Found

Q&A: Alex Rivera, "Sleep Dealer"

Alex Rivera’s debut feature Sleep Dealer was developed at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program labs and won the 2002 Sundance/NHK award and a 2004 Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. It then moved on to win two major awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Rivera and David Riker won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for outstanding achievement for their screenplay and Sleep Dealer was also the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award to the filmmaker provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Sleep Dealer was selected "for its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction."

While screening as part of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, the U.S. distribution rights for Sleep Dealer were picked up by Maya Releasing, which intends a theatrical distribution in February 2009. This decision was being reached even as the charmingly kinetic Alex Rivera and I sat down to discuss his film.

topics: directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, science fiction, sundance, sundance film festival

Q&A

Alex Gibney, going "Gonzo"

It’s a good time to be Alex Gibney.

We met this year over egg rolls at a small upstairs bistro on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, where Gibney’s bio-doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson premiered. It was Tuesday, in late-January. That morning Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (SFIFF 2005) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary in 2006, had learned that Taxi to the Darkside, his documentary murder mystery that examines the death of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, had been nominated for an Academy Award. (It eventually won.) Another documentary he’d executive produced, No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, had also been nominated for Best Doc.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, q&a

Experience

Andrea Kreuzhage & Someguy riffle through "1000 Journals"

In 2000, a San Francisco graphic designer with the humble pseudonym of Someguy had a wildly ambitious brainstorm. He put a thousand blank journals out into the world in stages, opening the spigot on a torrent of contributions encompassing everything from knocked-off diary entries to poignant confessions to obsessively crafted art. Nonetheless, after three years, only a single completed book of 220 pages had made its way back to Someguy. The 1000 Journals project has mushroomed in the intervening years, inspiring both a book drawn from journal entries and a documentary, 1000 Journals, that tracks down participants around the globe and raises a host of fascinating questions about creativity, collaboration, community and communication. We sat down with Someguy and first-time director Andrea Kreuzhage, a German producer who’s lived in Los Angeles since the mid-‘90s, during the first of three screenings of 1000 Journals in the S.F. International Film Festival. (Editor’s note: At one SFIFF screening, another journal was returned to Someguy by Erin Gardner. The film screens again Thursday, May 1, at 3:15 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.)

topics: art, authors, bay area, directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: Katherin McInnis cues the carnival music

Photographer and filmmaker Katherin McInnis, a longtime Bay Area resident who recently relocated to Brooklyn, screens her most recent film, Woodward’s Gardens, in the experimental shorts program "In A Lonely Place: New Experimental Cinema" at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. A couple of years ago, McInnis, in conjunction with local exhibition space Southern Exposure and the Mission-based Neighborhood Public Radio, created an audio tour of the city blocks bordered by Duboce, Mission, 15th Street and Valencia that once comprised the grounds of Woodward’s Gardens—an elaborate 19th-century amusement park. One part zoo, one part leisure space and one part spectacle, the grounds were owned and operated by the hotelier-cum-showman Robert Woodward, who came to be known as the "Barnum of the West." McInnis was so intrigued by the transformation this urban space had undergone in just over a century that she decided to create a film version of the tour. She also offered a photo-essay on the project last year in SF360.org.

topics: bay area, experimental film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: Barry Jenkins' San Francisco story

Two young, attractive African Americans, a man and a woman, wake up in a strange house in a nice San Francisco neighborhood, avoid each other as they dress and slip out the front door in awkward silence. But Micah’s not ready to let go of Jo’. So begins Barry Jenkins’s indie debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, a graceful, poignant and altogether marvelous film about fleeting urban connections, black identity and invisibility, cultural adventures and this gentrified city’s lost soul. Jenkins studied film production at Florida State University before heading to the industry town of LA. He soon relocated to San Francisco, and with stunning alacrity wrote, shot and completed Medicine for Melancholy. Jenkins was screening the movie at a Florida festival prior to its upcoming local premiere in the San Francisco International Film Festival, so we conducted the following pithy interview via email.

SF360.org has been running a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs through May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

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

Insider

SFIFF51: On the breeding behind "Evolution: The Musical!"

You can think of it as The Sound of Music meets Quest for Fire, or Jesus Christ Superstar rocks Land of the Lost. However you slice it, Evolution: the Musical! amounts to some pungent cross-breeding. The most ambitious project to date from Bay Area comedians, impresarios and filmmakers Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor, a.k.a. Illbilly Productions, Evolution is the strikingly contemporary story of a sort of missing-link Romeo (Bancroft, decked out in a few fig-leafs worth of fur and underbrush) and his pent-up, tightly bonneted Juliet (Tonya Glanz, cannily evoking the fervid Amish nymphet). The forbidden romance between Wog Wog and Mary, to give them their proper names, blossoms amid a rap-inflected survival-of-the-freakest showdown between their respective homies: a tribe of Beasties (backed by Darwin himself) and a church-load of Blesseds (playing on Jesus’ team). Gleefully puerile in its comic exuberance, on the politically fraught subject of human origins Evolution: The Musical! manages a wry send-up of religious and secular pretensions. The 38-minute featurette—packed with local comedic talent including the lion’s share of the sketch troupe Killing My Lobster—will enjoy its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in a combination screening and live performance at Mezzanine for SF360 Film+Club on May 6.

SF360.org sat down for a round table discussion with Bancroft and Taylor, as well as actors and KML veterans Glanz and Jon Wolanske (who plays the petulant head of the Blesseds). This took place over email, which meant there wasn’t really a table. In fact, Taylor was apparently in the woods at the time.

topics: independent film, music, q&a, san francisco international film festival

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