Insider

SFIFF51: Exhuming history with "The Judge and the General"

Character development is essential to any film, but in documentary, it’s particularly challenging to depict. With The Judge and the General, Bay Area filmmaker Elizabeth Farnsworth and co-director Patricio Lanfranco vividly portray the kind of character transformation that alters not just an individual’s life, but the course of history. Judge Juan Guzmán, whose family supported Pinochet, is given the job of investigating the General’s crimes— which he does, surprisingly, with vigor. The film watches him dig up the most gruesome of histories, touch decaying bones, and find out a truth he was skeptical existed in a powerful documentary about Chile’s past and present. As part of our Bay Area filmmakers’ series as the San Francisco International Film Festival gets underway, SF360.org asked Farnsworth some introductory questions over email last week.

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

Insider

SFIFF51: Renee Tajima- Peña's trip down "Calavera Highway''

If making a movie about one’s family could be equated with a fire-walk in August, then making a documentary about one’s partner’s family might be akin to a midsummer sauna. Yet veteran L.A. filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) signed on to a road trip with her husband from L.A. to Washington state to Texas in search of "la verdad" about the father that abandoned Armando’s mother Rosa and his six brothers several decades ago. An intimate and elegantly crafted work of cinema verité, Calavera Highway encompasses universal familial tensions, Mexican-American identity, the responsibilities of fathers (and sons) and the psychic malleability of map-drawn borders.

Tajima-Peña, who’s an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the Golden Gate Award for long-form television documentary at the S.F. International Film Festival, where Calavera Highway screens three times in early May. Via email, she talked about searching for "Calaveras" hidden in closets and elsewhere.

topics: asian american cinema, bay area, documentary, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival