Platform

Joe Berlinger on the impact of "Crude"

From upstate New York to Arkansas to the Bay Area and far beyond it, Joe Berlinger’s films, many with co-director Bruce Sinofsky, have been fascinating, cinema verite-style entertainments. Though they’ve investigated crimes big and small, paved the way for new reads of verdicts and, surprisingly enough in the case of the two Paradise Lost films, built movements, the films have never been prosecutorial in style or didactic in nature. They are primarily curious about relationships, misdeeds and the bizarre trappings of very specific subcultures. They don’t default to talking heads, statistics, graphics or the essay format, yet they’ve solved some of the gnarliest puzzles imaginable. Berlinger’s latest, Crude, could be seen as departure, given its antagonist is Chevron, and it does include a seated interview or two. But its power comes from its measured to approach to all sides. Its primary target is a surprise—in that it implicates American culture as a whole for remaining ignorant of moral crimes being committed elsewhere. As Berlinger prepared for a trip west, to speak on a panel curated by San Francisco Film Society Saturday, September 26, at the Lumiere (more on Slippery Slopes: A Forum About Crude and the Investigative Functions of Film, below), SF360 spoke with him about the drama before, during and after the creation of Crude.

topics: activism, directors, distribution, diy, documentary, environmental films, independent film, latin american cinema

In Production

Telles charts "Storm" of Mexican Revolution

Not long after he began developing a film about the Mexican Revolution, Ray Telles was introduced to four men who’d fought with Emiliano Zapata. “We have to get these guys,” he implored prospective funders. “By the time we’re in production, they’ll be dead.” Incredibly, the veterans were more than 100 years old when the East Bay filmmaker interviewed them in 2002. “A couple of them were pretty vivid,” he recalls. “It was such a moment in their lives. One was with the Zapata army when he was assassinated [in 1919], and it burned it in his memory. It brings him to tears. He talks about how they all stood by when Zapata went into Hacienda de Chinameca and came out bloodied, and they all knew what happened.”

topics: activism, awards, bay area, immigration, latin american cinema, latin cinema

Platform

Richard Levien, from "Immersion" to "La Migra"

New Zealand transplant Richard Levien, a longstanding fixture of the San Francisco indie film community, has until recently been known primarily as an editor. That changed forever during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival when Levien’s directorial debut Immersion won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Short. Shortly thereafter, Levien was named as the first recipient of a $35,000 award from the first SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant for the script development of what will be his first narrative feature, La Migra. Both projects focus on the tribulations of immigrant children trying to live normal lives in the United States in the face of stigmatization, xenophobia and an often-vindictive legal code.

topics: actors, bay area, children's issues, digital filmmaking, diy, drama, exhibitions, film festivals, funding, immigration, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

In Production

Local makers line up next shot after SFIFF

A film festival can be a launching pad for a brand new release, a gratifying encounter with a live audience on the way to a national TV broadcast, a hometown celebration or just another stop on the circuit. The 2009 SFIFF has been all that and more for the numerous Bay Area filmmakers with feature-length works in the program, and who are already plotting their next moves.

The crowd-pleasing opening night film, La Mission, is slated to screen May 30 and 31 in the Seattle International Film Festival. Beyond that, director Peter Bratt and company wait to hear from other fests while they maintain ongoing negotiations for distribution that commenced with the film’s Sundance premiere.

topics: actors, american indian film, arab cinema, bay area, center for asian american media, digital filmmaking, distribution, diy, documentary, drama, film festivals, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

SFIFF52 Blogs: Portillo's persistence--and wit--on display

A filmmaker stands on the balcony of her hotel room in Quintana Roo, on Mexico’s southeastern coast, resting between unproductive interviews for the documentary film she’d like to make about three local fishermen who, rumor has it, found a large package of cocaine that washed ashore and sold it to the police. As she sighs and sits on the hammock, her crew busy filming cutaways on the beach below, she tells her lover, far away and on the phone, how difficult it is to be a documentary filmmaker. At Monday’s screening of Al Más Allá, Lourdes Portillo’s new short feature film, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the line draws a laugh from the large crowd. The filmmaker within the film, a partly autobiographical comic send-up of the documentary director as single-minded, blind tourist, has seemingly brought her crew down to Mexico to film her, and they capture the director’s every move with faithful ardor. When the directions to the house bought by one of the fisherman with his cut of the drug money instead lead to an empty field, the director’s crew races to positions from which they can get two camera angles of the director stumbling through the field toward the car. It’s as if this failure is so significant that one camera is not sufficient to capture it.

topics: awards, bay area, documentary, documentary film, latin american cinema, latin cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance kabuki

Platform

SFIFF52: Lourdes Portillo--visionary, sleuth, activist and "Persistence of Vision" awardee

The San Francisco-based and internationally acclaimed documentarian Lourdes Portillo once told an interviewer, by way of explaining her approach as a filmmaker, that she hated the obvious. For three decades, in films like Señorita Extraviada, La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead, and The Devil Never Sleeps, Portillo’s camera has continually taken us beyond the obvious—those things lying in the way of our vision of the world and each other—to contemplate the unnoticed, disregarded and unexpected. A truly independent filmmaker who has consistently worked outside the main avenues and currents of the industry, Portillo is an apt recipient of the
52nd San Francisco International Film Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award Monday, April 27.

topics: awards, bay area, diy, documentary, film festivals, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival

Experience

SFIFF52: La Mission at el Castro--a beautiful day in the neighborhoods

San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods—and an argument can be made that there is no more lively and fascinating neighborhood in the city than the Mission. It’s a place where stories intersect: Historic murals depicting Latin American indigenous struggles butt up against well-worn Irish bars, which have themselves been transformed into trendy nightspots for a whole new demographic. Street vendors, workers for hire and school kids waiting for Muni buses share small strips of sidewalk just inches away from the slope of sunbathers at Dolores Park who offer an entry to another world altogether in the Castro.

Diverse populations, dense city: conflict naturally will occur. What’s challenging for city planners can be wonderful for film writers—especially when conflict leads as thoughtfully and passionately to resolution as it does in Peter Bratt’s opening night feature for the San Francisco International Film Festival, La Mission.

topics: actors, african american cinema, american indian film, bay area, castro theatre, diy, drama, film festivals, filmmakers, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival