Insider

SFIFF51: Barry Jenkins' San Francisco story

Two young, attractive African Americans, a man and a woman, wake up in a strange house in a nice San Francisco neighborhood, avoid each other as they dress and slip out the front door in awkward silence. But Micah’s not ready to let go of Jo’. So begins Barry Jenkins’s indie debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, a graceful, poignant and altogether marvelous film about fleeting urban connections, black identity and invisibility, cultural adventures and this gentrified city’s lost soul. Jenkins studied film production at Florida State University before heading to the industry town of LA. He soon relocated to San Francisco, and with stunning alacrity wrote, shot and completed Medicine for Melancholy. Jenkins was screening the movie at a Florida festival prior to its upcoming local premiere in the San Francisco International Film Festival, so we conducted the following pithy interview via email.

SF360.org has been running a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs through May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, independent film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: On the breeding behind "Evolution: The Musical!"

You can think of it as The Sound of Music meets Quest for Fire, or Jesus Christ Superstar rocks Land of the Lost. However you slice it, Evolution: the Musical! amounts to some pungent cross-breeding. The most ambitious project to date from Bay Area comedians, impresarios and filmmakers Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor, a.k.a. Illbilly Productions, Evolution is the strikingly contemporary story of a sort of missing-link Romeo (Bancroft, decked out in a few fig-leafs worth of fur and underbrush) and his pent-up, tightly bonneted Juliet (Tonya Glanz, cannily evoking the fervid Amish nymphet). The forbidden romance between Wog Wog and Mary, to give them their proper names, blossoms amid a rap-inflected survival-of-the-freakest showdown between their respective homies: a tribe of Beasties (backed by Darwin himself) and a church-load of Blesseds (playing on Jesus’ team). Gleefully puerile in its comic exuberance, on the politically fraught subject of human origins Evolution: The Musical! manages a wry send-up of religious and secular pretensions. The 38-minute featurette—packed with local comedic talent including the lion’s share of the sketch troupe Killing My Lobster—will enjoy its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in a combination screening and live performance at Mezzanine for SF360 Film+Club on May 6.

SF360.org sat down for a round table discussion with Bancroft and Taylor, as well as actors and KML veterans Glanz and Jon Wolanske (who plays the petulant head of the Blesseds). This took place over email, which meant there wasn’t really a table. In fact, Taylor was apparently in the woods at the time.

topics: independent film, music, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: The Miller Brothers on writing, pitching, acting, directing, and hitting one out of the ballpark

Right about now, San Franciscans could use a baseball story that warms hearts as opposed to chilling souls. Touching Home by Bay Area-raised identical twins Logan and Noah Miller is a largely autobiographical coming-of-age film that radiates sincerity. Two major league hopefuls contending with their alcoholic father and some bad luck round the bases of West Marin with steadfast purpose and occasional humor. More impressive than the gleam of these two new actors’ smiles and the polish of this debut film’s editing and cinematography is the chutzpah the twins demonstrated in getting actors like Ed Harris and Robert Forster to play major roles. Less likely, perhaps, than being called up to the big leagues was their capture of actor Harris’s attention in the alley of the Castro Theatre after a 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival tribute. They showed him a short trailer of their project, and a short while later, they got the call that he would be solidly behind it. The film makes its world premiere Saturday, April 26, during SFIFF51. SF360.org got a chance to ask the twins about baseball and miracles over email last week.

This week, SF360.org runs a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs April 24-May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: actors, bay area, directors, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival, sports movies

Insider

SFIFF51: Johnny Symons and "Ask Not"

East Bay filmmaker Johnny Symons has a bone to pick with former President Bill Clinton. More precisely, with the policy familiarly known as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" that prevents openly gay men and women from serving in the military. Since its adoption in 1993, more than 12,000 queer soldiers have been discharged, while the remaining 65,000 are compelled to keep their sexual identity a secret. Symons, who spotlighted the hurdles of gay and lesbian Americans in Daddy & Papa and Beyond Conception, explores this under-reported situation in the straight-shooting documentary Ask Not. The title is a play on Clinton’s ill-conceived compromise, of course, and on President Kennedy’s famous inaugural-speech challenge, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." The film introduces us to discharged soldiers Alex and Jarrod on a gutsy Call to Duty speaking tour, a soldier serving in Iraq and gays and lesbians sitting in at recruiting offices to protest the law that prevents them from enlisting. "Ask Not" has its world premiere April 26 at the Castro and May 5 at the Sundance Kabuki as part of the SFIFF51.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, san francisco international film festival

Report

SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

Take Two

Review: "Shotgun Stories"

In a recent documentary some interviewees recalled seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets when it came out in 1973, and being amazed that someone, anyone, could actually make a movie about the type of people they’d grown up with in NYC’s tougher boroughs. Thirty-five years later, of course, the general attitude might well be, “Please God, not another Mean Streets knockoff!”—being that New York City slang-speaking East Coast youth dramas have become one of the reigning cliches of indie cinema.

Many things go in and out of fashion at the movies, but it’s seldom noted that among them are entire geographic and population sectors of American life. Middle-to-upper-class WASPS never seem to go out of style; boys (of whatever race) in the ‘hood are a relatively new prevalent flavor; desperately-seeking twentysomethings in the more glittering cities are a favorite; generic suburbia is a fallback setting for many genre exercises.

But the smaller-town “heartland” America that once held our majority populace—and which has duly been shrinking for many decades, though it ain’t vanished yet—is now seldom seen on screen.

topics: directors, independent film, reviews

Platform

Jeff Nichols on "Shotgun Stories"

With “Shotgun Stories,” first-time writer/director Jeff Nichols managed to build, for less than half a million dollars, a relatable story and characters with substance seen rarely in mainstream film—and the film is now on quite a roll, fresh off grand jury prize wins at both the Seattle and Austin Film Festivals, Roger Ebert’s “great discovery” at the Chicago Film Festival, and nominated for a Cassavetes Award at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards. I was particularly interested in the film’s success, as six of the principal cast and crew members of “Shotgun Stories” either teach at or graduated from the same small art college in North Carolina as me. When Nichols was visiting San Francisco for the film’s opening night appearance at SF Indiefest many many weeks back, he offered us with some insight into the creation and production of the film, which opens in SF this Friday. [SF360.org editor’s note: This article first appeared in SF360.org in a slightly different form during SF Indiefest.]

topics: independent film, sf indiefest