The Edit Room

Crafting an elegant essay doc

The essay or topic-based documentary is the second most popular art form dominating today’s independent documentary landscape. Although it shares in the festival accolades and box office commercial success of the character-driven documentary, structurally the essay doc is a different beast entirely, usually organized around a central idea rather than a protagonist on a quest. It looks different too, often employing talking heads, text, statistics, man-on-the-street interviews, educational graphics and slide shows to make its points. Popular examples include An Inconvenient Truth, Religulous, Bowling for Columbine, and The Corporation. Other essay films, such as Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World and Jean Marie Teno’s currently released (and recently playing the SF International Film Festival) Sacred Places (edited by Christiane Badgley), are more introspective tomes or poetic profiles than quantitative or data-heavy docs.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, diy, how-to, san francisco, sundance film festival

In Production

Kroot orbits Planet Kuchar

"There are no second acts in American life," some nobody by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald said. Hogwash. George and Mike Kuchar have had productive, ongoing careers long after their initial burst of notoriety as forerunners of the New York underground film scene in the late ’50s and ’60s. If there is any justice in this world, next year’s release of Jennifer Kroot’s documentary It Came from Kuchar will launch the twin brothers on an equally improbable third act.

topics: actors, avant-garde, bay area, cinephiles, comedy, cult cinema, directors, documentary, experimental film, san francisco, san francisco art institute

Insider

SFIFF51: California Newsreel at 40

What will you do on your 40th anniversary? If you’re California Newsreel, you’ll continue to do the same as you always have: producing and distributing film and video as a means of social change. Founded in 1968, the San Francisco-based Newsreel is the oldest nonprofit, social-issue documentary film center in the United States, with a library that includes Made in L.A. (Hecho en Los Angeles), which follows three Latina garment workers through a groundbreaking lawsuit and consumer boycott; This is Nollywood, an examination of the technical, economic, and social infrastructure of Nigeria’s booming film industry; and The Other Europe, which (among other stories) looks at the 2004 deaths within a group of illegal Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, England — the worst industrial accident in Britain in 25 years.

How have audiences, and Newsreel itself, changed over the years? California Newsreel principal Cornelius Moore sat down with SF360 via email and gave his thoughts on the state of the company, film’s role as an instrument of social change, and Newsreel’s status on MySpace.

The 51st S.F. International Film Festival celebrates California Newsreel’s 40th with a panel on Bay Area political documentary May 3, and screens the CA Newsreel film Faubourg Tremé May 3, 6, and 7.

topics: african american cinema, african cinema, bay area, directors, distributors, documentary, political film, san francisco, world cinema

Found

Why skaters heart Spike

Most of the kids you see tooling around the streets on skateboards these days don’t know this, but there was once a time when spotting a professional skateboarder in a movie or on television was about as likely as finding a hundred bucks on the ground. But that was a long time ago. Skateboarding’s popularity has boomed a thousand-fold over last ten years and skate-related media coverage is now ubiquitous. It’s great for money-minded professional skateboarders and for large corporations, but skateboarding’s mainstream presence just seems strange to people like me who have been skating their entire lives. On one hand you have the MTV extreme sport stuff—the Rob and Big show, The Life of Ryan, the X-games, etc. And on the other you have contrived docu-dramas, like Larry Clark’s Kids, that treat skate-culture as a symptom of urban decline. It’s interesting stuff, but none of it has anything to do with skateboarding. Thank god for Spike Jonze, the patron saint of real skateboarders and the only real “skate director” out there.

topics: directors, san francisco, san francisco film society

The List

10 reasons to see "Cinema Piemonte"

This weekend the Associazone Piemontesi of Northern California, in association with the Italian Cultural Institute and Regione Piemonte, is presenting “Cinema Piemonte,” a brief survey of movies made in that beautiful area of the mother country. The four films run the gamut, from comedy to melodrama to spectacle to agitprop. They also span a whoppin’ nine decades of cinematic history. Admission is free to all programs. Beyond that obvious lure, here are further reasons to attend:

topics: directors, italian cinema, san francisco

Experience

Danny Glover, "Honeydripper," and us

Danny Glover is 61 years old, a born-and-raised San Francisco resident. He’s best known to the masses by far as the calm co-star to a much crazier (both on- and off-screen, it seems) Mel Gibson in those Lethal Weapon movies, though he (and we) would probably cite his best work as being elsewhere, in films seen much less widely.

One of them might well turn out to be Honeydripper, which opens this Friday. An all-too-rare instance these days of a (more or less) starring vehicle for him, this latest from writer-director John Sayles—a filmmaker whose track record of pro-labor projects must have made him simpatico with the longtime unionist actor—casts Glover as Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, piano-playing proprietor of the titular blues joint in 1950 rural Alabama. Facing financial ruin, he needs a big windfall, fast. So he creates one, claiming that he’s secured a show from famed (if fictive) electric guitarist Guitar Sam. But the latter doesn’t turn up as promised, forcing Pine Top to try saving his club via a desperate gambit.

topics: african cinema, directors, documentary, political film, san francisco

Global Lens

Since its inaugural year in 2002, the Global Lens film festival has gotten around, rather restlessly around, crisscrossing the country from Manhattan to Vashon Island with many far-flung points in between like a Beatnik with a yen for riding the rails. Which is more or less the idea. Except that instead of setting out to discover America, the traveling series of recent Third World cinema — a cornerstone of the nonprofit Global Film Initiative (GFI) — is out to help overwhelmingly passportless Americans discover the world.

There is, you might agree, a certain urgency involved. Formed in the wake of 9/11 by Susan Weeks Coulter and Noah Cowan (the latter of the Toronto International Film Festival), GFI seeks to harness the power of cinematic storytelling to promote what its founders see as much needed cross-cultural dialogue between Americans and their neighbors at home and in the so-called developing world.

Combing through, as well as cultivating, the Third World’s often fledgling independent film industries through its grant and acquisition programs, San Francisco-based GFI has been bringing some of the best narrative cinema being produced today in the Global South to American audiences unlikely to encounter it any other way. It’s not just that Americans don’t travel abroad much either. With independent movie theaters and art houses a thing of the past in many American towns, a series like Global Lens can present an all too rare alternative to the multiplex fare.

But what, you may ask, has Global Lens to offer a cosmopolitan film fest feeding-ground like the Bay Area? In some cases, it’s a Bay Area premiere, in others, it’s a deserved second chance to see fine independent films like opening night’s “Of Love and Eggs” (2004), by Indonesia’s Garin Nugroho, which screened (along with his most recent work, the stunning “Opera Jawa”) at the San Francisco International but failed to find an American distributor despite wide acclaim on the international festival circuit. GFI (whose collection numbers 37 films to date) takes up such films in its flexible filmmaker-friendly acquisition agreements and not only tours with them but — in partnerships with First Run Features and First Run/Icarus Films, respectively — eventually makes them available to the home video and education markets. Supplemented by an educational program of free screenings of select films to high school students and downloadable discussion guides for educators, Global Lens also reaches out to Bay Area youth like few other film festivals.

“As a curated series, Global Lens differs from festivals because it is both a cinematic showcase, and distribution source for new and emerging works from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East,” explains director of programs Santhosh Daniel. “Films are screened theatrically as part of our touring series, and then released in home video, on television, and non-theatrically as part of our Global Lens film collection, providing longevity beyond a one-time festival screening.”

Another film clearly worthy of a second look this year is “Kilometer Zero,” the spare and sardonic 2005 feature by Paris-based Iraqi Kurdish filmmaker Hiner Saleem (“Vodka Lemon”), which impressed but also ruffled feathers at Cannes in 2006 with its distinctly Kurdish perspective on the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. With a little distance from that moment (much like the implication of an evolving journey in the title’s reference to a practical and symbolic starting point), the film’s ambivalent stance from the Kurdish north of Iraq concerning the US toppling of the genocidal and deeply despised regime of Saddam Hussein seems less an uncomfortable retort to the indictment of US imperialism (marked the previous year by Palme D’Or-winner “Fahrenheit 9/11”), than a historically and culturally rooted viewpoint that is at the same time a sly send-up of militarism and nationalism itself. With a complex set of human loyalties and relationships at play, as well as an understated theatricality mocking top-down nationalism’s callow certainties and patriotic platitudes, “Kilometer Zero” reveals the theater of war as a theater of the absurd, full of needless pain and strife as well as alternately gentle and bitter human comedy — all of it amid a land that both the film’s unlikely Kurdish hero and his equally unlikely Arab traveling companion agree is paradise on earth, while vehemently disagreeing about whether it is properly Kurdistan or Iraq.

In addition to “Of Love and Eggs” and “Kilometer Zero,” Global Lens 2007’s choice lineup offers seven more features and a program of seven shorts from more than a dozen countries. The series pulls into town next weekend (following stops in Memphis, Scranton, Little Rock, and other hinterlandings) for more than two weeks worth of screenings in a dozen Bay Area locations — including off-the-beaten-track film venues with strong neighborhood cultural centers like St. John’s Presbyterian and the Bayview Opera House, as well as stalwart fest housers like the Roxie. Countries explored by contributing films this year include Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, and South Africa.

“Global Lens has no political bent or cultural leaning as a series,” stresses Daniel. “All the films are chosen solely based on their artistic and narrative quality. Some films may have had a strong run on the festival circuit, but for the most part, the cinematic perspectives one finds in the series are fresh and unique.”

topics: film festivals, san francisco, world cinema