Found

Guy Maddin talks about movies, writing, his writing about movies, and the allure of Ann Savage and the Osmonds

SF360.org editor’s note: On the occasion of the opening of My Winnipeg this Friday in Bay Area theaters, we’re re-running an entertaining interview Johnny Ray Huston, arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, conducted for us with Maddin two years ago, when Maddin was the recipient of a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He also appeared at the Festival this past spring with My Winnipeg, and was back in town this month doing a live presentation for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Due to brilliant works such as his 2001 short ‘The Heart of the World,’ GuyMaddin is a more-than-worthy choice for the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, but I’d like to suggest that he also deserves praise for his writings about film. For example, ‘Death in Winnipeg,’ his account of time spent on the set of a recent TV movie about the Osmond family, is one of the best and funniest pieces of journalism my bloodshot eyes and addled brain have beheld in the past decade. That article and other scribblings by Maddin can be found in ‘From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings,’ a beautifully-designed tome featuring hyper-compressed descriptive wit that is signature Maddin. In conjunction with Maddin’s SF visit, I recently spoke to him about his second career as a film writer, as well as other topics.

topics: authors, cult cinema, directors, san francisco international film festival, screenwriting, silent film

Platform

Catherine Breillat unveils "The Last Mistress"

In the 20 years since 36 Fillette shocked audiences with its unflinching depiction of an unhappy 14-year-old girl determined to lose her virginity on a seaside family holiday (and discovering her sexual power along the way), French author and director Catherine Breillat has carved out a reputation as a fearless provocateur. Not coincidentally, she’s a magnet for controversy, attacked in some quarters for presenting sex and the sharp-elbowed power plays between men and women in the rawest terms. But perhaps it’s the notion of a woman director pulling back the curtain on society’s ugly secrets that pushes the buttons of some critics and moviegoers, rather than the confrontational themes of works like Romance and Fat Girl. The Last Mistress, which opened the San Francisco International Film Festival in April and begins its local theatrical run Friday, is at first blush a restrained, talky drawing-room drama set in the repressed 18th century. It soon reveals itself as a fierce passion play between an independent woman (Asia Argento) and a younger man who, after 10 years, stuns her by deciding to take a wife. Breillat, still showing some of the physical effects of her 2004 stroke that delayed production of The Last Mistress, was paradoxically much more playful and cheerful this time than when she visited the festival in 2003 with Sex Is Comedy. She speaks and understands English, but we relied on a translator.

topics: directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, women filmmakers

Platform

"Up the Yangtze" with Yung Chang

It is difficult not to be awed by the staggering figures that increase every day: more than 67,000 dead, five million homeless, 23,000 missing, more than 240,000 hospitalized, 10,000 children buried in the rubble of unsafe schools.

Now there is added poignancy to the question "whither China?" that is posed in Up the Yangtze, a superb documentary that examines the surreal changes taking place and the role the controversial Three Gorges Dam may play in that country’s future. The film played in Sundance and at the San Francisco International, and it opens at Bay Area theaters this week .

The glorious benefits to come with a future dam are not exactly what Mao envisioned in his poem "Swimming," which concludes: "The mountain goddess if she is still there will marvel at a world so changed."

Marvel, indeed.

topics: documentary, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

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

Platform

"Standard Operating Procedure:" Questions and answers with Errol Morris

Transcription by Eve O’Neill.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris reaches into the murkiest of waters and somehow manages to extract clarity. His fishing expeditions have taken him from the lonely highways of Texas to the torture chambers of Iraq. What he pulls up is never the expected answer; often enough, it’s a revelation. With Standard Operating Procedure, which opened in the Bay Area last Friday, Morris forces audiences into a new understanding of the infamous torture photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and our complicity in their making. His investigative zeal traces back to the Bay Area, he said in a recent onstage conversation during the San Francisco International Film Festival. What follows is the transcript of the interview with B. Ruby Rich during his SFIFF Persistence of Vision award screening at the Sundance Kabuki April 29.

topics: bay area, critics, directors, documentary, san francisco international film festival

Review

"Standard Operating Procedure" and the stories we tell

SF360 asked Bay Area writers and fans to comment on the films of SFIFF51. Stephen Elliott reports from the April 29 Persistence of Vision screening of Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, opening May 9. The screening was preceded by an onstage conversation between B. Ruby Rich and Morris. This story appeared originally in SF360.org on April 30.

He calls it the "Interrotron." The way Errol Morris interviews a subject is to speak into a camera. His image is then projected on a screen and the interviewee responds into the camera. It’s like a teleprompter that allows the game show host or newscaster to speak directly to you while reading her lines. And that’s the feeling of Morris’ films of the last 15 years, particularly The Fog Of War, featuring former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: that the subject is speaking directly to the audience. And that’s the feeling of Standard Operating Procedure. The interviewees, primarily the low level military police on duty at Abu Ghraib prison who participated in and photographed the torture of Iraqi prisoners deep inside the war zone, are talking to you.

topics: directors, documentary, political film, reviews, san francisco international film festival

Report

SF International's Golden Gate Awards: Alive and cooking

Food scents and film sensibilities mingled at a Golden Gate Awards evening that saw the San Francisco International moving away from a stage-presentation format into a pungent party atmosphere at the California Culinary Academy Wednesday night. With kitchen scenes as backdrop, filmmakers received and celebrated awards in a variety of categories while taste-testing from a broad buffet.

Yung Chang, with Up the Yangtze, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature, presented by storied documentarian Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk). He got the opportunity to thank two of his uncles, Wilson and Howard, who were present at the party, and asked the audience to not forget the 4 million people who’ve been relocated by the Three Gorges Dam Project. His involvement with the people he filmed has continued after shooting, and he told SF360.org that, after showing the film to one of his subjects, she said she "saw her fate" and decided to leave the quite possibly dead-end cruise-boat job she’d been working and go back to high school. The filmmakers are now helping her family financially.

topics: animation, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, features, san francisco international film festival, shorts