Topic: bay area
Pre-tweaked: DP Joseph Seif (left) is at work on an earlier Synchronium Films production with actor Christopher Sugarman; both took part in Flynn Witmeyer's "Tweaker with an Axe" as well. (Photo courtesy filmmaker)
The horror, the horror: ‘Tweaker With an Axe’
Flynn Witmeyer’s debut feature sports a title you’d expect to see on a one-sheet mockup at the market in Cannes or a grindhouse marquee on Market St. back in the day. Tweaker With an Axe is the epitome of high concept, but its cast of gay and lesbian characters sets it apart from the pack of comedic suspense thrillers. Or does it? “The characters’ sexuality isn’t part of the story,” Witmeyer says. “They just happen to be gay and lesbian. That’s one of our interests in doing this film. Our interest is to make genre films—horror or sci-fi or fantasy—that incorporate gay and lesbian characters. We want to see more representation of gay and lesbian characters in cinema.”
topics: actors, bay area, diy, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, horror
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Documentary story structures that funders love
We all know an editor who needs to get out of the edit room more often. (I just have to look in the mirror.) I recently had the delightful and heady experience of being on the other side of the fundraising table, giving the thumbs up or down to a slew of documentary directors seeking money for their works-in-progress.
topics: bay area, diy, documentary, hbo, how-to, itvs, sundance
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Facing the music (rights)
Awesome music is almost always a hallmark of a really great film. It can evoke the tone of a scene – high drama, nostalgia, alienation, warm fuzzies – in seconds. A lot of the filmmakers I work with become very attached to having a particular song in their film. I read a lot of scripts that have a very specific and expensive song written into a pivotal scene (e.g., THE ARTIST: I’m going to fight this cancer, stay in art school…and I love you!! They embrace as Lionel Richie’s “Stuck on You” begins.) The filmmaker is usually totally crushed when they realize that they can’t use the song without paying a lot of money.
topics: bay area, diy, legal issues, music
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Immersed: Richard Levien won two awards at the SF International last spring and is moving forward with his new work, "La Migra." (Photo by Pat Mazzera, courtesy SFFS)
Richard Levien, from "Immersion" to "La Migra"
New Zealand transplant Richard Levien, a longstanding fixture of the San Francisco indie film community, has until recently been known primarily as an editor. That changed forever during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival when Levien’s directorial debut Immersion won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Short. Shortly thereafter, Levien was named as the first recipient of a $35,000 award from the first SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant for the script development of what will be his first narrative feature, La Migra. Both projects focus on the tribulations of immigrant children trying to live normal lives in the United States in the face of stigmatization, xenophobia and an often-vindictive legal code.
topics: actors, bay area, children's issues, digital filmmaking, diy, drama, exhibitions, film festivals, funding, immigration, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival
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Bitter pill: Sunday's homophobia-in-sports double bill of "Training Rules" (pictured) and "Claiming the Title: Gay Olympics on Trial" was an emotional event at Frameline33. (Photo courtesy Frameline)
Frameline33: Icons and unsung heroes
"What do they want from an old dinosaur like me?" quips John Hurt, reprising his career-making role as Quentin Crisp, in response to an invitation to regale a much younger audience about his life. By this point in An Englishman in New York, Richard Laxton’s sequel to The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and this year’s opening night film at Frameline33, Crisp has been branded a black sheep for refusing to retract flip comments made on the then-emerging AIDS crisis and is still adjusting to the slights that come with being perceived as some living relic of the past. To a large degree, the image of Crisp as a stoic holdover from an earlier age of faeries and rough trade who survived on wit and sheer force of will was one of his own making, and it is certainly a reputation that Claxton’s film helps secure.
topics: audiences, avant-garde, bay area, british cinema, documentary, filmmakers, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, queer cinema, sf international lgbt film festival, world cinema
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Back to Bolivia: Rick Tejada-Flores (foreground) looks at the twists and turns of his family's past in "The Road to Chulumani." (Photo courtesy filmmaker)
Tejada-Flores takes first-person in ‘Road’ for a change
For every Nick Broomfield or Ross McElwee, there are 50 documentary makers who break out in hives at the thought of being in front of the camera. Rick Tejada-Flores was one of those guys. But when he decided to explore his family’s checkered Bolivian past, he accepted that he had to be a character. “I don’t think American audiences are really too interested in what happens in the rest of the world unless there’s a connection to our society,” Tejada-Flores observes. “By my telling the story, and also by relating it to my experience of defining myself as a Latino in this country, it gives people a point of reference. I’m struggling to find my way through what happened in Bolivia, and so are they.”
topics: bay area, directors, diy, documentary, south american film
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Teen triangulation: Frameline33 films including "Dare" (pictured here) explore teen angst. (Photo by Michael Fimugnari, courtesy Frameline)
Frameline33: Youth in revolt
Traps set by lovers playing hunting games in the forest. Tween caterpillars getting ready to bolt the cocoon. Young communards turning their backs on outdated moral strictures. Ghosts of high school obsessions past. And multiple packs of teenagers on the road and on the run. In this year’s Frameline Fest, as so often in life, it’s all about the one(s) that got away.
topics: bay area, castro theatre, critics, cult cinema, diy, drama, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sf international lgbt film festival, world cinema, youth
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