Report

The greatest finds of my generation

The harsh glare of the spotlight that brought Howl mixed reviews from critics on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival had melted into a warm glow by Saturday, when the Bay Area-made nonfiction feature played to an adoring audience at Park City’s Library venue. Programmer David Courier’s slip of the tongue as he celebrated "two of the most venerated documentary filmmakers of our time, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman" (Oscar winners for Common Threads and The Times of Harvey Milk), by praising how the two were "making their first fourway—I mean FORAY—into dramatic films" offered an appropriately irreverent frame for a film about Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet and the fate of his epic "Howl" in a 1957 San Francisco courtroom.

[Editor’s note: Continue reading entries on the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, including interviews with Bay Area makers Sam Green and the Butcher Brothers Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, critical takes on films and events of the festival, behind-the-scenes photos, as well as exclusive interviews with Bay Area Sundance staffers in SF360 Blogs.]

topics: activism, actors, authors, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

Butchers open shop at Sundance

Glen Helfand: To be from the Bay Area and be called The Butcher Brothers might mean you get mixed up with purveyors of grass fed meats for foodies, but the team of Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, aka The Butcher Brothers, taps into an equally deep Northern Californian tradition in indie filmmaking. Their new feature The Violent Kind, is a nightmare-with-bikers-in-the-woods fantasy that was shot in Petaluma, Cotati and surrounding areas (as was their vampiric first feature, The Hamiltons), and definitely fits their collaborative moniker.

[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]

topics: bay area, horror, sundance film festival

Platform

Frazer Bradshaw on the evolution of "Everything Strange and New"

It’s a testament to the programming staff at the Sundance Film Festival that first-time feature filmmaker Frazer Bradshaw’s low-key, Oakland-shot domestic drama was chosen to debut there last January. It makes a bold impression without brand names or buzzwords—working instead with solid performances and an inventive score to convey a dissonance between the inner and outer lives of a working-class man. Bradshaw appeared with other outliers and innovators, including Laurel Nakadate, Scott Sanders and David Russo, on a panel I moderated at that festival last year. (The film premiered locally at the SF International in the spring.) I recently got the chance to catch up with Bradshaw over email. His film opens at the Roxie on December 4 with a weekend benefit for co-star Luis Saguar, who passed away this past summer.

topics: actors, directors, diy, film festivals, independent film, sundance film festival

Platform

Richard Levien, from "Immersion" to "La Migra"

New Zealand transplant Richard Levien, a longstanding fixture of the San Francisco indie film community, has until recently been known primarily as an editor. That changed forever during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival when Levien’s directorial debut Immersion won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Short. Shortly thereafter, Levien was named as the first recipient of a $35,000 award from the first SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant for the script development of what will be his first narrative feature, La Migra. Both projects focus on the tribulations of immigrant children trying to live normal lives in the United States in the face of stigmatization, xenophobia and an often-vindictive legal code.

topics: actors, bay area, children's issues, digital filmmaking, diy, drama, exhibitions, film festivals, funding, immigration, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival

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

Local makers line up next shot after SFIFF

A film festival can be a launching pad for a brand new release, a gratifying encounter with a live audience on the way to a national TV broadcast, a hometown celebration or just another stop on the circuit. The 2009 SFIFF has been all that and more for the numerous Bay Area filmmakers with feature-length works in the program, and who are already plotting their next moves.

The crowd-pleasing opening night film, La Mission, is slated to screen May 30 and 31 in the Seattle International Film Festival. Beyond that, director Peter Bratt and company wait to hear from other fests while they maintain ongoing negotiations for distribution that commenced with the film’s Sundance premiere.

topics: actors, american indian film, arab cinema, bay area, center for asian american media, digital filmmaking, distribution, diy, documentary, drama, film festivals, latin american cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

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.

All of these skillfully crafted essays belie the chief difficulty that sinks many topic-based films: how do you keep your audience engaged rather than putting them to sleep?

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