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

Report

Recession sidesteps theaters, up to a point

The economic downturn is hurting everyone, right? Yet Hollywood is on pace to break the box-office record it set last year. Likewise, the arthouses are doing steady business. Even concession sales at smaller theaters are generally level. So what’s going on out there?

Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff reports that in 18 of the first 19 weeks of 2009, the arthouse chain’s ticket sales were up from last year. Nonetheless, he says, "I don’t believe the industry is recession-proof. It’s all about the films. If there were 20 films in the marketplace no one wanted to see, they wouldn’t come to the movies. If we had great movies and we were priced out of the marketplace, people wouldn’t go either."

topics: art film, bay area, distribution, exhibition, independent film, international film, landmark theatres, red vic movie house, roxie

Experience

SFIFF52: "Once Upon a Time in the West," restored

In a sense, nobody has ever made movies larger than Sergio Leone. Not large in expense, epic scale, or god knows in cosmic import. But rather large in the sense of, well, tangible largeness —no one has ever quite equaled his ability to maximize the unforgiving vastness of wide open spaces and the intransigent solitude of humans hellbent on enforcing their will within that inhumane desolation. Could he have made his mark in any genre but the Western, with its innate need for harsh wilderness and stark good-vs.-evil conflicts? Perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine how. Leone’s sensibility fit the Western so completely that in the end he was almost incapable of working his way out of it.

This Sunday afternoon the SF International Film Festival presents a meticulously restored new print of Once Upon a Time in the West, there’s little risk in promising that it will be spectacular. This 1968 Italian-U.S. coproduction was Leone’s magnum opus, granted all the length, extravagance and star power he could desire. Was this fulfillment (not to mention the sheer exhaustion of marshaling such sprawling resources) so overwhelming that it made future effort near-impossible?

topics: actors, bay area, critics, directors, genre films, hollywood, international film, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival, world cinema

Platform

The Arab Film Festival's Michel Shehadeh touts a cinema renaissance

If there was ever a time when Americans needed to hear a cross-section of voices from the Arab world, it’s now. Sure, the 12th annual Arab Film Festival, as always, is a celebration of community and identity and the art of cinema. But it also provides an all-too-rare window onto the Arab street without CNN obscuring the view. We sat down with executive director Michel Shehadeh, who joined the festival earlier this year, for a wide-ranging interview. First, though, some program highlights: The festival begins Thursday, October 16, with Waiting for Pasolini, a comedy about a Moroccan village’s interaction with an Italian film crew. A pair of Sundance award-winners, the crowd-pleasing Captain Abu Read (October 17 at the Clay and October 18 at the Camera 12 in San Jose), Jordan’s first-ever feature and (needless to say) its submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the inspiring Palestinian rap doc, Slingshot Hip Hop (October 24 at the Shattuck in Berkeley), make their local premieres. The list of guest filmmakers includes Slingshot’s Jackie Salloum and Khadija Al-Salami, the Yemeni director of the wrenching documentary Amina (October 26), about a death-row inmate convicted of murdering her husband. The Arab Film Festival runs through October 28 at various locations in San Francisco, October 18-19 in San Jose, October 23 in Oakland and October 24-26 in Berkeley. For ticket information, call the festival office at (415) 564-1100 or go to the festival’s web site.

topics: arab cinema, documentary film, features, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, international film, political film, q&a

Platform

Ariella Ben-Dov dips into the Madcat archives

What do women want to watch? With Diane English’s recent unfunny and product placement-filled re-make of The Women hitting theaters last week, Hollywood’s answer, predictably, is more of the same. Thankfully there are curators like Ariella Ben-Dov, whose Madcat Women’s International Film Festival has long provided a platform for fiercely independent and experimental women filmmakers, whose work often refuses to be defined by the label “women filmmaker.” Ben-Dov’s curatorial practice has also made a point of expanding Madcat’s audience beyond already faithful cinephiles. On the eve of the 12th anniversary of Madcat, the only avant-garde women’s film festival in the United States, I spoke with Ben-Dov over the phone from New York, where she’s adjusting to her new position as director of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History, about expanding the San Francisco-weaned Madcat Festival, the power of watching a film in an audience and the uncanny return of Beverly Hills 90210. The Festival (more on the schedule at Madcat’s web site) gets underway Sept. 19 at Artists’ Television Access and continues with the lively El Rio barbecue-enhanced screenings the following week.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, experimental film, film festivals, international film, women filmmakers

Report

Toronto 2008: Slow food, fast festival

Every year, people grumble. Every year, someone points out how much worse it is than before. And every year, there are films that pull everyone out of the doldrums and guarantee it all continues. Welcome to the world of film festivals, and to this season’s Toronto International Film Festival in particular: bigger, brighter, more overwhelming, less intimate, and in the end, exactly as satisfying as the films each audience member happens to stumble into.

topics: art film, film festivals, film history, genre films, independent film, international film, world cinema

Insider

Inside the Telluride Film Festival

The Telluride Film Festival thrives on trust: Film lovers and filmmakers travel to this remote corner of Colorado from great distances and at considerable expense on blind faith—because the TFF program is a closely guarded secret until the day that the festival opens. For 35 years, the extended festival family of pass holders, filmmakers, staffers and supporters has convened on Labor Day weekend knowing that their expectations of seeing a well-curated selection of world cinema, past and present, from Hollywood to Romania to Senegal to South Korea, will be exceeded. (Surely no one arrived in town dreaming that this year’s tributees would be actress Jean Simmons and directors David Fincher and Jan Troell.)

This is my 20th TFF; I was here three times as a pass holder, and, for the past 17 years, I’ve come here as a volunteer staffer. I’m one of many: The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring. For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a “schlepper," most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he’s stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he’s acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, “There was no way I wasn’t gong to Telluride. I love working (here).”

[Editor’s note: What follows is the TFF lineup, which was announced yesterday and posted in "News" on SF360.org.]

topics: animation, directors, documentary, exhibitions, features, international film, telluride film festival