Take Two

Heddy Honigmann and the art of interview

With Heddy Honigmann’s latest portrait in resilience, Oblivion, opening at the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki this Friday, it’s a good time to celebrate one of documentary’s most engaging storytellers. Honigmann is not without accolades—she won the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival and has had retrospectives in Berlin, New York, Paris and elsewhere—but one still wishes the ongoing doc boom would have done better by her. Watch Oblivion, and you’ll see a master in full stride, gracefully handling a subject (class inequity and political disillusionment in Lima) that would turn to putty in lesser hands. The film is a deceptively smooth ride—we only realize the tremendous moral sense required to coordinate so many different stories into a common circuitry of experience and expression in the afterglow of Oblivion’s final notes of solace.

topics: documentary film, san francisco international film festival, sffs screen, world cinema

Take Two

Instinct propels "Lion's Den"; a fact-fiction mix animates "24 City"

The best filmmakers working in the neorealist tradition today—the Dardenne brothers, Kelly Reichardt, Ramin Bahrani—turn the ordinary into the extraordinary with deceptive ease. Argentinian director Pablo Trapero has joined them with a growing list of films whose protagonists battle the pressures of the everyday in stories that turn out to be phenomenally unique.

He gained public attention at festivals, including the SF International, in 1999 with Mundo Grua (Crane World), a 16mm black-and-white character study of an ex-musician with an obesity problem attempting to find work in construction. His demons were beef and pasta and his charms, against a wide-open South American sky, were many.

topics: asian cinema, bay area, film festivals, landmark theatres, san francisco international film festival, sffs screen, south american film, world cinema

Take Two

Tilda Swinton steals the show in Zonca's "Julia"

It may be a measure of the dopey levels general pop culture discourse has sunk to that when Tilda Swinton is noted by your average fan types—as she’s begun to be, having recently infiltrated Hollywood mainstream cinema—the subject of concern is usually her appearance. Physically striking, charismatic and a remarkable actress, Tilda Swinton isn’t going anywhere but farther into the general consciousness.

Of course she’s still going to be making eccentric art and even experimental films, because that is her preferred thing.

topics: actors, film history, french cinema, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sffs screen, world cinema

Take Two

Iron Curtain call in the Poland of "Katyn"

There’s only one answer possible to the question “Who is the leading Polish filmmaker, past and present?” And it’s not “Roman Polanski." (He’s certainly from Poland, but not having directed a movie there since 1963 is a bit of a disqualifier.)

Andrzej Wajda stayed in his homeland through thick and frequent thin. (At one point the then-Communist government, infuriated by his films’ dissenting nature, simply forced his production company out of existence.) Further, he has few rivals anywhere in using the medium almost exclusively to explore his country’s history and character. With very few digressions over what’s been almost a 60-year career span to date, Poland has been his canvas, subject and muse.

topics: critics, eastern european film, sffs screen, world cinema

Insider

Locally made "Hats Off" finds fascination in 93-years-young actress

The things we know—or think we know—about the lives and loves of Hollywood’s celebrity class are disturbing to ponder. Jennifer Aniston’s bad luck with men. Brad and Angelina’s fertility rites. Will Smith’s religious affiliations, or lack thereof—none of it’s really any of our business, but all it takes is a grocery store checkout line or a treadmill stint at the gym to get the highlights and low points in the lives of the red carpet royalty. True, it’s mostly rumor, surmise, conjecture, and fabrication, but leaving those quibbles aside, what, exactly, is it that makes Will Smith’s cushioned $20-mil-a-pic existence more curious and scrutiny-worthy than that of any of the hundreds of walk-ons, extras, and bit part players who have populated his films?
While you’re standing in line at the supermarket pondering that question—and helplessly reaching for the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad of The Hills on the cover—somewhere in New York City one of those walk-ons, a 93-year-old woman named Mimi Weddell, is navigating the cramped apartment she shares with her daughter and son, perusing a jaw-dropping collection of hats for the perfect complement to her Elizabeth Arden-styled coiffure, and preparing for one more in a decades-long series of theatrical and commercial auditions.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, sffs screen

Insider

Li Yang's hard look at China in "Blind Mountain"

There are at least two Chinese words for "blind:" "xia" for the physically impaired and "mang" for those who cannot or will not see ugly or uncomfortable truths. But director Li Yang spent years in Germany before he could make two films intended to open Chinese eyes to the wretched lives of women for sale and miners-turned-murderers in their lust for money and survival.

Unfortunately, in their new capitalist/communist world, most Chinese citizens will probably not be given the opportunity to see either the 2003 mining horror/suspense story Blind Shaft (Mang Jing) or the kidnapping and sexploitation of a college student in Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)—not because of censorship, but for the same reasons American arthouse films don’t reach their publics: commercial pressures. However, Blind Mountain, a gripping fictional tale inspired by a true case that is only one of similar thousands, will open today on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. And there is still another Li production to come: Mang Liu about the two million homeless children cast adrift on city streets begging for help.

topics: art film, asian cinema, sffs screen, sundance kabuki