Platform

Alex Gibney, going "Gonzo"

[Editor’s note: This interview first appeared in SF360.org during the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson played on closing night.]

It’s a good time to be Alex Gibney.

We met this year over egg rolls at a small upstairs bistro on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, where Gibney’s bio-doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson premiered. It was Tuesday, in late-January. That morning Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (SFIFF 2005) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary in 2006, had learned that Taxi to the Darkside, his documentary murder mystery that examines the death of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, had been nominated for an Academy Award. (It eventually won.) Another documentary he’d executive produced, No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, had also been nominated for Best Doc.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, q&a

Report

SF International's Golden Gate Awards: Alive and cooking

Food scents and film sensibilities mingled at a Golden Gate Awards evening that saw the San Francisco International moving away from a stage-presentation format into a pungent party atmosphere at the California Culinary Academy Wednesday night. With kitchen scenes as backdrop, filmmakers received and celebrated awards in a variety of categories while taste-testing from a broad buffet.

Yung Chang, with Up the Yangtze, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature, presented by storied documentarian Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk). He got the opportunity to thank two of his uncles, Wilson and Howard, who were present at the party, and asked the audience to not forget the 4 million people who’ve been relocated by the Three Gorges Dam Project. His involvement with the people he filmed has continued after shooting, and he told SF360.org that, after showing the film to one of his subjects, she said she "saw her fate" and decided to leave the quite possibly dead-end cruise-boat job she’d been working and go back to high school. The filmmakers are now helping her family financially.

topics: animation, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, features, san francisco international film festival, shorts

Diary

Capelle on Composers: Back to Back

Back to music.

I have some friends that were in a Sub Pop band that pre-dated Nirvana. They were known as the Dwarves. Their music is and was a snotty suburban unholy mixture of the Sonics, the Orlons, the Stooges and a vat of amphetamines. Their record covers usually featured midgets and half-naked woman covered in either blood or some sort of Nestle syrup of some sort. Here is one of their lines.

[Editor’s note: For the San Francisco International’s 51st edition, SF360.org has asked Bay Area musician/composer/cineaste Marc Capelle to blog his thoughts on movies, music, and the films showing in the Festival. This is the third of three installments.]

topics: authors, awards, bay area, cult cinema, genre films, music, san francisco international film festival

Q&A

Gibney going "Gonzo," part two

Editor’s note: This is the 2nd of two installments of Cathleen Rountree’s interview with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which closes the San Francisco International Film Festival Thursday.

SF360.org: Do you think Thompson has a lasting legacy? I mean in the sense that there aren’t many people practicing his art form now.

Gibney: The thing for any writer is that you have to find your own voice. So people imitate Hunter Thompson at their peril, because that was Hunter’s voice, not Writer X’s voice. You know, there’s a little bit of Hunter Thompson in someone like Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. But there’s a legacy to Hunter Thompson, or to me the legacy should be: what’s wrong with breaking the rules? We need a few more people who break the rules, but to break them carefully. What did Bob Dylan say: "To live outside the law you must be honest." Because sometimes the people in power don’t play within the rules and, worse, they manipulate the rules against those who are trying to speak truth to power.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, san francisco international film festival

The List

SFIAAFF's winners

Boys will be boys, or b-boys, if you look at the winners of the 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, announced last night, the final SF night for the annual SFIAAFF. Winners of the Narrative Feature Jury Prize (a tie with Santa Mesa), as well as Best Documentary, were b-boy movies, Always Be Boys and Planet B-Boy, respectively. While breakdancing in the U.S. has certainly seen better days (a U.S. team has not won the international “Battle of the Year” since 1998), the art has been taken up with a vengeance by Asians, with Korean teams a particularly dominant force. Last night, they came up on top again. The complete list of awardees, in case you missed it live, is here at SF360. The Festival moves to San Jose March 21-23.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, pacific film archive, sundance kabuki

15 docs on the Oscar short list

Fifteen documentary films have been selected for the "short list" of titles competing in the Best Documentary Feature category at the 80th Academy Awards, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Documentary Branch screening committee viewed the eligible documentaries in a preliminary round of screenings, according to AMPAS, and branch members will now select the five 2007 nominees from among the 15 titles on this shortlist.

[SF360.org Editor’s note: This article appeared originally in indieWIRE on Nov. 19, 2007.]

The full list is:
1. "Autism: The Musical," directed by Tricia Regan
2. "Body of War," directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro
3. "For The Bible Tells Me So," directed by Daniel G. Karslake
4. "Lake of Fire," directed by Tony Kaye
5. "Nanking," directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman
6. "No End in Sight," directed by Charles Ferguson
7. "Operation Homecoming – Writing the Wartime Experience," directed by Richard Robbins
8. "Please Vote For Me," directed by Wejun Chen
9. "The Price of Sugar," directed by Bill Haney
10. "A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman," directed by Peter Raymont
11. "The Rape of Europa," directed by Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen
12. "Sicko," directed by Michael Moore
13. "Taxi to the Dark Side," directed by Alex Gibney
14. "War/Dance," directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine
15. "White Light/Black Rain," directed by Steven Okazaki
Nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 and the Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2007 will be presented on Sunday, February 24, 2008.

topics: awards, critics year end polls, documentary, lists, oscars

Local filmmakers get a Goldie opportunity

The San Francisco Bay Guardian’s GOLDIES got off to a good start at 111 Minna last night, with MC Marga Gomez jokingly describing the Goldies as, “the Golden Globes for poor people.” Indeed, many of this year’s “outstanding local discoveries” by the arts staff of the newspaper work outside the realm of mainstream art (read: profitability). As far as film is specifically concerned, the Bay Area has a rich history of experimental, politically active underground cinema, a tradition this year’s two Goldie filmmakers embodied in very different ways.

Kerry Laitala strikes a classical experimentalist pose, hand-processing her own arabesques so to further emphasize their materiality. The clip from “Muse of Cinema” cast a haunting spell in its dense soundtrack-image weave, with all the disembodied clapping hands seeming the perfect tonic for an awards ceremony, especially since Ms. Laitala couldn

topics: awards, bay area