In Production

Simon and Gosling play Strachwitz’s tunes

Camera and sound gear in hand, Chris Simon and Maureen Gosling have tagged along with their old friend Chris Strachwitz from Texas to Cajun country, from Appalachia to pre-Katrina New Orleans. Their documentary in progress, tentatively titled No Mouse Music! The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records, pays tribute to the underappreciated career of the El Cerrito Pied Piper who’s pursued, recorded and released American roots music since 1960.

topics: activism, audiences, bay area, cinematography, cinephiles, diy, documentary film, latin cinema, music, world 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

Take Two

The sad dance of "Tony Manero"

Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s sophomore feature Tony Manero, opening Friday on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, concerns itself with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a man in his 50s obsessed with the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fixation situated in the midst of the tough social context of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Raúl leads a small group of dancers regularly performing at a bar located in the outskirts of the city and every Saturday evening he unleashes his passion for the film’s music by imitating his idol. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when the national television station announces a Tony Manero impersonation contest. His urge to reproduce his idol’s likeness drives him to the edge.

topics: hollywood, latin cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, world cinema

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

Take Two

"Silent Light" and shattered landscapes

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ third film is an unmistakably serious work, emblematic of the kind of brooding, large-canvas filmmaking which has become a rarity even at Cannes, where Silent Light won the Jury Prize in 2007. Reygadas endured much hectoring for the brash sex scenes in his second feature, Battle in Heaven, though one that it was the director’s unfashionable solemnity which accorded the wrath. No respite here. Silent Light unfolds in an isolated Mennonite community in hardscrabble Northern Mexico, a minimalist western landscape which inscribes the film’s slow-winding scenario and inexpressive performances by nonprofessionals with a pantheistic touch of raw, compulsive spirituality.

topics: directors, independent film, latin cinema, world cinema

Carlos Reygadas's "Silent Light"

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ third movie is an unmistakably serious work, the kind of big-questions, large-canvas filmmaking which has become a rarity even at Cannes, where “Silent Light” shared a jury prize with buoyant “Persepolis.” Reygadas endured much hectoring for the brash sex scenes in his second feature, “Battle in Heaven,” though one senses that many of these critics had a plainer dislike for the deliberately challenging narration also featured in his debut, Japón. “Silent Light” lands in an isolated Mennonite community in hardscrabble Northern Mexico, and is already taking potshots for its slow-winding scenario, inexpressive performances by nonprofessionals (the film is apparently the first made in the Plautdiestch dialect), and stacked spirituality.

topics: cannes film festival, filmmakers, latin cinema

International Latino Film Festival and SF International Animation Festival

Three to see at ILFF with Eve O’Neill’s take on where to go for more animation when SFIAF closes below.

Could there be a livelier night for an opening than the Day of the Dead? Not according to the International Latino Film Festival, which chose the largely Mexican holiday to launch its 11th International Latino Film Festival at the Castro Theater last Friday. As the party continues nonstop through next week on more than a dozen screens throughout the Bay Area, it’s worth drawing attention to two other offerings from next-door neighbor Mexico, as well as one bridging the ganglands of Los Angeles and war-ravaged El Salvador, as the fest unfurls its 16-day exhibition of nearly 100 feature films, documentaries, and shorts from far-flung corners of Latin culture worldwide. In the wake of Mexican cinema’s triumphant showing at the 2007 Oscars, the following three films serve to confirm how some of the biggest surprises can come from the shortest of distances.

1. “JC Chávez” — Mexican actor and ILFF guest of honor Diego Luna (“Before Night Falls”; “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) makes his directorial debut with this engrossing 2006 biography of Mexican boxing champ Julio César Ch´vez, whose extraordinary rise from humble circumstances to unrivalled mastery in the ring made him a popular hero, while also leaving him prey to powerful figures in sports and politics — from Don King in the U.S. to Carlos Salinas in Mexico — looking to tap his fame for their own ends. Chavez’s skillful use of brute force on the road to fame and fortune finds its metaphorical match in power games beyond the capacity of any single pair of fists to confront, let alone defeat. But there’s a transcendent power too evinced by the iconic image of the fighter, one that Luna’s film expertly evokes.

2. “Malos hábitos (Bad Habits) — The pun is old, where nuns are concerned, but Mexican director Simón Bross’s stylishly atmospheric 2007 debut feels fresh, even amid its millenarian gloom. The story follows the unhappy household of an anorexic wife and mother; her husband, a frustrated architecture professor who turns his attentions to a voluptuous student; their plump daughter, banished to a diet clinic; and the girl’s teacher, a medical school graduate turned Franciscan nun with her own special relationship to food. Turning nourishment and the body into central problems and metaphors, “Malos Hábitos” intriguingly balances science and faith, eros and thanatos, in a seemingly small, intimate tale set in Mexico City during a haunting, bible-worthy downpour.

3. “Hijos de la guerra” (Children of the War) — Alexandre Fuchs’s 80-minute look into the world of MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha Trece, the international gang dubbed the most dangerous in the world by the likes of the FBI, is riveting filmmaking from start to finish. But that it comes bracketed by a foreign policy address by Ronald Reagan signals its determination to be much more than a sensationalist treatment of urban gang life per se. Born on the streets of Los Angeles amid children fleeing the catastrophic violence of El Salvador, MS-13 is ultimately the child of many forces, not least the U.S.-fueled civil war and an episode in American foreign-policy backlash reminiscent of other, more attention-grabbing ones of the moment. Constructed of amazing, often disturbing footage as well as candid interviews with present and former gang members, law enforcement officials, sociologists, and others, Hijos de la Guerra is as complex in the emotions it stirs as in its rigorous dissection of the international and inter-generational consequences of war.

Staying animated

Attendees at the second San Francisco International Animation Festival will be lucky enough to catch movies from across the globe, in styles ranging from the traditional to cutting edge, from the family-friendly to the sexually explicit, including features, shorts, music videos, and everything in between. Still haven’t gotten your fill? Jump online and head to any one of these sites where you can find more work by some of the artists featured in the festival.

5. StudioAKA is a London-based company will loads of talent and almost all of their content available on their website.

4. A. Film A/S is Scandinavia’s largest animation company. Better brush up on your Dutch before the jump the website is in English, the films are not!

3. Ardmann Studiosdo more than Wallace and Grommit, as anyone who saw “The Pearce Sisters” can attest to. Check out the site for a great animation reel, or jump over to Shaun The Sheep’s new home to see clips from all of the shorts on the full-length DVD.

2. Partizan is an international community of directors that collaborate to produce music videos and commercials. While not under a strict policy of animation only, there’s plenty of innovative animated and graphic content.

1. The National Film Board of Canada is Canada’s major public film producer and distributor, and the NFB has been around for over 65 years. It specializes in documentary, animation, and drama. There are over 70 animated films available for viewing at their website.

topics: animation, film festivals, latin cinema, lists