Okay!! Here we go! Yesterday's press conference officially launched the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Susan Gerhard at SF360 broke the news.
Brian Darr's on top of it and has linked to the program schedule and offered up his own anticipatory raves.
I'm already attending press screenings and arranging interviews and hope to get entries up on The Evening Class as fast as I can. I'm primarily reporting to Twitch this year so my responses will be on either or both sites at the same time.
SFIFF is notoriously behind the rest of the country's festivals in its fare so many of these films will have been seen by others long before me, so any comments or recommendations or online reviews are certainly welcome, either through email or through the comments. Darren Hughes has already gracefully provided some guidelines, which I very much appreciate. Thanks, Darren!! He writes: "I just finished browsing through the SFIFF lineup and was pleased to see that several of my favorites from Toronto will be playing there. Along with the heavy-hitters—Sokurov, Tsai, and Hou—I can recommend two others. First, don't miss A Perfect Couple, directed by Nobuhiro Suwa. It was one of the best films I saw in 2005, a really quiet and sensitive study of a disintegrating marriage. I wrote a bit about it at Long Pauses. Also, there's an interesting Chinese film called Perpetual Motion. It's like A Long Day's Journey Into Night or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—one of those chamber dramas about four people who spend a night drinking and, eventually, revealing buried secrets. I have a weakness for those kinds of dramas, but Girish also liked it better than he expected to."
Further heads-up are invited!
