Platform

Tom Shepard's 'Whiz Kids' blinds us with science

Back in the ’80s, when Thomas Dolby climbed the charts with a novelty video and radio hit, Tom Shepard was a Colorado adolescent carving an identity as a science prodigy. Now an accomplished San Francisco documentary maker, Shepard revisits the overachieving, hyper-ambitious world of science-obsessed high school seniors in his new film, Whiz Kids. The emotion-charged, feature-length work follows three teenagers through the nerve-wracking run-up and pressure-packed competition of the annual Intel Science Talent Search. Like his previous films, Scout’s Honor and Knocking (co-directed with Joel Engardio), Whiz Kids is propelled by young people at crucial junctures in their lives. Shepard moved to New York for two years during production and post to be closer to both his subjects and his collaborators, the renowned doc duo of editor Jane C. Wagner and cinematographer Tina DiFeliciantonio.

topics: bay area, documentary film, independent film, youth

SFIFF52 Blogs: Cataloguing California

A recording of a school choir’s last performance before the Eagle Mountain mine closes and the town is abandoned. A hulking prison—California’s largest—dominates the failed social experiment of California City. An oil refinery belches pollutants over Richmond, the state’s murder capital. These are some of the raw materials that form Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town. In blending the sights and sounds of 14 specific locales, Schmitt attempts to create a catalogue of the state’s economically depressed towns, industrial wastelands and failed utopian communities. But, she says, “The film is less about individual histories of towns—any place in the state could be in the film. We all live in company towns.” Of her attempt to question why and how certain communities fail, Schmitt says, “I think of this as an archive. And this is, as all archives are, a subjective and flawed way of looking at history.”

topics: documentary, documentary film, environmental films, san francisco international film festival

Report

Film Society Awards Night--a wild ride with Ballard, Coppola, Redford and Toback

Francis Ford Coppola surprised the black-tie audience during Film Society Awards Night at the Westin St. Francis Hotel Thursday night by turning over the Founder’s Directing Award he received to longtime colleague Carroll Ballard.

"I would have never gotten to stage one in this business without Francis. He kept me from falling in the toilet at least a dozen times," said Ballard, who got his first solo directing job (The Black Stallion, 1979) from Coppola. Among Ballard’s other films are Wind (1992), Fly Away Home (1996) and Duma (2005).

"I’m touched, as you can imagine," Coppola told the audience, "because this is my hometown." The director replied to Ballard, "When you have the kind of god-given talent that Carroll does, you can never fall in the toilet."

topics: actors, authors, awards, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, documentary film, drama, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance, sundance film festival

SFIFF52 Blogs: Portillo's persistence--and wit--on display

A filmmaker stands on the balcony of her hotel room in Quintana Roo, on Mexico’s southeastern coast, resting between unproductive interviews for the documentary film she’d like to make about three local fishermen who, rumor has it, found a large package of cocaine that washed ashore and sold it to the police. As she sighs and sits on the hammock, her crew busy filming cutaways on the beach below, she tells her lover, far away and on the phone, how difficult it is to be a documentary filmmaker. At Monday’s screening of Al Más Allá, Lourdes Portillo’s new short feature film, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the line draws a laugh from the large crowd. The filmmaker within the film, a partly autobiographical comic send-up of the documentary director as single-minded, blind tourist, has seemingly brought her crew down to Mexico to film her, and they capture the director’s every move with faithful ardor. When the directions to the house bought by one of the fisherman with his cut of the drug money instead lead to an empty field, the director’s crew races to positions from which they can get two camera angles of the director stumbling through the field toward the car. It’s as if this failure is so significant that one camera is not sufficient to capture it.

topics: awards, bay area, documentary, documentary film, latin american cinema, latin cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance kabuki

Platform

SFIFF52: Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider follow SF schools' immersion students

The making of most documentary films is an immersive experience. So it’s only natural that Bay Area filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, who’ve been working together as Patchworks Films for years, turn their video cameras to subjects in which they are already immersed. (It was childbirth after they had kids in Born in the U.S.A.; it was Orthodox Jewish life after an old friend’s religious conversion in The Return of Sarah’s Daughters.) That their latest project, Speaking in Tongues, is about immersion itself is only a coincidence. It just so happens the particular kind of education their children are receiving—Cantonese-English dual-language immersion at Alice Fong Yu—is one of the pioneering projects of the San Francisco Unified School District. The film they premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival this weekend and next (Sun., April 26, 3:15 p.m., Sat., May 2, 3:30 p.m., Thurs., May 7, 2:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki) follows the stories of four public school children (not their own) studying Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish along with their English. At a time when the U.S. border anxieties are at odds with the need for greater international cooperation, the film looks at what it means to give children the opportunity to become fluent in a second language through public school. The film plays in the Documentary Competition.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is part of a series of Q&As with local Bay Area filmmakers whose work is screening the SFIFF52.]

topics: diy, documentary film, filmmakers, san francisco international film festival, youth

In Production

Kitchell hits on another hot topic with environmental movement docu

Mark Kitchell’s Oscar-nominated Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) masterfully reclaimed a crucial period in history from revisionist neo-cons. His current project, an ambitious summation of the environmental movement, should encounter substantially less resistance from the Right. Perhaps that’s asking too much, given the die-hard "global warming is a hoax" crowd’s ability to use mainstream pundits (George Will, among others) to blow their smoke. The greater impediment to Kitchell’s doc, frankly, is the surge in films about climate change. "When I started out the field was pretty wide open," he ruefully notes.

topics: bay area, documentary, documentary film, environmental films, funding, independent film, political film, san francisco film society

Fear-Free Fundraising

Lightening your fundraising load

When Tennessee Ernie Ford sang, “You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt,” he may have been referring to coalminers’ back-breaking labor. Or, he may have been singing about the life of an indie filmmaker. How much did those grant proposals weigh?

If you’ve followed my columns lately, you may have noticed that in this economic nosedive, I’ve been pushing the idea of asking individual donors you might be able to sway with a personal pitch over trying to get the attention of foundations feeling the financial pinch. Here are five fairly sure-fire ways to make approaching individual donors for funding that much easier.

topics: digital filmmaking, directors, documentary film, funding, independent film