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

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

SFIFF52 Blogs: Rage against the machine

On May Day Eve, Travis Wilkerson and two members of death-folk outfit Los Duggans, Dylan Wilkerson and Miguel Hernandez, performed Proving Ground, probably the first multimedia Leninist rant to have ever graced the Sundance Kabuki, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Travis Wilkerson did the ranting and controlled the Kaptivator, a device intended for VJs that allows video clips to be sampled, looped and superimposed. Los Duggans provided musical backing on two guitars and the occasional banjo, with rolling folk melodies that seemed to propel Wilkerson’s exhortations forward. The piece had four distinct movements, opening and closing with Lenin’s theory, specifically his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and moving, just as Lenin would, from theory to practice in the middle two movements. In these movements, the dramatic center of the work, Wilkerson raged against the US bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and compared the recent massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli Army to the Sand Creek Massacre of the 19th century, when a group of Colorado Territory militias lead by Colonel Chivington slaughtered a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho.

topics: avant-garde, performance, political film, san francisco international film festival, sundance kabuki

SFIFF52 Blogs: Portillo's persistence--and wit--on display

A filmmaker stands on the balcony of her hotel room in Quintana Roo, on Mexico’s southeastern coast, resting between unproductive interviews for the documentary film she’d like to make about three local fishermen who, rumor has it, found a large package of cocaine that washed ashore and sold it to the police. As she sighs and sits on the hammock, her crew busy filming cutaways on the beach below, she tells her lover, far away and on the phone, how difficult it is to be a documentary filmmaker. At Monday’s screening of Al Más Allá, Lourdes Portillo’s new short feature film, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the line draws a laugh from the large crowd. The filmmaker within the film, a partly autobiographical comic send-up of the documentary director as single-minded, blind tourist, has seemingly brought her crew down to Mexico to film her, and they capture the director’s every move with faithful ardor. When the directions to the house bought by one of the fisherman with his cut of the drug money instead lead to an empty field, the director’s crew races to positions from which they can get two camera angles of the director stumbling through the field toward the car. It’s as if this failure is so significant that one camera is not sufficient to capture it.

topics: awards, bay area, documentary, documentary film, latin american cinema, latin cinema, san francisco international film festival, sundance kabuki

Found

SFIFF52: A Robert Redford rarity--live and onstage

Robert Redford’s appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival to accept the Peter J. Owens Award is a major occasion. Public-fuss-shy, Redford has done an amazing job, considering the odds, of remaining private. He started buying Utah land well before he was a star in order to Get Away From It All. And while he has, on occasion, stepped up to the podium to comment on his frequent environmental and political concerns, or on the status of the now-fabled Sundance Institute and Festival he founded years ago, he hasn’t used the podium to blow his own horn as a movie star (or even director) since the last time a publicist made him. And when was the last time a publicist had that much clout?

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, documentary film institute, drama, dramatic films, festivals, hollywood, independent film, san francisco international film festival, sundance, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

Insider

SFFS Screen's "Delwende"

The West African nation of Burkina Faso is one of the globe’s poorest nations. When the children of Saaba begin mysteriously falling ill and dying off, the collective opinion is that it must be due to, well, witchcraft. At odds with wife Napoko (Blandine Yameogo) over his sending 16-year-old daughter Pougbila (Claire Ilboudo) off to an arranged marriage, influential elder Diarrha (Celestin Zongo) orchestrates it so a ceremonial totem accuses her of being the witch. She’s driven away, and can find no shelter anywhere—news spreads fast of her alleged evildoing—until finally she ends up at a shelter for other banished “witches” in capital city Ougadougou.

[SF360.org editor’s note: San Francisco Film Society publishes SF360.org and programs the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki.]

topics: african cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, sundance kabuki, world cinema

Insider

SFFS Screen: Jacques Nolot and "Before I Forget"

The single, disgruntled, been-there-done-that gay man pushing well into middle-age or beyond has a long cinematic history—albeit most of it in the closet and unflattering. Sophisticated urban audiences might have recognized that such classic character actors in Hollywood’s "Golden Age" as Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton were playing stereotype "queers," but to most audiences they were just comic-relief eccentrics too fussy or silly to have gotten married. Later on, as movies became more "frank" in the 1960s and beyond, such figures came out of the closet only to be more harshly ridiculed, painted as bitter, misogynist, untrustworthy, even homicidal. What about today? With rare exceptions, in mainstream movies he’s still on the margins, if less despisedly so, as the heroine’s nonthreatening best friend or the funny neighbor or something.

So there’s something modestly daring about the movies made so far by Jacques Nolot, a longtime French stage, TV and film actor who didn’t make his feature directorial bow until a decade ago. His latest, Before I Forget, plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting this Friday.

topics: directors, french cinema, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki