, animation, art, asian cinema, authors, avant-garde, bay area, castro theatre, critics, cult cinema, curators, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, dramatic films, environmental films, experimental film, f, festivals

Experience

The essay film in action

The term "essay film" has a protean quality, shifting shape as quickly as the films that it usually designates. The essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, and its importance stemmed from its engagement with history, and its challenge to the dominant forms of telling history. The essay film has often lived on the margins, but its importance, then as now, is tied not to its position inside or outside of the power structure, but to its potential for questioning that power. The Pacific Film Archive’s current series of "essay films," a collection of diverse work, offers the viewer an opportunity to adapt to the peculiar searching, questioning tone of these films.

“The Way of the Termite: The Essay in Cinema” is a traveling series curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, a member of the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Luc Godard in the early ’70s, and the maker of several later essayistic films on his own. The series takes its title from Manny Farber’s famous division between “termite art” and “white elephant art," made in an essay that Gorin cites in his program notes. He aligns film essayists with termite artists, eating through the boundaries that would contain them.

topics: african cinema, authors, avant-garde, bay area, french cinema, independent film, world cinema