Experience

Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’

If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.

topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, documentary film, film arts foundation, frameline, independent film, sf international lgbt film festival

In Production

Bay Area narrative filmmakers are thriving in doc capital in '09

When I received the proposal last January to write a weekly “In Production” column for SF360.org, I had no concerns about finding sufficient material—that is, local works in various stages of progress. As you well know, the Bay Area is the only place in the country outside of the industry town of Los Angeles and the megalopolis of New York that could sustain a weekly column on independent filmmaking. The challenge I expected was (un)covering a halfway respectable number of narrative features to balance the famously overwhelming output of documentary makers. But as the year unfolded, the trickle of fiction films built to, well, not a flood but a very healthy stream—in the middle of a depressing recession. While I’m not quite ready to anoint the Bay Area as Indiewood North (or West), I have found that something’s certainly going on.

topics: activism, actors, bay area, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, features, filmmakers, frameline, independent film, mill valley film festival, narrative feature filmmaking, san fra, san francisco international film festival

Critic's Notebook

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

Critic's Notebook

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

Experience

Fearless: Strand Releasing turns 20

Nineteen eighty nine was famously the year Amerindie cinema exploded with Sex, Lies and Videotape. But it was also the year something perhaps equally important to independent film happened: Marcus Hu, Jon Gerrans and Mike Thomas co-founded Strand Releasing, which remains an active, irreplaceable and distinctive presence on the U.S. distribution scene twenty years later. (Thomas left the company in the late ’90s.)

That anniversary is being celebrated with a retrospective of past Strand titles at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (More on it below.) But that series can only scratch the surface of a catalog encompassing over 200 features and some of the great names in film both here and around the world. Just a glance at what it’s currently got in theatres gives you an idea of its adventurousness: Brit Terence Davies’ poetic documentary-memoir Of Time and the City; Doris Dörrie’s German-Japanese seriocomedy Cherry Blossoms; Lance Hammer’s highly acclaimed Amerindie drama Ballast; Bruce LaBruce’s latest provocation Otto, or Up With Dead People; and fellow Canadian Claude Miller’s sweeping intergenerational sale Un Secret.

topics: avant-garde, awards, bay area, cult cinema, curators, digital filmmaking, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, frameline, hollywood, independent film, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

"Otto:" A zombie movie with heart, soul and plot

Sheer show-off brattiness can be attractive as it manifests in a young filmmaker’s works—but not so much if the filmmaker fails to mature in sensibility along with his or her escalating age. This has been a particular problem with certain figures in the ’80s Amerindie breakthrough, who still amuse and sometimes enthrall, but rarely get past cineaste in-jokery and prankish shock value to convey some real depth of artistic (or simply human) perspective.

topics: film history, filmmakers, frameline, queer cinema, reviews

Platform

New at Frameline: K.C. Price

For a large chunk of Frameline’s 32 years of existence, Michael Lumpkin captained the preeminent San Francisco queer media arts organization. When he departed to forge new trails at the conclusion of this year’s S.F. International LGBT Film Festival, the board picked K.C. Price to take over as executive director. Price was the managing director of the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, the building that houses Frameline and several other local film organizations, and his resume includes stints as the development director at Frameline and the STOP AIDS Project. Price’s fundraising experience should be an asset amid a spiraling recession that’s expected to roil nonprofit arts groups in the coming year. We met the new guy in the Frameline offices last week to find out what was on his plate.

topics: castro theatre, directors, documentary, experimental film, features, festivals, film arts foundation, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema