Report

Citizen critics found new outlets, faced challenges in 2009

The silver lining to a decade that saw traditional critics in conventional media dwindle? The explosion of socially networked citizen critics who’ve helped create a multidimensional, democratic dialogue about the movies. San Francisco, with its panoply of film festivals, has, not surprisingly, spawned a wealth of such web-based writers. We checked in with a few of these writers, some of whom call themselves bloggers, to get a snapshot of what ’09 brought the web’s way as the economy faltered, and the community tweeted.

topics: bay area, blogs, cinephiles, critics, exhibition, festivals, world cinema

Critic's Notebook

Toronto International Film Festival, from bottom feeders to Topp Twins

There are two ways to approach a film festival: Follow the buzz or try to create the buzz for yourself. Journalists usually opt for the former, critics for the latter, while audiences splinter in a dozen directions. The "big tent" approach of the Toronto International Film Festival has always allowed a generosity of pursuits to co-exist, rewarding the adventurous and satiating the lazy, all without judgment. This year, though, the balance of power lurched out of whack as the scrum of journalists turned all junketish. The corps of handlers trying to call attention to quality small or foreign films complained that all the media wanted to do was watch and write about the big movies that were about to open anyway. What a shame—I saw some of the most powerful, unexpectedly glorious films this year, not a one slated to open wide this autumn at press time.

topics: authors, bay area, cinephiles, critics, directors, distribution, distributors, documentary film, drama, features, festivals, film festivals, women filmmakers, world cinema

Fear-Free Fundraising

Writing a kick-ass funding proposal

To land a foundation grant for your film, you need a well-edited trailer or work sample, chutzpah and, importantly, a kick-ass written proposal. Today’s topic is that proposal. Here are the basic ingredients.

Good ideas
You have to know what you are trying to create and what success looks like for that creation. With a film, your proposal is only as strong as the ideas, images and people your film contains. Do you have strong characters that give the audience somebody to identify with or whose story will move them? Are existential truths revealed through your film? Are there ideas, themes, lessons and morals to give your film shape and life? Have you thought through what the film is about, and is there a driving rationale for what it contains?

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, features, festivals, funding, hbo, how-to, independent film

Platform

Mountain high: Telluride's Bay Area behind-the-scenes staff

The Telluride Film Festival is world renowned for the unique and selective quality of its program and for the filmmakers who make the arduous trek to the southwest corner of Colorado each year. But some of the most interesting people are behind the scenes—and many of them live in the Bay Area. SF360 had the opportunity to interview 15 of the 50 Bay Area staffers in the week leading up to opening night, as they arrived by plane, train and automobile to prepare for the 36th TFF. Each year the Telluride staff is reminded that “you’re not paid enough to have a bad time,” so we wanted to find an explanation for the high recidivism of the Telluride family for the festival that this year’s Guest Director, Alexander Payne, calls the “older, non-druggy Burning Man.”

topics: activism, actors, festivals, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, international film, world cinema

In Production

Hess and Janos salute the volunteers of America

Look what’s happening out in the streets: 65 million Americans volunteer every year. That may not be what Paul, Grace and Marty had in mind, but there is a revolutionary aspect to community participation these days. Via Volunteer Nation: Stories of Service, veteran producer-directors Ben Hess and Dan Janos are using the latest technology to mobilize the millennials (18-35). “That demographic consumes content online and on mobile devices, but not on traditional television sets,” Hess notes. “We’re looking at the convergence of activism, social awareness and digital media.”

topics: activism, bay area, directors, diy, documentary, exhibition, festivals, independent film, internet, political film, producers, public

In Production

Weissman collects oral histories of S.F.’s "Heartbreak and Heroism"

As the years passed after the exhilarating, exhausting release of The Cockettes in 2002, David Weissman arrived at the conclusion that he was through making films. It wasn’t the agony of fundraising that cooled his coals, but a more basic concern: He was insufficiently jazzed about any of the ideas he was coming up with. But when the notion struck of revisiting the early years of the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco, Weissman sprang into action. He obtained a small grant and started conducting marathon interviews with people who lived here before and during the crisis. It’s still early days for Heartbreak and Heroism: Stories from the Plague Years in San Francisco but Weissman has a clear fix on the film he making.

topics: art, art film, bay area, diy, festivals, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, political film

Experience

Frameline33: something old, something new....

The success of anti-gay-marriage Prop. 8 shocked many people who’d assumed their fellow Californians were ahead of the national curve in terms of sophistication and tolerance. (And they were probably right, in that it took considerable out-of-state money expended on misleading, inflammatory ad campaigns to scare a narrow Left Coast majority into believing traditional marriage needed “defending.”)

topics: bay area, critics, diy, documentary, drama, exhibition, experimental film, festivals, film history, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, hollywood, horror, independent film, international film, world cinema, youth