Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival opens its 32nd

The Mill Valley Film Festival’s 2009 program features, as ever, a bounty of local work, U.S. independent features and docs, international festival favorites and children’s flicks, as well as live events and more. But what it also offers is a surprisingly potent mainstream industry presence: The headlining tribute programs offer opportunities to get a close look at A-list types more frequently seen at the multiplex than at the art house. And you know what? We approve.

That’s because the 32-year-old festival’s 2009 tributees are the kinds of starry talents that give Hollywood a good name: famous mid-career actors with depth and range, a writer-director who’s actually succeeded by appealing to the audience’s grownup intelligence, not its inner (or actual) 14-year-old Tweeting fanboy. These are the good guys. We can’t even hate them because they’re beautiful.

topics: activism, actors, african american cinema, authors, bay area, critics, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, features, film festivals, independent film, international film, mill valley film festival, music, world cinema

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

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