San Francisco International Film Festival

55th San Francisco International Film Festival Announces Awards and Prizes at Golden Gate Awards Party

Meredith Brody — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:32:00 GMT

While the Golden Gate Awards party was going on at the Rasselas Jazz Club and Restaurant on Fillmore, I was some 33 miles south, at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, watching Howard Hawks’ “A Girl in Every Port,” accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer.

This meant that I did not know the winners until I read the press release, which further meant that I had only a few seconds (I’m a fast reader) of embarrassment, regret, incomprehension, and amusement at my own expense rather than an entire evening. As seems to be my lot, I had only seen one movie of the six named as winners or honorable mentions for the four top awards (and I’d seen that one last September, at the New York Film Festival, and hadn’t much liked it).

The Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature (which includes a $20,000 cash prize) went to “It’s The Earth Not the Moon,” (Portugal 2011) by Gonçalo Tocha. Honorable mention: “Meanwhile in Mamelodi,” (Germany/South Africa 2011), by Benjamin Kahlmeyer.

Bay Area Documentary Film winner was “The Waiting Room,” (US 2011), and director Peter Nicks won $15,000 in cash and $2,000 lab services from EFILM Digital Laboratories.

The New Directors Prize went to “Policeman,” (Israel 2011), by Nadav Lapid, who won a $15,000 cash prize. The Honorable Mention went to “OK, Enough, Goodbye,” (Lebanon/UAE 2010), by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia. (“Policeman” was the film I saw last fall in NY. And I was on my way to see ”OK, Enough, Goodbye” on the first full day of SFIFF when I got distracted by a friend and accompanied her to “The Fourth Dimension,” which was probably the most disappointing thing I saw altogether. Ah well.)

And the FIPRESCI international critic’s prize went to “The Exchange,” by Eran Kolerin (Israel/Germany 2011). I’d loved his first feature film, “The Band’s Visit” (2007), which I saw at an earlier SFIFF, and marked it down as one of the films I absolutely had to see at the year’s festival. Somehow it slipped away from me.

Eight additional awards were given to short films, which I can’t comment upon, because I didn’t go to any of the short film programs.

I note with absolutely no sense of irony that none of the awards winners are listed as having US distribution as of now.

SFIFF Announces Golden Gate Winners & Prizes

Aaron Bogert — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:37:30 GMT

Last night the San Francisco International Film Festival announced the winners of this year's Golden Gate Awards.

Among the big winners were Goncalo Tocha's "It's the Earth Not the Moon" for Best Documentary Feature; Peter Nicks' "The Waiting Room," which won Best Bay Area Documentary; and Nadav Lapid's "Policeman," which took home the New Director's Prize. All three directors were awarded cash prizes ranging from $15,000-$20,000.

See below for complete list of features and shorts winners:

Golden Gate Award Documentary Feature Winners

Documentary Feature: It's the Earth Not the Moon
Gonçalo Tocha (Portugal 2011)
* Winner receives $20,000 cash prize
Honorable Mention: Meanwhile in Mamelodi
Benjamin Kahlmeyer (Germany/South Africa 2011)

Bay Area Documentary Feature: The Waiting Room
Peter Nicks (USA 2011)
* Winner receives $15,000 cash prize and $2,000 lab services from EFILM Digital Laboratories.

New Directors Prize: Policeman
Nadav Lapid (Israel 2011)
* Winner receives $15,000 cash prize
Honorable Mention: OK, Enough, Goodbye.
Rania Attieh, Daniel Garcia (Lebanon/UAE 2010)

FIPRESCI Prize: The Exchange
Eran Kolirin (Israel/Germany 2011)

Golden Gate Award Short Film Winners

Narrative Short: Surveillant
Yan Giroux (Canada 2011)
* Winner receives $5,000 cash prize

Documentary Short: I'm Never Afraid!
Willem Baptist (Netherlands 2011)
* Winner receives $5,000 cash prize

Animated Short: Belly
Julia Pott (England 2011)
* Winner receives $2,000 cash prize

Bay Area Short, First Prize: Aquadettes
Zackary Canepari, Drea Cooper (USA 2011)
* Winner receives $2,000 cash prize

Bay Area Short, Second Prize: Workers Leaving the Googleplex
Andrew Norman Wilson (USA 2011)
* Winner receives $1,500 cash prize

New Visions: 20Hz
Ruth Jarman, Joseph Gerhardt (England 2011)
* Winner receives $1,500 cash prize

Family Film: The Storyteller
Nandita Jain (England 2011)
* Winner receives $1,500 cash prize
Family Film Honorable Mention: The Vacuum Kid
Katie Mahalic (USA 2011)

Youth Work: Metro
Eric Brownrout, Nick Escobar (USA 2011)
* Winner receives $1,500 cash prize
Youth Work Honorable Mention: Life as a Collage
Forrest Penrod (USA 2011)

San Francisco International Film Festival 55: 'Abramovic,' 'Neighboring Sounds,' and Kenneth Branagh

Meredith Brody — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:19:23 GMT

Kind of a light Festival day: viewed a DVD that I loved, saw a new movie onscreen that was a first feature and reminded me why we go to film festivals, went to a cocktail party that didn’t feel like one, and attended Kenneth Branagh’s tribute for the Founder’s Directing Award.

First up, the DVD: “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.” For years I’ve been on the fence about Abramovic: sometimes I thought she was a terrific self-promoter and narcissist who relied on cheap and obvious stunts, often involving violence and/or nudity. Other times I was able to acknowledge that “terrific self-promoter and narcissist” was part of the job description of a performance artist (or even artist, tout court ), and that the work could actually be compelling. I wasn’t able to see the retrospective show at MOMA from which the title of the documentary is drawn. For the duration of the show the artist was present literally: all day she sat across from a changing array of people who stayed as long as they chose, wordlessly.

During the show I became addicted to a portion of its website that showed portraits of each of the people who sat across from her, plus one new photo of Marina taken each day, for the performance piece that she created for the show. The information included how long they sat (times ranged from one minute to the entire seven-hour day, probably enraging the people patiently lined up for their turn), and the comments section sometimes identified who the sitters were. I was drawn to both the faces and the cult quality that the piece engendered, revealed in the comments.

The reverent, engaging documentary showed me more than I knew about her, and afterwards I felt more generous and open to both the artist and her body of work. The last section, covering the performance piece, gave me more of a “you are there” feeling than I’d had obsessively tracking the sitters online.

Then I went to see “Neighboring Sounds,” a 2-hour-and-ten-minute Brazilian debut feature that arrived with the imprimatur of the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s influential New Directors/New Films series. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho has previously made shorts and documentaries (some of which can be viewed online). “Neighboring Sounds” follows the assorted inhabitants (some middle class, some wealthy, and their staff) of a few blocks in the Brazilian coastal city Recife, after they hire a nighttime security patrol. Work, parties, visits to country houses: the episodic structure meanders its way to a surprising conclusion that seems to come from another genre entirely. Filho has an interesting eye, his actors gave naturalistic performances that felt of a piece, and as the tone varied, the rhythm of the film stayed constant. One of the better films I’ve seen at SFIFF, and from a young director to watch.

I stop at the pre-screening reception before the 7:30 Branagh tribute at the Castro, at a restaurant on Market previously named after its address, 2223, but since February of this year, under new owners, known as Jake’s on Market. It’s a nice airy space (especially with its tables removed for the party), with a long bar visible alongside the main room. When I get there the bar is full and there’s a cluster of people right around the entrance, in the midst of which I can espy K. Branagh, but most of the room is empty. I don’t see anyone I know, there’s no food in evidence, and from long experience I know imbibing alcohol just before a movie is not the best idea, so I’m adrift. Menus specially printed for the party are placed here and there, and they look very promising (rock shrimp and crab ceviche, two kinds of crab cakes, buffalo chicken, bacon-wrapped meat loaf, mozzarella and tomato skewers, assorted pizzas), plus I haven’t eaten all day, so I figure I’ll stick around.

I exchange film festival banalities with a few other guests. Food emerges from the kitchen at a glacial pace, and on less-than-full plates, an old catering trick. I manage to snag a tiny crab cake (and am unable to tell whether it’s the East Coast Maryland blue crab version or the West Coast Dungeness variety), a skewer with a cherry tomato, basil leaf, and tiny ball of mozzarella, and a hard ball of something that alarmingly and almost disastrously squirts hot melted cheese when I bite into it – that must be the Buffalo chicken.

I feel like a creepy and ungracious party crasher, plus I remember that one of SF’s best BLTs (and only $5.50!) is available right across from the Castro at Rossi’s Deli, so I’m out the door.

The Irish-born, British-raised Branagh, hot off the unexpected success of “Thor,” is interviewed by a nervous and overprepared Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director of the California Shakespeare Theater. Branagh is predictably charming, modest, and amusing, though there are no surprising revelations, as there were at the less-attended but more candid Judy Davis tribute.

The conversation is heavy on Shakespeare, so one wonders exactly why the 1991 neo-noir curiosity “Dead Again” was chosen. It’s a rare chance to see it projected on the big screen, and actually a film print, at that. It's fun to glimpse 20-year-old LA locations (including the Shakespeare bridge in Los Feliz, as well as the tower apartment building also used in Altman’s “the Long Goodbye”) and period fashions – not just the 40s ones, as now the late-80s clothes and hairstyles.

There’s still half-an-hour of film to go when there’s a disturbance to my left: one VIP guest in my row has decided, abruptly, that he’s had enough, and is pulling what’s left of his party -- two departed after the interview and before the movie -- away, despite my neighbor’s feeble remonstrance that she’d like to see the end. “I hope it’s on DVD,” I say to her. I am reminded that sometimes it’s safer to stay at home.

SFIFF Review: Caveh Zahedi's 'The Sheik And I' Creates A Compelling, Subversive & Ethical Puzzle

Sean Gillane — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:04:01 GMT

In “The Sheik and I” director Caveh Zahedi once again turns the camera on himself, this time as he chronicles his attempts to create and exhibit a film commissioned by the Sheik of Sharjah for the emirate’s art biennial. The film is stitched together with Zahedi’s after-the-fact recalling and contextualization of the events of the production, along with behind-the-scenes style footage, brief glimpses at the film within a film that Zahedi is supposedly originally creating, unpolished animated sequences, and even just white text on a black screen (for when the cameras run out of batteries, which appears is often due to Zahedi’s always-be-rolling approach).

Before launching into the story, Zahedi tries on a series of shirts to wear as he narrates the film, peering at his image on an off-screen monitor and wondering aloud how each shirt will cause him to be perceived. His assistant behind the camera eagerly plays along, suggesting a red shirt is, “a little aggressive maybe.” Zahedi quickly responds with the minimal amount of inquisitiveness to make his reply qualify as a question, responding, “Aggressive?” Here begins the director’s scheme of putting judgement in the mouths of others. His attempts to get raw analysis from his often barely willing participants invent a drama that initially has no purpose beyond fueling itself. He’s spurring critical thinking but in the most annoying way possible.

“The Sheik and I” is a commissioned film for an arts festival celebrating “the production of art as a subversive act.” Actually, it is a film about the making of that commissioned film, at least, until that one is done. Then it becomes a film about the censorship of the film about the commissioned film. Somehow Zahedi holds this all together and acts like it's no big deal, ready to act wildly surprised when the world isn’t exactly as he would have expected it to be. While the director might not be in control of the world he’s navigating in the film, he’s certainly in control of how we see it. He plays himself walking a line between innocence and ignorance, but really he’s a blindfolded magician throwing knives with a secret hole in the fabric to peek through, one eye always on the target.

Zahedi’s wide-eyed curiosity invigorates the plot whenever it starts to lag. When he innocently asks why anyone would object to appearing in a scene mixing terrorism, weapons and Muslim prayer, he exposes the issue in its barest form. Zahedi continues to play the ignorant American, isolating the tension on both sides. His wary actors initially explain to him that his concept isn’t realistic and is in fact stupid, which the director waves off, saying that he knows it’s stupid and it doesn’t need to be realistic. The actors persist, clarifying that it’s not that they don’t understand his intentions in the moment, but that the people that see it will not understand and will take offense to it. Zahedi persists until the actors express fear at putting themselves in danger, a call that the director leaves to them to make.

Zahedi doesn’t have a difficult time finding people to get involved with his production. From the moment they land in Sharjah, he starts recruiting almost everyone he meets to be in his movie in some way. The man hired to pick up the director and his crew from the airport, Mansour, immediately becomes a part of the film as well as the film they are making for the arts festival. Soon after, he recruits an employee of the organization that has hired the filmmaker, named Yazan, to play a kidnapper. They all set out together to shoot a scene guerilla-style but then realize that they are about to use the house of the daughter of the Sheik as the backdrop for a scene featuring a kidnapper holding a machine gun and wearing a burqa. Zahedi doesn’t relent though and keeps pushing to shoot the scene anyway until Mansour, who has been a good sport and played along with the director’s off-the-wall approach to filmmaking, finally objects. Yazan agrees it’s a bad idea and suggests they leave, prompting Zahedi to activate his ignorant mode, requiring Yazan to break it down in simple terms. He explains that because Mansour is Indian and is in the emirate to work to support his family, he could face deportation for participating in this ill-advised scene in the production. He goes on to explain, “Because of racism,” and then quickly, “Oh shit, that was on camera.”

That moment becomes the core of the film; admissions of indisputable fact shrinking at the thought of someone actually hearing them. The events of the film take place on such an inoffensive micro level that no one really objects to Zahedi’s interviews -- until the weight of a camera pointing at them sinks in. With the camera comes the threat of exhibition, and after that, unification of an idea that could oppose the Sheik himself on a macro level. Zahedi isn’t even interested in a specific idea, he readily admits he could care less about the politics that he doesn’t understand, but instead is interested in the death of an idea at the hands of censorship. By taking on his assignment of subversion to its extreme he discovers, “In a place with no freedom of speech, you can’t say there is no freedom of speech.”

Zahedi is impressively committed to his filmmaking approach, but still sensitive to the fallout from his tactics. He concedes his personal stakes are low, admitting, “The worst that could ever happen before is my work doesn’t get shown.” Many of the folks that star in his film however are at risk to lose their jobs or even face deportation from the emirate for their involvement with the film, leaving Zahedi to deal with the ethical puzzle he’s created for himself.

At times he might seem to champion himself above all others in the film, but Zahedi takes plenty of opportunities to embarrass himself and identify the important details he misses with his broad view. His ever-present young son Beckett chatters at him constantly, a noise which the on-screen Zahedi barely acknowledges, dismissing the talk by parroting it back at him incorrectly. In the edit though, Zahedi doesn’t just maintain that chattering presence, but subtitles it, calling even more attention to his on-screen inability to understand or care. When playing the clueless American, he speaks confidently in English to anyone he encounters, making no effort to endear himself to the locals. Instead, he uses the opportunity to firmly announce the perspective of the film, one that supposedly has no biases beyond logic.

In all, Zahedi is winning and even goofily charming if you can digest his abrasive approach to filmmaking; probably grating otherwise. He willingly plays the fool for us, skirting around politeness to get to the heart of his subjects’ mindsets and fears. The film moves quickly and is remarkably structured to reference itself when necessary, fattening its own ideas with its unfiltered logic. It resolves satisfactorily, even if it never really overcome the obstacles it directly identifies. The dissection and consideration are enough. [A-]

SFIFF 55: Judy Davis, 'Women with Cows,' "The Giants,' Rissient on Hawks

Meredith Brody — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:21:45 GMT

I have viewed myself into a corner; there’s practically nothing playing this afternoon that I haven’t already seen. I have prepared for this by checking out some press screeners, despite my insistent internal script that runs: “you don’t go to film festivals to watch movies on DVD.” So I try to choose either talking heads documentaries or movies with less than epic sweep.

So I begin with “The Anabasis of May and Fusaku Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images," a long title for a film with a 66-minute running time. It’s exactly the kind of project that one would never see outside of a film festival or an archive, combining period and contemporary footage and film clips over voiceovers from one-time Japanese New Wave screenwriter and director Masao Adachi, who abandoned filmmaking to join the revolutionary Japanese Red Army in exile in Beirut, and May Shigenobu, daughter of the group’s founder Fusaku Shigenobu. I don’t always find the Super 8mm images compelling, although the story is; I do enjoy the film clips from Adachi’s career, which as usual make me want to see the movies they’re from.

Occasionally, I admit, I pause the film to check the internet for more information on Adachi’s career and the filmographies of his collaborators (including Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu), and background info on the political actions described. (If I’d seen the movie on the big screen, I would have headed to the Internet as soon as I got home, as I did for example – really! – after I saw both the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s amazing presentation of Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” and the SFIFF’s opening night film “Farewell, My Queen.” I’m old enough, kiddies, to still find it marvelous that so much information is to be found at our fingertips within seconds.)

Next up is a Swedish documentary with the oddly pleasing title “Women with Cows,” which has intrigued me with a sentence in the catalogue entry: “ ‘Grey Gardens’ with cows.” Although the two sisters of the title are locked in a folie à deux, neither of them demonstrate the mad facility with language that helps make “Grey Gardens” so unforgettable nearly 40 years after the fact (not to mention the glamorous Jackie Kennedy connection). The crux of the madness is that one sister, painfully bent double by age and injuries, insists on keeping and milking many cows, despite the inherent difficulties and financial folly, while the other seems unable to dissuade her. The bucolic Swedish countryside, beautiful in spring and summer and forbidding in winter, is a seductive backdrop to a story that seems padded at 93 minutes. Its ending contains a mild surprise (hint: that’s why they call them enablers).

The last entry in my homemade triple bill is a Belgian/France/Luxembourg co-production, “The Giants.” Young brothers (15 and 13, though they seem even younger), left to their own devices without family or resources in the home of their dead grandparents in the countryside while their mother works elsewhere, get into increasing trouble when a pal introduces them to predatory drug dealers. Things briskly go from bad to worse. This modern-day fairy tale straight out of the Brothers (very) Grimm features an unexpected cameo star turn of a not-quite-fairy-godmother, who unexpectedly does not save the day. The indeterminate ending, very Huck Finn, begs a sequel: "The Giants Part Deux."

My homemade triple bill leaves me just enough time to get over to a restaurant in the Castro, Canela Bistro Bar, where the Festival is hosting a reception for Judy Davis. I arrive to find Festival Mel Novikoff honoree Pierre Rissient holding court at a corner table, and I join him. As a satellite, I thereby become the unexpected beneficiary of not only plates of hors d’oeuvres (delicious flatbreads, sausage, and Spanish tortilla omelets, which are good enough to prompt a possible return visit to the place), brought to the table rather than snatched on the fly, and, even more delightful, when Davis arrives, she joins Pierre, who has known her since “My Beautiful Career” premiered at Cannes.

This enables me to tell her, with complete honesty, that she’s one of the film artists whose presence alone is enough to make me go see a movie. She demurs, gracefully, and says “That’s quite a responsibility,” but I tell her she’s never let me down. Close up, she looks considerably younger than her 57 years (it’s two days after her birthday), as well as untouched by the surgeon’s hand. She’s wearing a tricky sleeveless black dress that suggests an avant-garde Japanese designer, and a similarly arty twisted silver necklace; they’re her clothes, one feels, not some stylist’s idea of Festival glam. She’s brought her tall, long-haired, fourteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to San Francisco, who cheerfully admits that she intends to go into acting.

The onstage interview at the Castro is conducted by Elvis Mitchell, critic and curator of the Film Independent program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Davis surprises by diverging from the well-trodden path of interviewees professing great affection for every director and actor they’ve ever worked with. David Lean was intimidating and less than totally helpful on “A Passage to India.” Why did she undertake Lillian in Hellman in “Dash and Lilly?” “I think it was the money – and Sam Shepherd.” David Cronenberg is courageous and perverse, and re-wrote “Naked Lunch” in a matter of days when filming remained in Toronto instead of going on location in Morocco. Woody Allen is “unusual” – “We never really talked.” On “The New Age,” Michael Tolkin was “another weird one…he wasn’t sure what he was making.”

A question from the audience about River Phoenix, who died at the age of 23 while they were making the unfinished “Dark Blood,” elicits “It was a fraught film. I didn’t like [director] George Sluizer, to be frank.” She ends with a rousing paean to the movie that’s about to be screened, Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Nobel prizewinner Patrick White’s Australian family saga “The Eye of the Storm,” saying it’s the first time she’s worked with a script that she feels is saying something true about Australia, about its alienation and dislocation, “a need to sort of justify one’s presence in an alien landscape…[that’s] beautiful, harsh, and difficult to understand.”

I’ve already seen “The Eye of the Storm,” which co-stars Charlotte Rampling as the dying mother of Geoffrey Rush and Davis, and Davis’s few words explain much about what I’ve seen.

The following day I play hooky from the Festival again. I’ve been tapped to drive Pierre Rissient to Stanford, where he’s going to contribute reminiscences of his friend Howard Hawks to critic/historian David Thomson’s class on the director. I pick Pierre up at the Fairmount, where he’s breakfasted with Fred Schepisi, and we talk nonstop about movies and books en route to Palo Alto.

It’s a gorgeous day, and I’m surprised by the bustling, prosperous atmosphere of University Avenue. We find our way to Thomson’s class on the massive, rather intimidating campus, built to my eyes on an inhuman scale. It’s held in a windowless auditorium in an impressive hall fronting the parklike oval quad, where parking costs a quarter for ten minutes, no credit cards are accepted, and I have nowhere near the twenty or so quarters needed to cover the more than three hours we’re to be there. The future of modern living, to quote the prescient Edward D. Wood Jr.

The class is on its fourth session, which begins with a clip from Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima, mon Amour.” To which I say “huh?!” But over the course of three hours Thomson weaves a fascinating and challenging criticial narrative that encompasses not only that film but a previously assigned novel by James Salter, “A Sport and a Pastime,” a long and mesmerizing clip featuring Nicole Kidman from Jonathan Glatzer’s film maudit, “Birth,” and, finally, Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Hawks’ musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

Entrepreneur/philanthropist David Packard’s exquisitely restored Stanford Theatre repertory house is concurrently presenting a nearly complete Hawks retrospective, to which the Thomson class is invited gratis. Pierre contributes a glimpse of Hawks as host and companion as well as filmmaker. I once spent the day in Palm Springs with Rissient and Hawks, so I chime in with my bit.

As I drive Thomson and Rissient out of town, I see people already lining up for that evening’s double bill of “Ceiling Zero” and “The Dawn Patrol.” The rush hour traffic doubles our driving time to two hours, but again there’s nonstop distracting chatter about books and movies, including anecdotes about everyone from Abraham Polonsky to George Worthing Yates, one of Pierre’s favorite genre writers, heretofore unknown to me, who, it turns out, was related to Herbert Yates, owner of Republic Pictures. The dreadful traffic causes me to re-assess my fantasy of auditing what remains of Thomson’s class. Maybe on a night when I can catch a Hawks double bill at the Stanford, I think.

SFIFF: Lawrence Kasdan Talks Making 'Darling Companion,' Reveals He's In The Midst Of Writing Harlan Coben's 'Stay Close'

Sean Gillane — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:04:00 GMT

Last week saw the release of “Darling Companion,” the first film from writer/director Lawrence Kasdan in nine years. The film tells the story of Beth (Diane Keaton) and her husband Joseph’s (Kevin Kline) dog getting lost in the mountains after their daughter’s wedding. The couple, their family, and friends spend the next week searching for the dog, a quest that puts all their relationships into question. We had a chance to talk to the director during the San Francisco International Film Festival where the film was playing.

For the first time since his 1991 film “Grand Canyon,” Kasdan shares a writing credit on a film with his wife Meg Kasdan. Together they shared an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay as a result of their efforts last time around. While it’s no coincidence that they have once again teamed up to tell a story together, the director considers himself to be in a constant collaboration with his wife, saying, “It was a good experience doing 'Grand Canyon' but we’ve had a lot of good experiences. We’ve been married for 40 years. 'Grand Canyon' was very satisfying but so was raising two children and having a grandchild and all the things that you get when you’re lucky enough to have a good relationship for a long time. It was a very organic turn in our relationship that we would work together again.”

“Darling Companion” boasts a cast of actors with an impressive collection of Academy Award and Emmy wins and nominations between them with Kevin Kline (“A Fish Called Wanda”), Diane Keaton (“Annie Hall,” “Something's Gotta Give”), Dianne Wiest (“Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Bullets Over Broadway”), Richard Jenkins (“The Visitor”) and Elisabeth Moss (“Mad Men”). Their parts feel tailored to their capabilities, but Kasdan reveals that casting doesn’t direct the writing process, explaining, “I never think about casting when I’m writing. There’s so many good actors and so few good parts. When you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve actually written something, which is the really hard part, the casting is like the reward you get and you get to put wonderful people in there. In all these movies I’ve made I’ve only thought about two or three roles ahead of time.”

Compartmentalizing the filmmaking process doesn’t discourage the director from having very specific casting decisions in mind once he gets to that stage. As he hunts for the right talent, he takes the opportunity to collaborate with talent that he’s been trying to sync up with through his whole career and “Darling Companion” became an opportunity to finally connect some of those dots. Kasdan speaks gratefully about his cast, saying, “...there are people like Diane Keaton or Wiest who I’ve wanted to work with for 30 years and never got a chance to. And it’s a thrill when you have a part that can attract them. Everybody that came on to this movie did it for scale; there was no money. The only traction they had was -- did they like the material, did they want to work with this group? And they all did, it was kind of fantastic, we got everybody we wanted. These are all people I’ve either known or wanted to work with for a long time.”

Beyond all the actors that might be familiar to a broader audience in “Darling Companion,” Mark Duplass stands out as a fresh face amongst the core ensemble. It’d be hard to find a big festival in the last few years that Duplass hasn’t had a film with an acting, writing, directing, or producing credit in, but his presence feels like new territory for the actor when seen in a cast with the likes of Kline and Keaton. It turns out Kasdan has been aware of Duplass’ work for several years, as he explains, “I had seen ‘The Puffy Chair’ when it first came out and I had seen a couple more of their movies. He’s a fascinating guy, Mark, and a terrific guy. When this script went out to be cast he approached us. I don’t know if I would ever have thought of him. Our casting director said, ‘Mark Duplass read this script and really wants to meet with you on it.’ He was actually the second guy we met for the part and I don’t think we met anyone else after that. I was so taken with Mark. He was so natural and he had never been in a movie like this. The things I had seen him in were original and fresh. He was just the right quality to sit within this group of very, very experienced actors and he’s from an entirely different background.”

On the loosely defined genre that Duplass has most been connected with, a type of film that co-star Kline recently admitted he finds mostly intolerable, Kasdan expresses an interest, noting, “I’ve seen ‘Hannah Takes the Stairs’ and several others. I find it fascinating. I like mumblecore. I like how loose it is; I like the feeling of spontaneity. I like all kinds of movies; I’m drawn to a huge variety of movies.” He doesn’t see any resentment between the two actors working styles though, remembering, “The whole cast was a fun group, they loved each other, they were drawn to working with each other. Kevin and Mark got along very well and are very friendly now. I think he was quite taken with what Mark did in the movie.”

In the past Kasdan has created films at a significantly higher budget level than “Darling Companion,” for example his last film, “Dreamcatcher,” which was released back in 2003. The director feels that while his interest in films has remained the same, the industry’s focus has taken a path in a direction opposite of his own, explaining, “Hollywood is not really making the kind of movies that I’ve always made. The first ten movies I made were all within the studio system and for a lot of those movies, ‘The Big Chill’ and ‘Body Heat’ and the ‘The Accidental Tourist,’ they were comedies or dramas about people. The studios don’t really do that too much anymore; they’re into another kind of movie. Some of which I like very much, but they’re gigantically expensive extravaganzas and they tend not to be human scale. So it seems to me that my future is a place where they’re still making movies like that, which is the indie world.”

Despite seeing his future outside of the studio system, Kasdan is still interested in branching out. There is even a surprising animated sequence that pops up within “Darling Companion” about which Kasdan reveals, “It’s the first time I’ve ever done it and I loved doing it. I always saw it as primitive animation, which I’m drawn to.” As we previously reported, Kasdan will next be tackling a thriller, which the director declares is, “a little different than anything I’ve done before, it’s the closest probably to ‘Body Heat.’ Harlan Coben, who is a wonderful thriller novelist, wrote the book which ‘Tell No One’ is based. He has a new best seller, which is on the best seller list right now, and he and I are collaborating on an adaptation of that book which is called, ‘Stay Close.’ It’s a very dark, Hitchcockian thriller set in New Jersey and I’m in the middle of that screenplay right now.”

“Darling Companion” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and start to roll out wider this coming Friday. The San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3rd.

55th San Francisco International Film Festival: from Fest Guilt and Porn to Rory Kennedy's 'Ethel'

Meredith Brody — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:29:38 GMT

I’m not particularly fond of the phrase “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans,” (even if it’s attributed to Woody Allen). But I’m being reminded of it daily. A couple of days ago, I felt guilty that I was watching a James Bond marathon instead of attending the afternoon honoring Barbara Kopple with the Persistence of Vision award, rationalizing my absence somewhat by (a) telling myself that I’d seen the movie they were screening, “Harlan County, USA,” more than once, and (b) that I was helping to instill cinephilia in my two young companions.

Today I feel guilty about choosing Rory Kennedy’s documentary about her mother, Ethel (and, by extension, her father Robert Kennedy, the Kennedy family, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war, and politics of the 50s onwards, all touched on in 97 minutes), over a 2 ½ hour Russian movie, “Target,” about “characters struggling to find meaning in a near-future ultra-capitalistic and over-consuming Russia,” especially because “Ethel” is scheduled to be broadcast on HBO this spring. But I wake up tired and I dread seeing, well, parts of “Target,” if you know what I mean.

I do sneak into the amusing Q-and-A with director Alexander Zeldovich afterwards, along with another local writer who tells me he watched the movie on his 27-inch computer screen, making me feel that maybe I could still watch it on my TV, after all. Insert screed about “I don’t go to film festivals to watch movies on DVD,” complete with anecdote about the horror I once felt watching a Toronto critic spend day after day in the noisy media room at the Toronto International Film Festival, because he could get in maybe one more title a day if he didn’t bother traipsing around from venue to venue. Thereby never seeing anything projected larger than a computer screen, and never feeling the ineffable pleasure of communal watching.

So there. I feel the ineffable pleasure of communal watching in “Ethel” that I’d never get at home alone, manifested in audible sniffing, among other strong reactions. I’d run into a friend at the festival a couple of days ago who’d just emerged from “Ethel” and had felt compelled to congratulate Rory Kennedy on the film’s power afterwards. Still glowing from the encounter, she told me she felt re-energized about the possibility of changing the world for the better. I’m sorry that Kennedy wasn’t still in town this afternoon for another Q and A.

So now I feel guilty that I’m going to see a wildly successful commercial film that is due to be released in May, by the Weinstein Company, no less. “Les Intouchables,” about a wealthy paraplegic whose zest for life is re-invigorated by the joie de vivre of a poor immigrant African servant, quickly became the second-most-viewed movie in France ever (after “Welcome to the Sticks,” aka “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis”), and eventually the highest-grossing movie in a language other than English (breaking the record for “Spirited Away").

I kinda dread it. The plot seems, dare I say it, racist (what’s the opposite of noble savage?), not to say clichéd and patronizing and cutesy. But I’m nothing if not a student of the zeitgeist, and once I’m seated in big ol’ room One with an obviously excited capacity crowd, laughing at the deprecating charm of the two young directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (who warn us that their movie is “in color, with dialogues,” i.e. not “The Artist), I’m ready. Etonne moi!

But the crowd’s excitement quickly turns to confusion once the movie unreels once, then twice, without subtitles. Yes, God laughs: apparently this copy (a digital one, I think) has no subtitles, although the credits themselves are in English (“based on a true story,” etc.).

By the time the announcement is made that members of the audience can choose to either get refunds or stay and watch the film in French, an hour has gone by. I stick around, but can only stay for half the two-hour film, because I’m due to meet old friend Pierre Rissient, in town to receive SFIFF’s Mel Novikoff Award “bestowed upon an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s appreciation of world cinema.”

“Les Intouchables” is indeed racist, clichéd, patronizing, and cutesy. (At least the hour of it that I see.) (And scheduled for an American remake!) I’m reminded, uncomfortably, of the time several years ago when I sat in a theater watching “Welcome to the Sticks,” (shown during the SF Film Society’s French Cinema Now festival), surrounded by a wildly guffawing audience, feeling kinda clueless. (I note that an American remake of “Welcome to the Sticks” still is listed in pre-production.)

Pierre and I catch up in the lobby of his nearby hotel before I accompany him to a party hosted by the Bank of the West (whose parent company is French) in honor of contemporary French cinema and “Les Intouchables,” conveniently held in the ever-changing restaurant next door to the Kabuki now called Pa’Ina Lounge. Pa’ina means “get together” in Hawaiian, a little Google tells me, and I guess that you can find char siu bao, siu mai, and egg rolls, in Hawaii, as well as sliced ham, cubes of cheese, and baguette (a nod to France?). Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I appreciate free food as much as the next festival geek, although not the over-loud music that forces me to shout into director Fred Schepisi’s ear. He’s never seen the Castro theater, where his “Eye of the Storm” is showing as part of tomorrow night’s tribute to Judy Davis, and I assure him that it’s a matchlessly preserved movie palace.

I run upstairs to the movie palace known as room 1 at the Kabuki, to see “Cherry,” the first movie directed by local hero and prolific novelist Stephen Elliott. I’ve heard it’s something of a valentine to San Francisco. I love paeans to cities: the first few minutes of “Oslo, August 31,” in which voiceovers of different reminiscences of the town accompanied shots of Oslo, were among the most exhilarating I’ve spent at the festival, even if the movie did take a very different turn afterwards.

There are recognizable, even iconic, SF locations (even in the scenes that are supposed to be set in Long Beach or on the road to SF, but hey! That’s scrappy independent low-budget fimmaking!) The audience applauds when two friends admire the long SF panorama from the top of Dolores Park, saying “This must be the most beautiful city in the world.” (Ever the curmedgeonette, I turn to my seatmate and whisper “I guess they’ve never been to Paris. Or anywhere else.”)

But the rags-to-riches -- or maybe unactualized-laundromat-employee-to-actualized-porn-director -- story plays like it should have been run through the old computer one more time. Ashley Hinshaw glows as Candide/Angelina, but Lili Taylor, James Franco, Dev Patel, and Heather Graham (still glowing herownself much as she did as Rollergirl, which I oddly glimpse within 24 hours as it’s back in heavy rotation on HBO) are given what feels like parts of characters rather than characters. And if co-writer Lorelei Lee thinks that not all porn stars were sexually abused as children, as she tartly informs one questioner after the film, one wonders why she and Elliott include a creepy shot of the protagonist’s (step?)father looming over her as she lies in bed clutching her younger sister and pretending to be asleep.

In today’s online porn world, I think, judging from what I’ve seen in “Cherry” and heard from its creators, plotlines may have gone away – it’s pure cut-to-the-chase, if you will – but there doesn’t seem to be any concept of guilt. I wish I could say the same as far as guilt is concerned. But I hear from one of my favorite film writers of all time, David Thomson, that the best movie he’s seen recently is Julia Loktev’s “The Loneliest Planet,” which was screening right down the hall while I was watching “Cherry.” I won’t be able to make its only other screening. It doesn’t seem to be scheduled to play anywhere outside of LA and NY. God laughs.

SFIFF: tUnE-yArDs Live Score For Buster Keaton & Fatty Arbuckle Films Did Not Disappoint

Sean Gillane — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:04:00 GMT

One of the most anticipated annual events at the San Francisco International Film Festival is the live score performances held each year. While it would be hard to top last year’s Tindersticks live performance of their own Claire Denis scores, this year’s pairing of tUnE-yArDs (led by Merrill Garbus) and guitarist Ava Mendoza with a collection of Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle films did not disappoint.

The evening consisted of four classic films, including “One Week”, “Good Night, Nurse!," “The Haunted House," and “The Cook.” The musicians quickly earned confidence from the crowd during “One Week” as Garbus’s unique vocals standing in for church bells were suddenly drowned out by Mendoza’s wailing guitar, signaling a villainous force entering the frame. During the performance, the musicians faced the films, respectfully interacting with the on-screen action instead of having it play backup to their own act. Collisions, trap doors, and storms all got their appropriate musical counterpart.

There is an inventiveness to the music of tUnE-yArDs that perfectly suits the surprises and twists that the Keaton and Arbuckle films offer. The scoring typically followed a pattern of Garbus-generated vocal and percussive loops (a tUnE-yArDs staple) backed with Mendoza’s elusive guitar melodies. The rest of the band pulled their weight, filling out the sound as the films unfolded, and when actual tUnE-yArDs songs hijacked the flow. Pairing the bank robbery scene in the Keaton-starring “The Haunted House” with the song “Gangsta” might not have been the most creative combination, but for fans that attended the show with an equal interest in the band and the film legend, it helped to crystallize the spirit of the event.

Those looking for another taste of tUnE-yArDs at the festival can check out the “Made in USA” shorts program, which includes Bay Area director Mimi Cave’s music video for “Bizness.” Or you can just watch it below.

Later in the festival fans of the live music/film combo can look forward to the world premiere of director Sam Green’s new film “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” which will be accompanied by a live performance by Yo La Tengo on Tuesday, May 1st. The San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3rd.

SFIFF: Harmony Korine & Val Kilmer Talk Stepping Into 'The Fourth Dimension'

Sean Gillane — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:04:03 GMT

Last Friday night, “The Fourth Dimension” made its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, a collaborative film that we thought got satisfying results out of its premise. In attendance were the set of directors responsible for the three short films created based on a collection of random instructions generated by Vice Films producer Eddy Moretti in a collaboration with Grolsch Film Works. The directors tapped included Harmony Korine (“Trash Humpers,” “Gummo”), Aleksei Fedorchenko (“Silent Souls”) and Polish director Jan Kwiecinski, making his big screen debut. We sat down to talk to Harmony Korine and Val Kilmer -- who stars in Korine’s film as a ridiculous motivational speaker -- about their short, “Lotus Community Workshop.”

The description of Korine creating a film within a structured set of rules may sound familiar. Back in 1999 Korine created his sophomore feature narrative “Julien Donkey-Boy” under the notably restrictive rules of the Dogme 95 movement. “The Fourth Dimension” creative brief isn’t meant to act as Dogme 95 2.0 though. Korine explains, “The difference between the Dogme rules and these rules are significant. The Dogme rules were extremely stringent and it was more like an experience akin to going to church. It was something, in some ways, very difficult. But this was more whimsical, comedic, tangential. It wasn't like there was a sense of any foreboding on the set. That was part of the idea going in. Part of the appeal for me is it never seemed overly serious; the rules are whimsical, there was an immediacy to it. It seemed like a perfect opportunity. I just enjoy making things so I didn't really over think it or think about the other films [in 'The Fourth Dimension'] or how it would work together. It was just about the piece itself.”

One of the goals of “The Fourth Dimension” from the get go was to set the work of three directors next to each other as a theatrical experience. The producers decided that a 90-minute film was the sweet spot, leaving each director with an atypical 30 minute run time to work with for their films, a constraint Korine wasn’t accustomed to. “When [Vice Films producer] Eddy [Moretti] told me about the idea they said it needs to be about 30 minutes long and I thought '30 minutes is kind of an awkward length.' I couldn't remember seeing something at that length that I was excited by," he said. "So I thought it'd be good if it's just its own thing, like maybe not even a movie, or maybe it's something more like a speech, a live performance, an experiment or something. And that's how I started thinking about Val as the world's worst motivational speaker.” Regarding casting Val Kilmer in a role that most people wouldn’t immediately think to place him in, he continues, “The idea was that -- I always kind of felt like at his essence Val was like this guy in some ways. Like, this could be a great secondary career for him.“

In the “Lotus Community Workshop” short, Kilmer plays an over-the-top motivational speaker that has no discernible expertise besides talking nonsense and working a crowd. On playing the outrageous character, Kilmer admits to dealing with some concern during the process of making the short, saying, “Well you know because the guy says so many idiotic things and his taste is questionable, at best, in a number of areas I had a real concern because the character's name is Hector but [Korine] would have people call me Val. And I'd say, 'Some of this stuff that I'm doing and saying, if it's not cut in the right spirit someone might confuse it with me. There's a sign behind my head that says 'Welcome Val!' And you've got your wife playing my girlfriend.’ It's just like this alternate universe, like the spirit of the film.”

Kilmer recognizes that the director has a unique process when creating a film, describing him as a “trickster.” The actor doesn’t feel unnecessarily excluded from the creative process though, in fact he can relate to it himself, disclosing, “If I was excited about an idea, like obviously he was or he wouldn't have made it, I'd want to share it with everybody. Except the private things in acting, it's your fuel and you wouldn't give away the fuel. There were several aspects of the story, like calling me by my name, that I would have to just trust him on because he wouldn't talk about it. And now when I mention it he just laughs. There's a real specific reason to a lot of things he does but he acts like he doesn't know what he's doing, like tricksters do. That's how he lives so it comes out very often in him, in his films. It's like there's some kind of strange magic going on. ”

Though Korine is often described as a director with a singular vision, that doesn’t mean he isn’t collaborative in his own way. Despite Kilmer’s unease at playing a version of himself, which could easily feel jokey and overdone, Korine feels confident in his approach to the character. The “Val” in the film explodes through the scene with an energy and pace that passes for improvisation, but Korine scripted the entire speech within a few hours of being asked to participate in the project. The director expresses a mutual level of trust with his star, saying, “Once he got the lines down it was about his interpretation. The truth is, I like the idea that with actors, once they give themselves up to the character, when they become the character, there's not really a right or wrong. They are that person. So I felt like what he could do was either just good or great. Cause he is that person, it is the truth already going into it.”

“Lotus Community Workshop” has some intentionally rough edges, with cameras from the shoot showing up on-screen and Kilmer speaking directly into the lens on few occasions, seemingly breaking character. This blurring of realities is a common element in Korine’s work; one that the director hopes engages the audience is a way they’re not accustomed to in most narrative films, as Korine illustrates, “Movies to me are more of a feeling. I like the idea of not always knowing what I'm watching. There's something interesting when you can go from something that's more written, more set up and then have it blend into something that's completely spontaneous and real and natural, but then never really know which is which. I like the idea of never being comfortable when you watch a movie. I don't want you to be able to just sit there and relax. I want the films to be more sensory. I want them to kind of go through you. I want them to be something more.“

An actor could understandably become worried about being thrown into a film that might aggressively challenge an audience without regard for how the actor might be perceived within that frame. Kilmer seems comfortable with the risk though, telling us, “Harmony saying, 'I just don't care about being judged,' is a big part of it. A lot of his experiments are exactly that. Experiments where you can sort of see into that experiment in the finished product. He has such wonderful courage; it inspires everybody.”

Since the beginning of his career, Korine has been known to be a notoriously quick writer, pounding out the script for his first produced script, “Kids,” in just six days. The same holds true to this day, as the director tells us, “I try not to write a script that will last more than a week. This was a couple hours, but ‘Spring Breakers’ was like a week. I just try lock myself in my room and imagine there's some guy with a gun at my head. Or else I could see that it just goes on for five years.”

As we previously reported, “Spring Breakers” will be Korine’s next feature film following his 2009 VHS-shot “Trash Humpers,” which will star James Franco, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens as well as Korine’s wife Rachel Korine, who has become a frequently seen talent in the director’s recent work. The director notes that the shoot is indeed over and expresses quite a bit of excitement about the production, remarking, “Man this thing's very special. I can't say too much about it but I'm really excited. I honestly don't know what I'm doing after that. ‘Spring Breakers’ was so intense. I'm sure over the next few months as I'm finishing up the edit I'll start to dream things up again.”

“The Fourth Dimension” is scheduled to play festivals worldwide throughout 2012 and is still seeking distribution. The San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3rd.

Jonathan Lethem's State of Cinema Address at San Francisco Int'l Film Festival

Sophia Savage — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:59:51 GMT

Check out Jonathan Lethem's State of Cinema address from April 21 at the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival:

San Francisco International Film Festival: 'Vivan las Antipodas!,' "Wu Xia'

Meredith Brody — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:02:44 GMT

A day of happy accidents.

I knew that I wanted to see “Wu Xia,” a martial arts movie that had been extremely successful in its homeland and which the Weinstein Company had acquired with some fanfare at Cannes last year, at 3:45.

I had a choice between two movies showing in an earlier afternoon slot: “Land of Oblivion,” a fiction film about the lingering emotional and physical effects of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and “Vivan las Antipodas!,” a curious-sounding documentary pairing four antipodal (i.e., across the globe from each other) geographical locations: Entre Rios, Argentina, and Shanghai, China; rural Russia and Patagonia; Hawaii and Botswana; and New Zealand and Spain. I hadn’t seen earlier work by either of the directors, and the films both seemed intriguing.

On the whole I feel I get more of the point of a film viewed on TV if it’s a documentary – especially, of course, if its primary intention is the delivery of information, not the beauty of its images. Despite the fact that I see more and more films via DVD and the plethora of movie channels, I still am occasionally stunned at how much more engaged I am by a movie shown on the big screen. I was most recently reminded of this by the triple James Bond bill I’d seen just the day before on the Castro’s matchless screen, and a viewing of “Dark City,” a film noir I’d seen and enjoyed several times on TV, which was something of a revelation when caught on the Pacific Film Archive’s less-impressive but still adequate theater screen last weekend.

So perhaps I was leaning towards the fiction film, especially because it was shot in Chernobyl and I figured the landscape would be more compelling, writ large. As it turned out, I was only released from my involuntary household bondage in time to race across the bridge and catch “Vivan las Antipodas!,” and even then only because the Cherry Blossom Festival was over. It’s a street fair that engulfs Japantown and the blocks in front of the Kabuki and Film Society Cinema for two weekends a year, at least one of which is scheduled at the same time of the film festival, rendering parking nearby even more problematic than usual.

I was surprised that “Vivan las Antipodas!” was screening in the big room. I was slightly saddened that the director, we were told, would be in town for its two subsequent screenings, but not today. And then the room darkened and I was immediately swept away, captivated by a film unlike any I’d ever seen before, which seduced me with its beautiful images and witty juxtapositions and for 104 minutes set me free from my own earthly cares and opened my mind up to many other possibilities.

I loved the camera movements, sometimes straightforward, sometimes dizzily turning upside down or sideways. I loved the juxtapositions of geography or activities. My mind felt freed and nimble in a way that meditation sometimes induces. I was reminded of some of the films of Chris Marker – not literally, but the way they make me feel smarter, sometimes, while watching them. Or, don’t laugh, the way I felt when I first saw Koyannisqatsi, decades ago, even though director Victor Kossakovsky’s long, languorous takes are nothing like Godfrey Reggio’s quick-cutting.

When the movie was over I ran into director of programming Rachel Rosen right outside the theater and, still reeling, told her I could easily have watched several hours more of Kossakovsky’s footage. She agreed that I was lucky to have seen it on the Kabuki’s big screen. (Later that night I discovered a whole series of Kossakovsky talking about his rules of filmmaking – on YouTube, of course. But no easy access to his earlier work, alas.)

“Wu Xia” found me, therefore, in an unusually good mood, seated next to a traveling cinephile who was spending at least part of the year AirBnB-surfing from film festival to film festival, having already been to SXSX and the Dallas Film Festival and looking forward to spending an entire month at the Seattle Internatioal Film Festival in June. We discussed the vagaries of film distribution, and he pulled out his iPad and introduced me to a website called Tugg, a new way of bringing films to “a theater near you” in underserved communities.

I was very happy with “Wu Xia,” which added animated “CSI”-like footage of the interior of the body to explain exactly how martial arts blows were able to maim and destroy their victims to its exquisitely-shot and masterfully-editted period story. I crave a good Asian action movie, and there haven’t been enough lately. I could have used more wire work, but why quibble. There’s never too much wire work, as far as I’m concerned.

Afterwards I took a chance on a Tibetan film – a Tibetan-Chinese co-production, as it happens, if that doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. Director Pema Tseden is identified as “the leading filmmaker in the only-just-emerging New Tibetan Cinema,” and this is his third feature. It was already screened once, and programmer Rod Armstrong notes in his introduction that he’s been asked to say that it’s a serious film, and that upsetting things happen in it. It’s shot in bright, grainy video, in long takes, mostly in long shot (an occasional medium shot, revealing facial features, comes as a shock) and not much happens in its 88 minutes. Apparently mastiff mutts are fashionable in China, and dogs are being stolen or sold for large sums. The old dog of the title is in danger of both.

I only wish that Rod hadn’t felt compelled to mention “upsetting things,” because the upsetting thing happens right at the end of the movie. Despite the warning, the fact that it occurs offscreen, and the incident’s symbolic and metaphoric power, I’m surprised at how vehemently some members of the audience excoriate the poor volunteer staffers trying to hand them ballots as they exit the auditorium. “It’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen!,” I hear, and “I never would have come if I’d known what it was about.” Huh. Once I’d settled into the rhythm of the picture, I found it compelling.

The last movie of the day is “Guilty,” a conventional, well-acted, but ultimately thinly-scripted movie about a couple falsely accused (along with a dozen other people) of participating in a child sex ring in France. (Memories were awakened of the almost equally Draconian McMartin preschool case in the 1980s, the longest criminal trial in American history, in which all charges were eventally dropped, but not before ruining many lives). Such a story might be better served at greater length on television, I mused, and then laughed at myself. Wasn’t the whole point of a film festival to get the hell out of the house and watch something with other people? Even if, as at “Old Dog,” they seemed to miss the whole point.

SFIFF: Richard Linklater Talks Making 'Bernie,' Bringing True Stories To Life & The Films He Has Brewing In The Background

Sean Gillane — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:57:00 GMT

Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” is hitting New York and Los Angeles theaters later this week and we caught up with him at the San Francisco International Film Festival to talk about the film.

The film tells the real-life story of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), a much-loved funeral director who forms a relationship with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a cold and insanely rich recently widowed woman. After several years of under-appreciated service and company, Bernie loses it and puts several bullets in Marjorie’s back, killing her. During the following nine months, Bernie is able to keep his crime a secret as he goes about spending her fortune buying gifts for the people in the town of Carthage and saving struggling businesses sort of like a dark Robin Hood.

Spattered throughout the film are a series of documentary-style interviews with the citizens of Carthage expressing their views on Bernie and his violent act. Despite being a confessed murderer, the folks around town speak well of the man, essentially suggesting that the killing was justified. For Linklater, this kind of attitude isn’t surprising, as he explains, “Our beliefs and our allegiances tend to trump any laws or any contrary information that comes at us. That’s what attracted me so much to the story. Cause here’s a conservative little town who kind of wants a guy to get away or get lightly punished. But that actually happens all the time, there’s murders with circumstances all the time. Particularly in the South, they kind of understand that frontier justice that still kind of exists in the South. “

A life-long Texan, Linklater has been trying to tell Bernie Tiede’s story since it actually occurred. He wrote the script (along with journalist Skip Hollandsworth) with a good deal of first-hand knowledge. Much of the film’s third act concerns Bernie’s trial, where evidence, such as the fact that he had kept Marjorie’s body preserved in a freezer for the nine months he successfully hid his crime, didn’t earn much sympathy from the jury. Linklater recalls, “I was at that trial. They would have given him the death penalty if they could of. It was so horrific- on the surface it looked so bad. He would have been better off disposing of her body or chopping her up and feeding her to the fish in the local lake. They would have understood that in some way. But the freezer thing threw everybody, it’s just so out of the ordinary.”

Looking over the director’s career one can find a developing interest in narratives with some sort of factual root. Recently Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles” gave us a fictionalized account of a young actor in Welles’ theater company and, though again fiction, “Fast Food Nation” examines the horrors of the fast food industry based on the content of investigative journalist Eric Schlosser’s book of the same name. “Bernie” carries on with that pattern and it is no accident as Linklater reveals: “I never was a big myth person. I was never one of those kids obsessed with superheroes or myths because I thought the real world was so fascinating. You know the real history, the real geology, the real cosmology- it’s so fascinating, and it’s real. I’ve always found so much interest in that. Maybe I’m just not that creative. This story attracted me like others have just to know that it really happened and that it was true and it’s bizarre, but you try to be true to it.”

One possible next step in the fictionalized history vein for the director is “College Republicans,” a comedy-drama about the young Karl Rove and Lee Atwater playing politics at university level before they grew up to be giants of conservative politics. But while Linklater expresses an interest in true stories, even more attractive to him are characters he can relate to. The director lays out the difference, explaining. “Obviously you have to relate to those characters or feel yourself in them. I really felt for Bernie in this whole process and I felt I knew him, and Marjorie too," Linklater said. ""College Republicans," that was a thing, I don’t know if that film will ever get made, but it’s kind of from a different viewpoint, kind of more political, more like ‘what an interesting moment in time.’ But I don’t feel the same way for those characters. It would be weird to make a film about, ‘The world would be better if my protagonist never existed.’”

Besides “College Republicans,” Linklater’s name has been linked to a remake of “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” the “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed and Confused” called “That’s What I’m Talking About,” and another entry in the “Before Sunrise” series. While the director isn’t ready to confirm his next film, that doesn’t mean he’s willing to let his projects fade away. Linklater describes his commitment to the projects he has passion for, saying: “Early on I could just go from one to the next but I’ve got this pile of backlog. I gotta say, it’s pretty satisfying twelve plus years later to have 'Bernie' finished, for something that’s been on that back-burner through 10 other films or so.”

“Bernie” comes to New York and Los Angeles this Friday and will roll out across the country in the coming weeks. The San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3rd. You can read more about the film in our interviews with Linklater, Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black from SXSW, as well as our review.

SFIFF 55 Update: From Jonathan Lethem to 'Oslo, August 21st,' 'Queen of Versailles,' 'The Sheik and I'

Meredith Brody — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:00:01 GMT

I’ve seen quite a few of SFIFF's State of the Cinema lectures, the tenth in fest's series of inviting a “prominent thinker to discuss the intersecting worlds of contemporary cinema, culture, and society.” Highlights that spring to mind include the erudite sound designer and film editor Walter Murch, complete with Power Point presentation; the irrepressible and charming director/animator/voice actor Brad Bird; and Tilda Swinton, easily the most stylishly attired and poetically, delightfully incoherent.

Last year’s invitee, however, the respected and prolific indie producer Christine Vachon, came woefully underprepared – I was sitting close enough to see the meager collection of post-its on which she’d scrawled her thoughts, the sum of which seemed to be that since she’d just produced a successful miniseries for TV (Todd Haynes’ “Mildred Pierce”), it was now OK for movie producers to create content for other providers.

I shouldn’t have worried. Programmer Sean Uyehara, who introduces this year’s speaker, the prolific novelist Jonathan Lethem, mentions that Lethem was first invited to deliver the address a couple of years ago, so presumably he’s been thinking about what he’s going to say for quite some time. Also, he’s now Disney Chair of Creative Writing at Pomona College (I was surprised to learn he’s left his iconic Brooklyn for sunny Southern Cal), so he knows his way around a lecture. Which he reads (more accurately, performs) from a densely-printed text.

He describes his talk as a plate-spinning act straight out of vaudeville, with each “plate” one of a few things he’s been thinking about in relation to the state of media. He celebrates the mumblecore films as an inadvertent documentary of our time, in which “late techno-capitalism has made infants of us all.” The Occupy movement is interesting precisely because it doesn’t make demands – its power as a movement is as a mirror, or a Rorschach blot – and has given capitalism back its name as a system, in that one can again be anti-capitalist.

Neoteny, wherein new species demonstrate traits of the infants of earlier species, reminds him of rock-and-roll coming from early jazz novelty numbers, and therefore he sees certain current film and media movements as preferring the demo track over the finished one, the rehearsal over the polished performance. He points out that the threat of death from new media to old media is greatly exaggerated: radio wasn’t destroyed by movies, nor movies by television. (Stop the presses!)

He loses me with the idea of “true vs. the real,” including the difference between sponge listening versus obedient listening. (Sponge listening occurs when he overhears his 4 year old saying “that’s balderdash!” after hearing dad use the phrase.) On the whole, he wants to reassure us that the kids are all right, that his students (and his 2 and 4-year-old children) are still watching movies and reading novels, even if on all these wacky new-fangled devices.

It all sounds a trifle daunting, not to mention way academic, but in practice his thoughts are clearly expressed and only result in a few moments of head-scratching on my part. It’s not quite a bravura performance – he’s a little shy when he mimes the act of plate-spinning – but when SFIFF posts the address on its uversetv channel, I commend it to your attention.

Afterwards I accompany Fandor’s Jonathan Marlow, LinkTV’s Hannah Eaves, and their irresistible tot Zazie to a party for Lethem being given across town at the offices of The Thing, a literary quarterly. I manage to tell Lethem that my mother was born and raised on the same street in Brooklyn as he was. But it doesn’t seem the time or the place to raise a question that occurred to me during his address, that is, the difference between watching movies on movie screens vs. computers and smartphones. The difference seems important to me. And I also have a friend, like Lethem a novelist and essayist who teaches at a prestigious college, who tells me that he’s astounded at what his students haven’t seen.

I slip into “Oslo, August 31,” shown concurrently in the two smallest theaters at the Kabuki, #s 7 and 8. The 57-seat theater, with its unimpressive screen, makes me feel like I’m in one of those media rooms seen on HGTV’s endless roundelay of McMansions. I forget my disappointment while watching the well-acted, compelling Norwegian drama, based on the same French novel, “Le feu follet,” that Louis Malle adapted in 1963. Even knowing the inevitable ending didn’t prevent my investment in the fate of its central character. I’m impressed by its economy of storytelling, and by the uniformly high level of acting – even one-scene actors create believable characters and convey a sense of life lived outside the frame.

Afterwards I find myself in the same room, the same seat, even, to see Caveh Zahedi’s “The Sheik and I.” Zahedi was something of a local hero when he lived in the Bay Area, but I remained a little skeptical of his endless confessional navel-gazing, finding it verging on cutesy even when self-consciously transgressive, as in “I Am a Sex Addict.”

“The Sheik and I” outlines the process of Zahedi traveling to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates to make a movie financed by the Arts Commission for the Sharjah Biennial. Predictably, chaos and rule-challenging ensues, as Zahedi tries to approach the Sheik of Sharjah to either appear in the film or approve of his portrayal by a street mystic, resulting in Zahedi’s film being banned for blasphemy. Although, since the theme for the Biennial is “art as a subversive act,” one wonders just what the commissioning curators expected. In the real world, heads (metaphorically) roll, and nearly everyone involved in running the Biennial or commissioning the film finds themselves fired or leaving Sharjah. I was especially charmed by Zahedi’s adorable toddler, Beckett, pressed into action in the film-within-the-film as well as the documentary. I think he has real star quality and could be the Shirley Temple of his generation. I would be first in line for any future appearances.

I am part of the somewhat sparse audience for the 11 p.m. show billed as “Acid Queens: Peaches and Tommy.” It features a brief stage appearance by popular SF drag queen Peaches Christ, backed by a band of fellow film theater employees, Citizen Midnight; a clip show of Ken Russell movies (reminding one that he was truly hors concours and much missed; and the screening of a restored print of Russell’s “Tommy,” which looked wonderfully delirious on the big screen. The hoped-for bacchanalian manic singalong never happened; it’s just another night in a repertory cinema, albeit one with terrific projection, as far as I’m concerned. Later I’m told that the upstairs balcony lounge (where one can drink during the movie) was more Dionysian in tone.

I stagger home at 2 a.m. Sunday I’m mostly playing hooky from SFIFF. My two nephews and I formed a James Bond club when the 24-year-old discovered the 10-year-old had never seen a Bond movie, with the intention of working our way through the entire canon before “Skyfall” opens in November. We have a long-standing date to see a James Bond triple bill (“Thunderball,” “Live and Let Die,” and “For Your Eyes Only,”) at the Castro Theatre. It’s Ben’s first-ever triple bill (gotta get him in training for future film festivals), and Michael’s first visit to the 1927-vintage Castro, which he finds extraordinary.

Afterwards I drive back to the Kabuki to see a screening of Lauren Greenfield’s “The Queen of Versailles.” What began as the documenting of the building of the largest private house in America (90,000 square feet) turns into something else entirely when the vacation time-share business of the couple building the house finds itself melting away when the American economy faces its own meltdown in 2008. The blurb in the catalogue says “Forced to rein in their habits in the face of financial distress, they begin to discover their true goals and aspirations,” but I don’t think so: they seem as clueless and cheerfully vulgar as they were when celebrating the height of consumerism.

I’m amazed not only that they permitted Greenfield to continue filming, but that, according to her, they’ve seen and enjoyed their portrayal in the completed film. A fiction filmmaker would be accused of creating garish and unbelievable caricatures. Here the documentary eye trumps the unreality of reality TV. The bulging-at-the-seams 26,000-square-feet house loses 15 of its 19 employees and unpicked-up dog shit starts to dot pale carpets. As Greenfield interviews the immigrant employees and others affected by the recession, the laughter turns increasingly uneasy, and you begin to question your own values as well. The perfect film to see in a festival setting (especially interesting in light of having seen “Farewell, My Queen” a couple of nights earlier), enriched by the Q-and-A afterwards and the discussions that sprang up as we exited the theater. And soon to open in a theater near you!

SFIFF Review: World Premiere of Terrorist-Savvy 'Informant'

David D'Arcy — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:02:26 GMT

"Informant" has timing on its side. The documentary by Jamie Meltzer, told mostly in the voice of Brandon Darby, is an activist’s journey from the post-Katrina ruins of New Orleans, to Venezuela and Colombia, and back the United States, where Darby sours on his former comrades and ends up working for the FBI. Two men are in prison now, thanks to his testimony, which identified them as having made bombs that were intended to be used at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Identifying them is the official story. Darby may have done much more. It could be that the bombs would not have been made, or the idea would not have gotten that far, had Darby not been in on the planning. The same questions about the involvement of an informant could have been raised in any number of prosecutions of terrorists where FBI informants played a role.

Is he a traitor? Today Darby is a hero at Tea Party events and religious congregations. He says he’s acting out of patriotism. Meltzer's film suggests that a political tour of Venezuela and Colombia could have resulted in some version of post-traumatic syndrome that set Darby away from his original alignment with radicals that moved from New Orleans to Austin to the next confrontation.

Brandon Darby is unrepentant. We can assume now that there must be others like him at many of the Occupy encampments all over the country. "Informant" is a revelation because it comes from the horse’s mouth.

SFIFF 55 Reviews: 'Goodbye,' 'Robot & Frank,' 'How to Survive a Plague,' 'Fourth Dimension'

Meredith Brody — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:52:51 GMT

On my first full day of San Francisco Film Festival screenings, the first screening of the day is “Goodbye,” the latest offering from Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian independent director who was sentenced (along with Jafar Panahi) by the Iranian government to six years in prison (along with a twenty-year prohibition on leaving the country, talking to foreign press, or writing or directing any films) on charges of propagandizing, at the end of 2010.

Rasoulof was released from jail after 17 days, and Panahi after five months, while the charges against them seem to be still wending their way through the courts. Both Panahi and Rasoulof still managed to have new films, made clandestinely, premiere last year at Cannes.

Panahi’s (reportedly smuggled out of Iran in a flash drive buried in a cake) is entitled “This is Not a Film,” a putative documentary of a day in his life under house arrest, and played at the San Francisco Film Society Cinema two weeks before the Festival. His credited co-director, documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahasb, was banned from traveling to the Toronto International Film Festival in September of last year, when the film was screened there.

Rasoulof’s “Goodbye” is his fifth film. I’ve seen two others: “Iron Island,” (2005) an allegorical film about a colony living on a oil tanker in the Persian Gulf under a despotic captain, which felt didactic and eventually tedious to me, and more seductive “The White Meadows,” (2009), in which allegory becomes beguiling myth, as a man travels from island to island, collecting the tears of its inhabitants, in a mysterious ritual.

“Goodbye” is shot in a totally different style: the sunlight and fairy tales are replaced by grim realism, filmed in muted shades of blue and gray. We follow a beautiful young woman, a lawyer banned from trying cases, as she wends her way through Kafkaesque bureaucracy, attempting to secure a visa to leave the country. Her husband, once a journalist, is mysteriously “working in the south.” She’s beset at every turn: conflicted about her pregnancy, harassed by police, patronized by men who only want to deal with her absent husband. It’s a powerful film on its own, but almost unbearably sad given the context of its creation.
Next up is “Robot & Frank,” a modest American indie with an impressive cast: Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, Liv Tyler and James Marsden. It’s set in the near future, delineated by only a few touches, some deft – such as an oddly thin car, and the relentless process of de-accessioning the physical books of the local library -- and some not: the baroque, lacquered upswept hairdos on stylish women. The aging and increasingly forgetful Langella, once a cat burglar, is provided with a predictably adorable robot (voiced by Peter Saarsgard) to aid him in his daily tasks.

I find the film sweet but predictable. Afterwards, the pitfall of seeing a film in a festival context arrives: the young first-time director, Jake Schreier, is personable and charming, and who could not fail to re-evaluate the movie you’ve just seen once you learn it was shot in only 20 days, in hundred-degree heat that nearly asphyxiated the small woman encased in the robot suit? I am not unmoved. But it doesn’t ultimately change the good-natured but slender movie I’ve just seen (due to be released next fall by Samuel Goldwyn Films). A questioner in the audience proves to be a geriatic psychiatrist, who politely doubts some of the film’s internal logic. Who goes to the movies expecting reality?

Only two films into the day and I’ve already been confronted with political repression, abuse, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer’s. Among a plethora of choices I’ve decided on seeing “OK, Enough, Goodbye,” because I have never before seen a deadpan comedy about a Lebanese pastry chef, but I am waylaid by film buff and Sundance regular Janet, who is going to see “The Fourth Dimension,” a trilogy of films created around a set of instructions that sound Dogme-esque but more specific (stuffed animals and bad jokes must be included) by Harmony Korine (who I find generally terrible sans l'enfant), Alexy Fedorchenko (the terrific “Silent Souls”), and Jan Kwiecinski, a Polish director and unknown quantity.

I follow Janet into the theater because (a) the movie was on my list anyway; (b) it’s being shown on the biggest screen in the complex, one of my favorite places to see a film in the entire Bay Area; (c) they’re giving out free beer and popcorn; (d) it’s the first film from the beer company Grolsch’s new film arm (!), and I’m curious as to why a beer company has a film arm, anyway.

Onward and upwards with the arts. Korine’s segment, “Lotus Community Workshop,” stars a Sam Kinison-esque Val Kilmer (long hair, doughy face, black beret, but without the compelling intensity) as an addled motivational speaker. An extended, uninvolving inside joke. I’m ready to be charmed by Fedorchenko’s “Chronoeye,” in which a cranky would-be time traveler is seduced by a noisily dancing neighbor, but ultimately I’m not. Kwiecinski’s “Fawns” looks bright and beautiful on the big screen, but again its apocalyptical narrative, initially intriguing (four punk kids rampage around a deserted Polish village about to be inundated by implacable floods) fails to grab me.

Oh well. You take your chances. I am still mystified as to the hopes and dreams of Grolsch’s film arm, even after listening to most of the gnomic pronouncements issuing forth from the stage afterwards, laden with directors, filmmakers, and the creative head of Grolsch, who bears coincidentally another famed beer name, Moretti. He is the one who came up with these filmic rules in concert with Korine (which should in itself have been a good reason to stay away).

All day I have been looking forward to seeing “Wu Xia” (aka “Dragon”): two hours of martial arts set in 1917, although from a Chinese director, Peter Ho-sun Chan, of whose varied output I’ve seen “Comrades: Almost a Love Story,” and the American “ The Love Letter,” romantic comedies, neither of which demonstrate the skill set of an action director. But it’s said to have broken box office records in China, where they know a thing or two about action movies. (Ou sont les Hong Kong films d’antan?)

But reality sets it: it’s not due to start for an hour, and I can walk right in to documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” which is about the political group ACT UP and how its actions influenced the creation of the drug cocktails that turned AIDS from a death sentence into a somewhat manageable disease.

Footage from the 80s and 90s (i.e. before cellphone video) and contemporary talking-heads interviews with many of the protagonists has been skillfully assembled into a moving narrative of the power of activism. I only quibble with the film’s end credits, which might lead the viewer to think that the AIDS drug cocktail has saved the world from the scourge of the virus: the 6,000,000 alive because of protease inhibitors are highlighted, rather than the many more millions who do not have access to the drugs. They’ve erred on the side of triumph. Even Larry Kramer, whose angry letter mentioning “at least 75 million infections and 35 million deaths” was handed out outside the theater when I saw the revival of his “The Normal Heart” in NY last year, seems uncharacteristically warm and cuddly in his closing onscreen moments.

The Q-and-A is long and involving. I finally exit the theater at the same time as the audience of “Wu Xia” (easily identifiable by the martial arts moves they’re trying out on each other).

So much for trying to be pragmatic. Ah well. I can see “Wu Xia” on Monday afternoon.

SFIFF Review: Peter Nicks' Doc 'The Waiting Room'

David D'Arcy — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:41:00 GMT

The Waiting Room (Dir. Peter Nicks, USA, 2012, 80 min.)

At Highland Hospital in Oakland, it’s another normal day. Sick people line up in the emergency room to wait until a doctor can see them. That usually takes all day. What we see is a flow of humanity that’s at the bottom end of the 99 per cent. This is a last resort, but it’s their only way into health care – all ages, all races, all ailments, almost all dead broke.

You would not want to be on their end of the equation. Opponents of the Obama plan would say that reform would bring this country to a system of rationing. When you see "The Waiting Room," you are made aware that rationing is already at work, whether the illness is cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, drunkenness, or kidney disease. You see people who don’t have money paying in another currency, time.

Bay Area filmmaker Peter Nicks gives you what looks like a Fred Wiseman movie, using the kind of raw material and a cinematographic precision that you would expect from a television show like "E.R." It’s more distilled than Wiseman – shorter – but the pageantry, if you can call it that, is no less complex – hardworking employees under huge pressure who’ve seen it all, impatient sick people, an infusion of the suffering who have been laid off from their jobs, and lots of fear.

"The Waiting Room" is edited to give the range of emotions observed and experienced in that space, and that range is vast. You feel as if you’ve been there for a day after 80 minutes, and you’re thankful that you’ve been watching a movie. Patients who have nowhere to go after treatment are kept in beds until someplace is found, and the waiting gets longer. This is documentary as distilled observation. It’s also as strong an argument for universal health care that I’ve seen in years. Funded partly by ITVS, it should end up on Public Television, if PBS is till there.

55th San Francisco International Film Festival Gets Under Way: 'Farewell My Queen,' 'Trishna,' 'Twixt'

Meredith Brody — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:15:06 GMT

It wasn’t until I was actually heading to San Francisco yesterday night, riding BART deep under the bay, that I finally felt endorphins kicking in about the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. Intellectually I knew the reason I hadn’t been looking forward to the annual two-week roundelay of screenings, parties, tributes, lectures, and live music with film. It was the almost unbelievable confluence of the untimely deaths of Graham Leggat, the executive director of the parent organization, who had succumbed to colon cancer in August of last year, followed with unsettling speed by that of his successor, Bingham Ray, who joined the Society in November, and died of a series of strokes while attending the Sundance Film Festival this January.

The annual press conference to announce the schedule had served as a sort of de facto wake. The program, too, felt colorless on this grey overcast day, as the programmers quickly scrolled through their presentations. Even Director of Programming Rachel Rosen, who can make anything sound like a party, sounded rueful as she mentioned that a favorite discovery of the staff had just made a splash at the SXSW festival.

There were a few films I’d seen elsewhere that I could recommend without cavill: the delightful documentary “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel,” about the compulsively quotable and influential fashion editor; the highly-colored, melodramatic “Chicken with Plums,” by “Persepolis” directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi; Todd McCarthy’s labor of love, “Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema,” about the famed Parisian producer’s rep who will receive the SFIFF’s Mel Novikoff award this year.

But others had left me cold: the German crime drama trilogy “Dreileben” had seemed less than the sum of its parts, Johnie To’s “Life Without Principle” a minor effort, muddled in storytelling and lacking in his trademark action; Francis Ford Coppola’s “Twixt” seemed to waver in tone, with a strange assortment of acting styles; “Policeman,” from Israel, was uneven and unengaging; and “Trishna,” from Michael Winterbottom, based on Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” one of his minor efforts.

I was only able to catch two movies at SFIFF press screenings, with mixed results: “Bonsai,” set in Santiango, Chile, was a charming and literary delight, not just because it was adapted from a novella but because its young characters existed in a world of reading and bookstores and writing in lined notebooks. But Lawrence Kasdan’s “Darling Companion” wasted his considerable talents and that of an impressive list of collaborators (Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepherd, Elisabeth Moss, cinematographer Michael McDonough) on a predictable and minor shaggy-dog story. (Which, incidentally, due to the vagaries of film distribution, opens commercially in LA and NY the week before it shows at the Festival.)

But hope springs eternal. As I traveled toward the Castro Theatre and the opening night film, Benoit Jacquot’s “Farewell, My Queen,” I leafed through the program guide with rising expectations. I reminded myself that every year I’m surprised and beguiled by films that might sound less than engaging on first reading a festival blurb. Such phrases as “deceptively detached,” “unerring sense of humanity,” “crushing pressures,” and “restrained tone,” (now there’s one to make the heart leap) might not initially grab you, but there’s nothing better than having your expectations exceeded.A perfect example: last year’s “Silent Souls,” wherein a man travels with a friend to cremate the remains of his wife, which still resonates in my memory. The heretofore unknown-to-me director, Alexey Fedorchenko, was returning to the festival with a segment of the three-part fim “The Fourth Dimension,” alongside Harmony Korine, of whom I’m wary, and Jan Kwiecinski, another unknown. Pleasurable anticipation mixed with pain.

I was also looking forward to the skillful documentarian Kirby Dick’s “The Invisible War,” about covering up military sex crimes, and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney’s look at hockey enforcer Chris “Knuckles” Milan, “The Last Gladiator, ” as well as other non-fiction entrants, including “Step Up to the Plate,” about famed French chef Michel Bras, and a study of the performance artist “Martina Abramovic: The Artist is Present”. SFIFF’s documentary lineup is generally quite strong.

Among the fiction films, famed auteurs are not in abundance, having seen the Coppola, Winterbottom, and Johnie To films: the new Kassovitz and Guedigian appeal to the Francophile in me, but those are not exactly marquee names. Star power seemed reserved for the tributes to Judy Davis and Kenneth Branagh (the British -- and Australians -- are coming), but even those names are somewhat subdued in celebrity culture terms.

In celebrity culture, Marie Antoinette is still, it seems, hot news: in Benoit Jacquot’s “Farewell, My Queen,” she’s incarnated by the appropriately Germanic Diane Kruger, attended to by the beauteous Lea Seydoux and Virginie Ledoyen. I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon of one man greeting another: “Hiya, Rubens, painter of fat women!”, which I would paraphrase as “Hiya, Jacquot, photographer of breasts!” A questioner during the Q-and-A put it more delicately: “I read that your films are about women who are on the verge of a personal epiphany” – a personal epiphany, on Lea Seydoux’s part, accompanied by beautifully-framed (by both the camera and her dress) downy upper slopes of breasts. (Later satisfyingly revealed unclothed, as were Virginie Ledoyen’s, whose sleeping body obligingly turned over to reveal equally pleasing buttocks). Seydoux is an ideal subject for Jacquot: even her teeth have cleavage.

Not to imply that this was a flesh show a la David Hamilton: just another pleasure, as is the inevitable period display of lavish costumes and sets. Did Marie Antoinette have female lovers? Jacquot, devilishly arching his eyebrows, resolutely refuses to say during the Q-and-A, though it’s clear where his preferences lie: “I don’t think that they sleep together, but I think it’s quite a pity…I think it’s always better when people sleep together.”

The period piece provides a bit of inspiration for the afterparty, held at Terra under the looming Bay Bridge: saucily costumed actors parade through the two-level space. This year’s party seems sparser than last, which allows for startlingly easy access to the food and drink on offer. But after an hour, having glimpsed Kitchen Sister Davia Nelson, film publicist Karen Larsen, and Susan Oxtoby and Steve Seid from the Festival venue the Pacific Film Archive, Fandor’s man-about-town Jonathan Marlow, director Barry Jenkins (who succeeds in shocking me by confiding his new vegetarianism), and assorted other SF luminaries (though not the ones sequestered in the VIP room), I head eastward, having snagged a ride with Telluride Film Festival co-director Gary Meyer. He and wife Cathy are full of stories from last weekend’s TCM Classic Film Festival in LA, and are en route for work reasons to NY, where they will also see theater and art.

I try not to be envious. Who knows what surprises the next two weeks hold? Maybe another “Silent Souls.” I’m just a woman on the verge of a personal epiphany.

SFIFF Review: 'Tokyo Waka: A City Poem'

David D'Arcy — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:38:09 GMT

Would someone please summon Alfred Hitchcock? "Tokyo Waka; A City Poem" is, among other things, an ode to the crows that seem everywhere in that Japanese city. They attack people, they eat anything available, and they raid the city’s zoo to steal baby prairie dogs and other small animals that they can carry away. They pull hair off animals in the zoo to make nests. Bay Are filmmakers John Hapas and Kristine Samuelson get it all on film.

“They’re not attacking. They’re warding off,” says a biologist. Small comfort. Even the few foreigners who visited Tokyo during the Edo period (1600-1868) complained that crows were everywhere. They certainly are all over the art in woodblock prints that depict the city from that time.

"Tokyo Waka" is elegiac. At the same time, it is plain-spoken, as locals talk of the hardy animals as a part of the urban ecosystem. The audience gets a serene tour of Tokyo in the process -- a city contoured according to the tastes of Japanese for nature that has been tamed – except, that is, for the crows. It is strange that they are tolerated in a city that rarely tolerates crime, or immigrants.

We see crows that know how to turn on a water fountain, and that use twigs as tools to dig for worms. One bird puts walnuts on the road so that cars will crush them.

Why not just get rid of them? Some are killed with poison gas, but doing so in huge numbers would clash with the deep-rooted Japanese belief in animism, the notion that God is in all things. (Why didn’t this apply to dolphins in "The Cove"?)

So the crows stay – more or less under control for now, as we see in this rich meditation with as much sensitivity to sound as to the image. Remember that Hitchcock showed you how things could get worse, without warning. "The Birds" was filmed at Pelican Bay, right up the coast from San Francisco. How much human interference will the Tokyo crows tolerate?

'Beasts of Southern Wild' Director to Be Honored at San Francisco Film Festival

Aaron Bogert — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:08:54 GMT

The San Francisco Film Society announced that they will be honoring "Beasts of the Southern Wild' director Benh Zeitlin at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival with their inaugural Graham Leggat Award.

The award is named after Graham Leggat, the former executive of the San Franciso Film Society who passed away last year. Leggat was part of the granting panel which initially awarded Zeitlin funds for "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which went on to win the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Full release below:

The Film Society and its highly regarded Youth Education program will be the beneficiary of the star-studded fundraiser honoring Zeitlin; Kenneth Branagh, recipient of the Founder's Directing Award, given to a master of world cinema; Judy Davis, recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award which honors an actor whose work exemplifies brilliance, independence and integrity; and David Webb Peoples, recipient of the Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting. Susie and Pat McBaine and Katie and Todd Traina are chairs of this year's Film Society Awards Night gala, and Melanie and Larry Blum are the honorary chairs.

"Benh Zeitlin, one of the many filmmakers whom the Film Society has supported, has completely captured our imaginations and enthusiasm from our first meeting with him," said Melanie Blum, the San Francisco Film Society's interim executive director. "In fact, Graham was part of the original granting panel that awarded Benh one of two SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaker postproduction grants, totaling $105,000, for Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Leggat, the former executive director of the Film Society who passed away last August, was above all else a film lover, and one of the things he cherished most about his job was the opportunity to cultivate filmmakers and help them to succeed. As he stated from the stage at Opening Night in 2009, "For the past five decades the Film Society has been something of a high end florist. It's taken the best films from around the world -- the flowers of world cinema, if you will -- and put them in the vase of the San Francisco International Film Festival." In August of 2008, under Leggat's leadership, the Film Society underwent an organizational transformation and, through an agreement with Film Arts Foundation, became stewards of programs that serve filmmakers directly. "Since then," said Leggat with a wry grin, "we've become less of a florist and more of a nursery. And part of that increased responsibility has meant caring more about the wonderful filmmakers of the Bay Area and the world at large." Thanks largely to Leggat's vision, the Film Society has grown to become a true filmmaker organization that supports films and filmmakers at all stages of production through Filmmaker360. For more information visit Filmmaker360.

Zeitlin is a director, animator, composer and a founding member of Court 13. He lives in New Orleans where dogs, cats, ducks, chickens and a 350-pound swine run wild in his home. Director of award-winning shorts Egg, Origins of Electricity, I Get Wet and Glory at Sea, he was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film." Zeitlin participated in Sundance Labs and won the NHK International Filmmakers Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival with his film Beasts of the Southern Wild, and in 2010 and 2011 he was awarded SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants for postproduction.

Beasts of the Southern Wild won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2012 and will be released June 27 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The film centers upon a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee where a six-year-old girl exists on the brink of orphanhood. Buoyed by her childish optimism and extraordinary imagination, she believes that the natural world is in balance with the universe until a fierce storm changes her reality. Desperate to repair the structure of her world in order to save her ailing father and sinking home, this tiny hero must learn to survive unstoppable catastrophes of epic proportions.

Additional recognition came today when it was announced that Beasts of the Southern Wild will make its international debut next month at the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.

SFIFF '12 Preview: Poor Family Struggles While Country Hosts World Cup in Doc "Meanwhile in Mamelodi"

Vanessa Martinez — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:45:45 GMT

The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival unveiled its lineup earlier today to reveal the following films profiled in S&A: 2011 SXSW Jury Award winner Gimme The Loot, the French comedy The Untouchables, The Double Steps (which I reviewed HERE), the Sheldon Candis drama LUV, the French/German drama Sleeping Sickness, and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights.

A documentary we have yet to profile, Meanwhile in Mamelodi, will premiere in the U.S. during the festival, which runs 4/19 through 5/3. Meanwhile, directed by Benjamin Kahlmeyer and produced by Boris Frank, centers on a poor South African family struggling to make ends meet while the raucous event festivities of the 2010 World Cup are taking place near their town, bringing hope and joy to their community.

Here's a synopsis from the festival's website:

Set against the raucous backdrop of the 2010 World Cup, Meanwhile in Mamelodi is a beautifully crafted portrait of a place and one family’s daily life inside it. The Mtsweni family lives in the Pretoria township of the title, in the district known as Extension 11. Their world is a ramshackle collection of corrugated tin dwellings and makeshift shops, open sewers littered with debris and red-earth rectangles filled with soccer-playing children and teens. Seventeen-year-old Mosquito is one of those kids. As she studies for math tests, flirts with boys and shops with her best friend, her father Steven prepares his “tuck shop” for the promise of cash-flush tourists. Meanwhile, his wife struggles with mental illness. The Mtswenis’ lives unfold as the Cup brings new hope to the ravaged town. Extension 11 buzzes with the drone of vuvuzelas, signaling a new South Africa has arrived. Despite the poverty around her, Mosquito insists this is not her parents’ country. She is the face of South Africa’s future—part of “a new generation free to do all things.” Mosquito’s story is told with tremendous musicality—a sense of rhythm and vibration permeates each scene. Through a rich color palette of turquoise, gold and red, director Benjamin Kahlmeyer imbues his frame with texture and life, illustrating a potent hope emerging from the rubble.

Watch the trailer below.

Meanwhile in Mamelodi (2011) - US-Trailer - Documentary from Boris Frank on Vimeo.

The Complete Lineup for the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival

Sophia Savage — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:04:15 GMT

The San Francisco International Film Festival, in its 55th year, announced the lineup for its April 19 - May 3 fest. SFIFF55 will feature 174 films, representing 45 countries and welcoming sine 225 filmmakers and industry guests. Among the films are 72 narrative features, 69 shorts, 33 documentaries, 55 female directors and four world premieres.

Benoit Jacquot's French "Farewell, My Queen" will open the festival, while Lynn Shelton's "Your Sister's Sister" will be featured in the fest's Centerpiece screening with the director in attendance, and Ramona Diaz's documentary "Don't' Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey," which looks at the band Journey and its lead singer, Arnel Pineda, will be the closing night film. SFIFF's Kandar Award for excellence in screenwriting will go to David Webb Peoples, who penned classics such as "Blade Runner," "Unforgiven" and "Twelve Monkeys."

The complete lineup is listed here. Films include "Cherry," "Bonsai," "Darling Companion," "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," "Gimme the Loot," "Chicken with Plums," "Compliance," "The Orator," "How to Survive a Plague," "Ethel," "Life Without Principle, "Polisse," "Robot & Frank," "Nobody Walks," "Where Do We Go Now" and "People Mountain People Sea."

Tribute screenings include Carol Reed's "The Third Man," Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, USA" and Fritz Lang's "House by the River."

Among the Live & Onstage events are "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller," the world premiere of documentarian Sam Green's work on the utopian visionary, which will include a live narration by Green and a score performance by Yo La Tengo, as well as "David OReilly Says Something," "Merrill Garbus with Buster Keaton Shorts," "Porchlight: True Stories from the Frontiers of International Filmmaking" and "State of Cinema Address" bu Jonathan Lethem. Here's details.

San Francisco Fest Opener: Lush French Period Drama 'Farewell, My Queen,' Starring Kruger and Seydoux

Sophia Savage — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:36:58 GMT

The San Francisco International Film Festival will open with "Farewell, My Queen" on April 19 at the Castro Theatre. The historical drama, from director Benoît Jacquot ("Right Now," "A Single Girl"), stars Diane Kruger ("Inglourious Basterds," "National Treasure") as Queen Marie Antoinette and Léa Seydoux ("Midnight in Paris," "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol") as her reader during the early days of the French Revolution at Versailles. The period drama earned strong reviews after it opened the Berlin Fest, where TOH! critic Matt Mueller wrote:

Benoit Jacquot’s smart, elegantly mounted costume drama about the court of Versailles as it’s about to be swept away by the French Revolution. Shot partly in the actual palace, and making grand use of dark, dank, candlelit corridors and stairwells filled with increasingly panicky nobles and household staff, “Farewell My Queen” has an intriguing protagonist in Lea Seydoux, who plays a lowly reader to Diane Kruger’s Sapphic-tinted Marie Antoinette, finding her swoony loyalty to the mercurial queen severely tested. It’s stalwart costume drama fare, with an old-school approach, but intelligent crafting and provocative plotting keep it engaging. It already has a US distributor in Cohen Media and they may well benefit from Seydoux’s growing profile (propelled along by the icy assassin she played in “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol”), as well as the inherent appeal of its subject matter to an upscale audience and the current vogue for upstairs-downstairs storylines.

Jacquot will participate in a Q & A after the screening; the Opening Night Party will follow at the contemporary art gallery Terra. More information on the festival and tickets here.

San Francisco To Open With 'Farewell, My Queen'

Nigel M Smith — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:57:08 GMT

The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 19 - May 3) will open with this year's Berlinale opener, "Farewell, My Queen," directed by Benoit Jacquot.

The period drama -- starring Diane Kruger ("Inglourious Basterds"), Lea Seydoux ("Midnight in Paris") and Virginie Ledoyen ("Army of Crime") -- takes place over the first days of the French Revolution and is told from the perspective of the servants at Versailles. Kruger plays Marie Antoinette. (Go HERE for Indiewire's review).

Jacquot will be present for a post-screening Q&A.

Kenneth Branagh to Receive San Francisco Fest's Founder's Directing Award

Sophia Savage — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:20:30 GMT

Kenneth Branagh, who was recently nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Sir Laurence Olivier in "My Week with Marilyn" and directed Marvel's "Thor," will be honored with the San Francisco International Film Festival's Founder's Directing Award (in honor of Irving M. Levin). He will be presented with the award on April 26 at The Film Society Awards night (benefitting their Youth Education program) and honored at an Evening with Kenneth Branagh on April 27, during which he will participate in an onstage interview and screen his 1991 sophomore film, thriller "Dead Again." For tickets go here.

SFIFF's interim exec director Melanie Blum singled out for praise Branagh's Shakespeare films as "the most innovative stagings of Shakespeare's work ever put to the screen," as well as "his exceptional skill as an actors' director." His 15 films as a director range from "Henry V" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" to a film of Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" and "Sleuth," written by Harold Pinter and starring Jude Law and Michael Caine.

The SFIFF's directing award has gone to such filmmakers as Oliver Stone, USA; Walter Salles, Brazil; Francis Ford Coppola, USA; Mike Leigh, England; Spike Lee, USA; Werner Herzog, Germany; Taylor Hackford, USA; Milos Forman, Czechoslovakia/USA; Robert Altman, USA; Warren Beatty, USA; Clint Eastwood, USA; Abbas Kiarostami, Iran; Arturo Ripstein, Mexico; Im Kwon-Taek, Korea; Francesco Rosi, Italy; Arthur Penn, USA; Stanley Donen, USA; Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal; Ousmane Sembène, Senegal; Satyajit Ray, India; Marcel Carné, France; Jirí Menzel, Czechoslovakia; Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA; Robert Bresson, France; Michael Powell, England; and Akira Kurosawa, Japan.

SFIFF 2012 Preview - "The Waiting Room" (Real Life Trials Of One Hospital Emergency Room)

Tambay — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:19:49 GMT

I say screw the abundance of fictional hospital-set medical dramas and see this documentary feature instead which has all the drama served up non-scripted style.

It's called The Waiting Room, an ITVS-funded, character-driven, cinema verité doc that, thanks to unprecendented access, takes the viewer inside the doors of an ER at an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients.

It promises a raw, intimate, and uplifting look at how patients, caregivers and hospital staff deal with each other, illness, bureaucracy and hard choices.

Further...

The ER waiting room serves as the grounding point for the film, capturing in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. Steel workers, taxi cab drivers and international asylum seekers crowd the halls. The film weaves the stories of several patients – as well as the hospital staff charged with caring for them – as they cope with the complexity of the nation’s public health care system, while weathering the storm of a national recession. The Waiting Room lays bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.

As someone who's previously been one of those many uninsured (and currently know many who are in that predicament), only visiting hospital emergency rooms when in dire need of care, I definitely want to see this.

Directed by Emmy-award winning documentarian Peter Nicks, the film will make its debut in competition at the 55th annual San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs from April 19–May 3. More festival info HERE.

Watch a preview of it below: