Peering at the SFIFF53 films from non-French speaking Europe, I'm especially glad to see a pair of German entries. Maren Ade's Everyone Else won a Silver Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival and follows the dissolution of a young couple on holiday in Sardinia. The film would have been a natural for our now-defunct Berlin & Beyond festival, and I'm assuming it didn't make the recent German Gems program because SFIFF already snagged it. If you've read the reviews and also caught Ade's debut The Forest for the Trees at SFIFF five years ago, you know this is going to be special. The other film is Turkish/German director Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, which is said to be quite different from his previous works like Head On and The Edge of Heaven. This one's a comic look at the efforts to save a failing family restaurant and stars my two favorite German actors, Moritz Bleibtreu and Birol Ünel.
I caught Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues hyper-stylized transsexual melodrama To Die Like a Man at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and loved it. Many loathed it. If you dug his previous works (O Fantasma, Two Drifters aka Odete) you sure don't want to miss this. In his review for the New York Film Festival, critic J. Hoberman called it "the kind of film Pedro Almodóvar should be making." Also Portuguese, at least in title and setting is Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun. I'm totally unfamiliar with the work of this U.S.-born French director who seems to be known for his formalist approach to filmmaking. Ostensibly, the film is about a French actress making a film about a 17th century nun in Lisbon, with Green portraying the director. Variety gave it a scathing review, but I'm planning to give it a chance.
The big Italian film this year is Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the unhappy wife of a Milanese industrialist. It's been compared to the works of Luchino Visconti. Uncoincidentally, the lone SFIFF screening of I Am Love takes place immediately after a restored print revival of Visconti's Senso at the Castro Theater on Sunday, May 2. If you're unable to make the showing, I Am Love opens at a Landmark Theater on July 2. The other Italian film I'm anticipating is Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's La Pivellina, in which a group of circus performers find and keep an abandoned child. Also of interest from Italy is Giorgio Diritti's WWII massacre movie The Man Who Will Come, which won both Grand Jury and Audience Prizes at last year's Rome Film Festival
From elsewhere in Europe we have Serbian director Vladimir Perisic's Ordinary People, a multi-fest prizewinner and (Bruno) Dumont-ian parable of ethnic cleansing and the human potential for brutality. At an opposite extreme lies Nina Hedenius' Way of Nature, a near-silent meditation on life at a remote Swedish farm. According to some reports I've read, the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia might be the next international hotbed of inspired filmmaking. SFIFF53 has programmed one title that keeps popping up, Rusudan Pirveli's Susa, a neo-realist tale of a 12-year-old bootleg-vodka delivery boy. Also from Georgia is the documentary Russian Lessons, which examines the 2008 Georgia-Russia armed conflict.
2009 was a quiet year on the Latin American filmmaking front, with virtually none of the region's major directors releasing new films. I'd hoped to find the Mexican omnibus film Revolución in the line-up, but perhaps it's too soon after the film's January premiere at Berlin. That reasoning wouldn't apply, however, to the absence of Claudia Llosa's sublime The Milk of Sorrow, which won Berlin's top prize in 2009 and was one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. One wonders, did the programming team really deem this film unworthy of our fest or were other factors involved? Oh well, I'm darn glad I saw it at Palm Springs.
Headlining what Latin American cinema we do have at SFIFF53 is surely Brazilian director Walter Salles' receiving the Founders Directing Award, along with screenings of his 2008 Linha de Passe and also a new work-in-progress. Also from Brazil come the narrative feature The Famous and the Dead and the musical documentary Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was, about the "spectacular rise and infamous fall of the undisputed king of Brazilian popular music." From Colombia there's Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys, in which a man and teenage boy set off on a roadless road-trip to return a cursed accordion. I've watched this on screener and it's visually stunning. Usually we get a bunch of titles from Argentina in the festival, but this year there's only one. The Peddler documents the work of Daniel Burmeister, a traveling septuagenarian filmmaker who uses local amateur talent to create genre movies. Rounding out the South American roster is You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiest, a Chilean comedy about the pitfalls of being young, horny and male.
While we may not have gotten Revolución, there are three other Mexican films in the SFIFF53 line-up, two of which I've previewed and heartily recommend. Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's documentary Presumed Guilty is an exposé of the Mexican criminal justice systems that follows one young man's efforts to reverse a homicide conviction. In Rigoberto Perezcano's meditative feature Northless, a young man's determination to cross into El Norte gets waylaid by the female proprietor of a Tijuana grocery store. The film I haven't seen is Pedro González-Rubio's docu-fiction hybrid Alamar, in which a half-Mayan boy spends a final summer with his father and grandfather along the Caribbean coast. The film has won a slew of festival awards, most recently a Tiger at Rotterdam, and I'm saving it for a big-screen festival experience (the underwater cinematography is by Alexis Zabé, who also shot Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light and Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe).
OMFG! was the reaction I had to seeing two particular Asian titles in the line-up—and I'm using "Asian" here in its broadest geographical sense. In 2006 I was blown away by The Forsaken Land, a film by Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara for which he won Cannes' Camera d'or for best first feature. I've had fingers and toes crossed that his new film Between Two Worlds would show up at our 3rd i South Asian Film Festival next fall, but I'm just as ecstatic to see it at the SF International. The other title that got a rise out of me is Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows. Rasoulof directed the phenomenal Iron Island, which the fest screened in 2006. I won't even attempt to synopsize what these two allegorical films are "about". Just read the program capsules and prepare yourself for an other-worldly cinematic experience. A million thanks to the programmers for securing these. (Mohammad Rasoulof, by the way, was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran along with director Jafar Panahi on March 1 and released 17 days later).
There are a handful of other Asian films I'm looking forward to. In 2006, Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a big splash with Last Life in the Universe. His two follow-up films took a critical beating and never made it to our neck of the woods. Now he's made Nymph, which garnered mixed to favorable reviews, and I'm really pleased to have the chance to see it. One of the highlights of the 2005 SFIFF was a sidebar devoted to New Malaysian Cinema. One of the directors feted that year was Woo Ming-jin, and his new film called Woman on Fire Looks for Water has come our way. It's described as an "utterly gorgeous meditation on yearning and regret set amid a small fishing village." I caught Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, a wistful social comedy about a blow-up sex doll come to life, at Palm Springs. It's an inevitable disappointment coming on the heels of the director's undisputed masterpiece Still Walking, but is well worth seeing for the lead performance by bug-eyed South Korean star Bae Doo-Na (The Host, Linda Linda Linda). There are two more Iranian films I might catch if time allows. Nader Takmil Homayoun's Tehroun is a crime thriller set in Tehran's slums, while Babak Jalali's Frontier Blues is an absurdist portrait of life along Iran's northern frontier. Anyone with a penchant for star-studded Chinese historical epics probably won't want to miss Bodygyards and Assassins and Empire of Silver.
Finally, we have some films that don't fit in any of these geographic categories. The top prize winner at last year's Venice Film Festival was Samuel Maoz' Lebanon, a film set entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. SFIFF53 also has this year's Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Set in a poor rural Ozark community, a 17-year-old girl must find her meth-cooking father to keep from losing the family home. Ted Kotcheff's 1971 once-considered-lost Australian exploitation shocker Wake in Fright (Outback) has been restored and revived with the hope of appalling a new generation of moviegoers. 2008's Baghead finally sold me on the talents of the directing Duplass Brothers and the festival will be screening their latest Cyrus, starring Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly. Another (truly) American indie film that's sounds promising is Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, the story of an ex-Black Panther returning home to Philadelphia in the year of the bicentennial. Finally, it you're as freaked out about Colony Collapse Disorder as I am, you won't want to miss Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn's documentary Colony.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
The full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) was announced at an unusually subdued press conference last week. With Executive Director Graham Leggat taking an uncustomary silent role in the proceedings, it was left for new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen and her staff to guide attendant journalists and Bay Area film community members through this year's impressive roster of 177 films from 46 countries. Rosen admitted that while the festival doesn't program according to "themes", certain ones inevitably emerge. 2010's program is characterized by "a return to basics and beauty in filmmaking," films that could be deemed "unclassifiable," films with an "intense interest in the creative process" and the beginnings of an "era of co-auteur theory" (15 of this year's selections have two or more directors). Rosen also joked that she has indulged her taste for "nuns, old men and farm animals."
In a previous entry I covered the films and events announced prior to the press conference. I won't be revisiting them here, except for these few addendums. Joining the list of on-stage "friends" at the Roger Ebert tribute will be writer/director Philip Kaufman and documentarian Errol Morris. At the world premiere of All About Evil, director Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) is expected to duet with actress Mink Stole on the theme song from John Waters' Female Trouble. Animator Don Hertzfeldt will be the youngest person to ever receive the fest's Persistance of Vision Award. The documentary Presumed Guilty so wowed the programming staff that they've already declared it winner of the Golden Gate Awards competition for Best Bay Area Doc, leaving one less decision for the jury.
Each year when the SFIFF line-up is revealed—and I've attended every single fest since 1976—I experience a mixture of elation and disappointment. This 53rd edition is no exception. Only six of the 20 films I most hoped for are in evidence, and several dozen more are MIA. That said, there are fully 25 films I'm very excited about seeing, with another dozen of possible interest. So here's my very subjective wander through what's in store from April 22 to May 6.
I'll begin, as I'm wont to do, with the French language selections. And right off, here's a big Evening Class kiss to whoever programmed Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg (Je t'aime…moi non plus). I'm a monster fan of musical iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg, but know very little about his life apart from the scandals (which include making the only pop record ever condemned by a Pope). This biopic only opened in French theaters three months ago, so once again, bravo. Somewhat relatedly, SFIFF has also programmed visionary Hong Kong director Johnnie To's Vengeance, which stars grizzled veteran rock 'n' roller Johnny Hallyday, aka the French Elvis Presley, as a chef avenging the Hong Kong slaughter of his daughter's family.
SFIFF has always done a fine job of keeping tabs on the work of France's l-o-n-g established auteurs. This year brings us Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which won a special jury prize last year at Cannes, and Jacques Rivette's circus-set Around a Small Mountain. I sheepishly confess to not being a particular fan of the latter director's work, but I adored 2007's The Duchess of Langeais and this new one stars favorites Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin (ex-wife of Serge and mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg).
A number of mid-career French auteurs also pop up this year, starting with the Opening Night screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, his first film since 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Bruno Dumont returns to SFIFF with his latest provocation, a tale of religious extremism called Hadejwich. Although it's received tepid reviews, everyone I know is dying to see White Material because a) it stars Isabelle Huppert and b) it's directed by Claire Denis. This is Huppert's second film in as many years playing a white colonialist, the other being Rithy Panh's mysteriously as-yet-unseen in the Bay Area The Sea Wall. Director Jan Kounen, whom Variety once called "the Carlos Castañeda of hipster helmers," gets a crack at the Coco Chanel legend in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. The story takes place at a time when reviled and penniless Igor (due to "The Rite of Spring" and the Russian Revolution respectively) moves his wife and four kids into Coco's sprawling estate. The film stars Anna Mouglalis (who also plays chanteuse Juliette Gréco in Gainsbourg) and Danish dreamboat Mads Mikkelsen. Then in Christophe Honoré's Making Plans for Lena, put-upon wife and mother Chiara Mastroianni gets to spend a disastrous weekend at her parent's home in Bretagne. And yes, there's a part in it for Louis Garrel. SFIFF53 will also be showing a special sneak preview of a new-ish film by François Ozon.
Four other French language films I'm anticipating are by directors at or near the beginning of their careers. I was thrilled to find Patric Chiha's debut film Domain in the line-up because it stars the world's scariest actress and a personal favorite of mine, Béatrice Dalle. Who can believe it's been almost 25 years since Betty Blue? Here she plays an increasingly unhinged, alcoholic mathematician who has a special relationship with her gay, teenage nephew. The lead actress is also my reason for wanting to see Dutch director Dorothée van den Berghe's My Queen Karo. Déborah François (The Child, The Page Turner) stars in this story of a squatting family in 1970s Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Karo. Making her second appearance at SFIFF is director Mia Hansen-Løve with Father of My Children. I wasn't as taken by 2008's All is Forgiven as many were, but I've heard nothing but great things about this true story of a French film producer's suicide and its effect on those he leaves behind. In her third feature, Lourdes, Austrian director Jessica Hausner enlists the help of yet another incomparable French actress. Sylvie Testud plays a wheelchair-bound, quasi non-believer who nonetheless makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes.
Finally, there are three French documentaries I've got my eye on. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno attempts to reconstruct a lost masterpiece by the director of Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, while recounting the story of its troubled production. Documentarian Nicolas Philibert had a 2003 arthouse hit with To Be and To Have, about a contemporary one-room schoolhouse in rural France. His latest film Nénette looks at a 40-year-old orangutan who lives the caged life in Paris' Jardin des Plantes. Jean-François Delassus's 14-18: The Noise and the Fury is a WWI doc that programmer Rosen especially singled out as being "unclassifiable." Using a mix of newsreel footage, movie clips and the voice of an unseen soldier narrator, the film attempts to fathom a reason for the "war to end all wars" 10 million dead.
While the above titles represent a formidable effort at bringing the latest French cinema to the Bay Area, there are a number of curious omissions. Will the latest works by such notable directors as Robert Guédiguian (The Army of Crime), Lucas Belvaux (Rapt), Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void), Tony Gatlif (Korkoro), Costa Gavras (Eden is West), Patrice Chereau (Persecution) and Sebastien Lifshitz (Going South), as well as Isabelle Adjani's Cesar-winning performance in Skirt Day pop up at the SF Film Society's autumn French Cinema Now festival? Or will they already be considered old hat and forgotten by then?
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
In a matter of days, the full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22 to May 8) will be revealed. If you're a San Francisco Film Society member, look for an e-mail this Friday with instructions for downloading a PDF of the fest’s mini-guide (and all tickets go on sale to members that same day). Non-members will be kept in the dark until after the official press conference next Tuesday, and can start buying tickets April 1. In the meantime, plenty of good stuff has already been announced. Here's a recap, followed by my personal 20-film wish list for the fest's 2010 edition.
For devotees of Midnight Mass hostess Peaches Christ (aka Joshua Grannell), the World Premiere of her/his feature directorial debut, All About Evil, will be the must-see event of this year's festival. Peaches seizes control of the Castro Theater on Saturday, May 1 at 10:45PM "with a fully realized stage-show spooktacular hosted by Peaches Christ, starring members of the cast including Mink Stole, Thomas Dekker, Martiny and more."
The SFIFF event I anticipate most each year is programmer Sean Uyehara's pairing of a silent film with a new live score written and performed by a contemporary music artist. You'd think last year's The Lost World/Dengue Fever combo would be an impossible act to follow, but I think Sean's done it again. On Tuesday, May 4, songwriter Stephin Merritt of the group The Magnetic Fields will premiere a new score to Stuart Paton's 1916 adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Joining Merritt will be Castro Theater organist David Hegarty, author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) on accordion and others TBA.
Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) will be the recipient of 2010's Founder’s Directing Award. His tribute takes place on Wednesday, April 28 and will feature a clip-reel of career highlights, an on-stage interview and "a special screening of In Search of On the Road (a Work in Progress), an hour-long edit prepared specifically for the Festival of a documentary about Salles's effort to make a documentary about Jack Kerouac." The following day Salles will offer a Master Class, plus attend a screening of his 2008 Cannes Competition film, Linha de Passe, which won a prize for its lead actress Sandra Corveloni. Hopefully, someone will ask the director why it has taken two years for this film to reach us (I believe this screening might even be the U.S. premiere?) Linha de Passe shows again at the Pacific Film Archive on Friday, April 30.
Receiving this year's Peter J. Owens Award for acting will be none other than legendary screen vet Robert Duvall. At the Friday, April 30 tribute, he'll be feted with a career clip reel, on-stage interview and a screening of his latest film Get Low, co-starring Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek.
Each year the festival gives its Mel Novikoff to "an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema." Could anyone be more deserving of such an award than Roger Ebert? On Saturday, May 1, Ebert will appear on-stage in conversation (employing his extraordinary, new computerized text-to-speech speaking voice) with directors Terry Zwigoff, Jason Reitman and others TBA. Following the tribute, the festival will screen one of Ebert's favorite films of 2009, Erick Zonca's Julia, featuring a balls-to-the-wall performance by Tilda Swinton. If you missed this film when it screened at the SF Film Society's Kabuki Screen (R.I.P.?) last summer, or its subsequent run at the Roxie, you're lucky to have this additional opportunity.
The SFIFF's 2010 Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting will be given to writer/producer/Focus Features CEO James Shamus on Saturday, May 1. Shamus is best known for the films he's written and produced for Ang Lee, including Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm and Lust, Caution. Following an on-stage interview with critic B. Ruby Rich, the festival will host the West Coast premiere of a new director's cut of Ang Lee's underappreciated 1999 Civil War film, Ride With the Devil.
Every year the festival screens newly restored prints of some select cinema classics. For SFIFF53 we'll get to take another look at Satyajit Ray's 1958 The Music Room at the Castro on Saturday, May 1, as well as Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso (date TBA).
This year's State of Cinema Address will be delivered on Sunday, April 25 by film editor/sound designer extraordinaire Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now). Titled "Three Fathers of Cinema: Beethoven, Flaubert, Edison," the address will "contemplate what would have happened if motion pictures had been invented in 1789. He will present various theories on the evolution of filmmaking, investigating the cultural origins of cinema in the 19th century and the implications for the future of cinema in the 21st century."
The festival has also announced the 11 films that will be competing for Golden Gate Awards Documentary Competition. There are three I'm especially looking forward to. Lixin Fan's Last Train Home won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (World Cinema), and looks at the phenomenon of China's annual New Year's mass migration. Winning the documentary Jury Prize just last week at SXSW is Jeff Malmberg's Merwencol, in which a brain-damaged survivor of a bar attack copes by setting up a complete WWII-era town in his backyard. In Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary winner Restrepo, we follow a group of soldiers fighting the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other eight titles are Colony, The Invention of Dr. Nakamats, Mugabe and the White African, The Peddler, PianoMania, Presumed Guilty, Russian Lessons and Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was.
Twelve filmmakers will compete for this year's New Directors Prize. I saw Ounie Lecomte's South Korean adoption drama A Brand New Life at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and would definitely recommend it. I've also heard very good things about Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar, which won a coveted Tiger Award at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. The remaining 10 titles are Animal Heart, The Day God Walked Away, The Famous and the Dead, Night Catches Us, Northless, La Pivellina, Shirley Adams, Susa, Tehroun and—I've gotta see this one for the title alone—You Think You're the Prettiest, but You Are the Sluttiest.
This year's Persistence of Vision Award will go to Fremont-born, Oscar-nominated short-film animator Don Hertzfeldt on Friday, April 23 in a program titled "Life, Death and Very Large Utensils."
Finally, SFIFF53 will close on May 6 with a screening of Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's documentary Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work. It is anticipated that Rivers will attend the screening, along with director Stern. At the closing night party at 1015 Folsom, "partygoers will celebrate the culmination of SFIFF53 with festive drinks, hors d'oeuvres and music inspired by the legendary comedian Joan Rivers."
Every year I draw up a list of the 20 films I most hope to find in the SFIFF line-up. They're culled from a longer wish list of approximately 100 films, spanning from 2009's Berlin Film Festival up to the present. A few have received mixed-to awful-reviews, but they're from directors who interest me nonetheless. Last year I only got seven of my 20 films, but eventually caught up with all but three. We'll soon know how SFIFF53 shakes out.
Altiplano (Belgium dir. Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth)
The Army of Crime (France dir. Robert Guédiguian)
Enter the Void (France, dir. Gaspar Noé)
Everyone Else (Germany, dir. Maren Ade)
Face (France/Taiwan dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) (France dir. Joann Sfar)
Hadewijch (France dir. Bruno Dumont)
Hiroshima (Uruguay dir. Pablo Stoll)
I Am Love (Italy dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Korkoro (France dir. Tony Gatlif)
Life During Wartime (USA dir. Todd Solondz)
Lola (Philippines dir. Brilliante Mendoza)
Lourdes (France dir. Jessica Hausner)
Min Ye (Mali dir. Souleymane Cissé)
Rapt (France/Belgium dir. Lucas Belvaux)
Revolución (Mexico dir. Mariana Chenillo, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo Garcia, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá, Carlos Reygadas, Patricia Riggen)
Scheherazade Tell Me a Story (Egypt dir. Yousry Nasrallah)
Skirt Day (France dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfeld)
The Time That Remains (Palestine dir. Elia Suleiman)
White Material (France, dir. Claire Denis)
And here are four terrific films I saw at January's Palm Springs International Film Festival—films I'd love for my Bay Area friends to see, too.
Dogtooth (Greece dir. Giorgos Lanthimos)
I Killed My Mother (Canada dir. Xavier Dolan)
The Milk of Sorrow (Peru dir. Claudia Lhosa)
To Die Like a Man (Portugal dir. João Pedro Rodrigues)
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
"I've never said this before but we were born to be Siskel and Ebert."—Roger Ebert
In the wake of the theatrical release of Shutter Island, it stands to follow that the cover article of this month's issue of Esquire would feature Cal Fussman's interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. However, when I reviewed the issue, the piece that most caught my attention—and which moved me quite a bit upon reading—was Chris Jones' revelatory profile of Roger Ebert: "The Essential Man", which I'm delighted to say is now available online at the magazine's website, along with additional photography by Ethan Hill. As value added, Ebert has selected what he considers one of his best-written pieces for Esquire: his 1970 interview with Lee Marvin.
As chance and other choices would have it, just as I was drafting this announcement, I received word from the San Francisco Film Society that Roger Ebert will receive this year's Mel Novikoff Award at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22-May 6). The award, named for the pioneering San Francisco art and repertory film exhibitor Mel Novikoff (1922-1987), acknowledges an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. The Novikoff Award will be presented at "An Evening with Roger Ebert and Friends", Saturday, May 1 at 5:30PM at the Castro Theatre. Confirmed guests to date include directors Jason Reitman and Terry Zwigoff, with others to be announced soon.
The program will close with a screening of Julia, touted by Ebert as one of the finest films released in 2009. Erick Zonca's character-driven thriller, starring the fearless Tilda Swinton, barrels straight into the sleazy wasteland of an abrasive alcoholic kidnapper who is in way over her head.
"It's an honor to pay tribute to a man who has enhanced the public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema for more than 40 years through his writing, television shows, Web site and film festival," said Rachel Rosen, the Film Society's director of programming. "His passion for film is an inspiration."
Here are a few excerpts from the Esquire article that inspired me.
"His new life," Jones writes, "is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing—it's like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It's not the food or the drink he worries about anymore—I went through a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note—but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn't exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning." (2010:121)
"Ebert's dreams are happier. Never yet a dream where I can't talk, he writes on another Post-it note, peeling it off the top of the blue stack. Sometimes I discover—oh, I see! I CAN talk! I just forgot to do it. [] In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn't get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can't quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he's never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole. [] These things come to us, they don't come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us." (2010:121)
"He took his hardest hit not long ago. After Roeper announced his departure from At the Movies in 2008—Disney wanted to revamp the show in a way that Roeper felt would damage it—Ebert disassociated himself from it, too, and he took his trademarked thumbs with him. The end was not pretty, and the break was not clean. But because Disney was going to change the original balcony set as part of its makeover, it was agreed, Ebert thought, that the upholstered chairs and rails and undersized screen would be given to the Smithsonian and put on display. Ebert was excited by the idea. Then he went up to visit the old set one last time and found it broken up and stacked in a dumpster in an alley." (2010:164)
"Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it. [] I know it is coming and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled 'Go Gently into That Good Night.' I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. …I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out." (2010:165)
Photos courtesy of Ethan Hill and Esquire. Cross-published on Twitch.
Earlier this year the San Francisco International Film Festival screened Gerald Peary's For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which I wrote up here, and followed it up with a free-to-the-public panel entitled "A Critical Moment", moderated by SF360 editor Susan Gerhard. My thanks to Daniel Kasman and The Auteurs Notebook for generously picking up a partial transcript of that panel. However, waste not want not, as they say. Here are the remaining perspectives.
* * *
For Variety, Dennis Harvey has dispatched from film festivals, often introducing filmmakers to an industry to which, otherwise, they would not have access. One could argue that Harvey's opinion foments opportunity for distribution. But Variety has been cutting back on staff drastically and Gerhard wondered if Harvey could talk about that and what impact it's having on the industry?
Dennis Harvey: Traditionally, the role of Variety—beyond reporting on the mainstream industry and reviewing the mainstream industry—has also been as the industry trade publication of record where everything is covered. When I first started writing for Variety, basically any feature-length film at a film festival that hadn't already been reviewed, was eligible for review and probably would be reviewed. That was before, admittedly, the start of digital technology that has made movies much less [difficult] to make. Even if the economy was doing really well, even if the Internet hadn't happened, there still would be too many movies for Variety to review, as a combination of that proliferation, simple budget cuts and the shrinking of print media.
We all know that the Bay Area has the largest single concentration of film festivals probably anywhere in the world. It has the oldest and largest of every kind of film festival. Even the International Film Festival is the largest in the Western hemisphere. It's a ridiculous embarrassment of riches for a relatively medium-sized metropolitan area. So it was a great place for me to be covering festival films for Variety; even better in some respects than it would have been in L.A. or New York. Until January 1st, when the new budgets were levied and I'm now covering from about 20 annual festivals in the Bay Area—which is still only a fraction of the ones that exist—I'm covering four. It's unfortunate—as a living, for me it's a personal concern—but, Variety had always been a place where filmmakers could potentially get distribution from all the visibility they would get from a Variety review, which would often be the first public review they would get. Now, unfortunately, it's going to be a situation where the films that are reviewed in Variety will only be reviewed because they have distribution. I don't want to say that's an evil, moral choice on Variety's part; it's more reflecting the reality of things.
There is a website and they always run more reviews on the website than they can fit in the publication; but, that doesn't affect the overall numbers. They're still reducing the number of reviews assigned in general. So there will be fewer web reviews as well.
It's luck of the draw. One angry filmmaker whose film I reviewed at Sundance left a message on my home phone—there's always a question how people get my home phone—saying, "Why can't you be like Roger Ebert? He supports young filmmakers." The answer is that Roger Ebert has the luxury if he wants of going to a film festival and only supporting starting filmmakers, and only writing about the young filmmakers that he likes. Whereas, I'm assigned a number of films, some of which I asked for, many of which I didn't.
* * *
As a full-time staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle—which has recently expanded its film coverage, in contrast to so many other dailies—Jonathan Curiel was asked by Gerhard to "report on the ground" to the pressures of working within a daily newspaper.
Jonathan Curiel: Let's look at the bigger picture here. The pressures experienced by film reviewers are the same pressures on other journalisms, as it were. In some ways, cinema and film reviewing are in a good position at The Chronicle because they're devoting more coverage to film reviewing. It's only been in the last several months that movies on Friday now have their own separate section. That's a good thing—there's more space devoted to movies—but the question is why did they devote more space to movies? One could say—and I'm not privy to this, thank God, because I don't work in the upper echelons of the paper—but, one could say it's because of advertising. That's why there's a separate section. Not because there's a dramatic need for a range of film reviewing of foreign films and independent films, etc.; but, because advertising—in a sense—requires this separate section. Again, that's one theory.
Regardless, it's a good thing that's happened at the San Francisco Chronicle, though—at the same time this is happening—they have cut back dramatically in other ways. One of the areas I used to cover a lot of was foreign affairs. Two years ago a top editor of the paper called me in and essentially said, "We are not going to be doing foreign affairs coverage from local staff writers." No way. That was a dagger in my heart, I would have to say. I write about a lot of different subjects—used to write about a lot of different subjects, including foreign affairs—and cinema is one of my subjects. At the same time that movies are being put on a pedestal—in a way—at the Chronicle, other areas are not. The paper's getting thinner.
It goes without saying that journalism has taken a big hit and particularly the San Francisco Chronicle. Those of you who have followed the travails of the paper know that the Hearst Corporation has threatened to pull the rug out from underneath the paper. That threat—as far as I know—still exists. There are rumors. You asked about what it's like to be in the trenches, well, I can tell you what it's like in the trenches. When you have rumors floating over your head that, in effect, say the Chronicle may not exist in five months, what do you think of that? Well, a lot of people are running scared. And it's not just the people who are writing about cinema or the local news or whatever. It's the people in the upper echelons who actually have to make these cuts. They will not admit that they're scared; but, they are scared. People at the bottom are scared. It's a bad time to be a journalist. You could say existentially it's the worst time in the history of the Chronicle.
In some ways, though, the Chronicle is in a good position because—even if the physical paper were to disappear—its website (which is one of the top 10 websites in the country) will be there and film criticism and film reviewing will be a big part of that. That's not going to go away, partly because there's a demand for this. …There's a definite market for a substantial San Francisco Chronicle that does write about foreign affairs and film intelligently. …I'll leave it at this: at the Chronicle, as elsewhere, there's optimism and pessimism and sometimes they're in the same moment.
* * *
Mary Pols took a buy-out from the Contra Costa Times and said that she was leaving film criticism to start a new life as an author. Since then, however, she's been pulled back into film criticism through a gig at Time.com. Gerhard asked Pols to talk about her transition to writing online.
Mary Pols: I did think it was the end of my film criticism career, which made me very sad because that's what I wanted to do since I was a small child basically. Like many other people in this room, I read Pauline Kael because her reviews were the only thing in The New Yorker that were digestible besides the cartoons. I was eight or nine years old. When I took the buyout last March from the Contra Costa Times, I had become the de facto film critic for the Oakland Tribune as well because the person who owned the Oakland Tribune bought the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News. My reviews were also appearing in the Mercury News and a bunch of other little papers in the Bay Area. This guy has a monopoly in the Bay Area on the alternative weeklies. When I left, I knew I wouldn't be replaced but I also thought, "If I don't go now and take a buyout, I'll get laid off soon." It was clear to me. The amount of space I had for reviews was shrinking and the publisher who clearly loved movies—and clearly loved me—was on his way out too because they were kicking out anybody who had been around for a while and starting "fresh" with God-knows-who.
I spent about six months not even going to movies after the buyout. I tried not to be sad about it. It's a remarkable rhythm to have in your life being a movie critic. It's usually five movies a week at least, a lot of hopping on BART trying to get places on time, strange times: 2:00, 4:00, then again at 7:30. You might see three movies in a day. You might see four. It's an odd rhythm to live with but—once it's taken away from you—it's very strange. You hang out at home in your pajamas pitching to people who don't know who you are, don't care who you are, and I thought I would never get another movie gig again. The way it came to me was sort of surprising. An editor read something I wrote about my scandalous love life—which was about having a one-night stand and having a baby [Accidentally On Purpose]—in the "Modern Love" column that runs on Sundays in the New York Times. Through that, an editor at Time found me. Seriously, she sent me an email the Monday after that ran, asking if I wanted to review for them. I thought, "This is a really cruel hoax being played upon me by those assholes at Gawker who, every Monday, make fun of 'Modern Love', right?" What a great thing to do. Find this poor soul who wrote about her tragic love life and taunt her with the idea of working for Time.
I googled her and she seemed to be legitimate. Anyway, I picked up that gig, usually one review a week, and I started in January and it's really great to be back in that rhythm. I will say that for the most part I have been going to mainstream movies and—as Ruby was talking about—if you're writing for an outlet like that, you can't [indulge] your tastes, and you have to accept the fact that you'll be seeing mainstream movies because most national publications cater to what's coming out on Friday that had a big ad and that people are going to be curious about….
I will say it's very depressing to be a journalist right now; but, I'm just trying to roll with it and remember that for me it was always an incredible gift to get to go to the movies and be paid for it; to spend hours of the day in the dark; and—if anyone will let me do that now for money—I'm going to jump upon it and I'm going to hold on as long as I can. I hope there are people that care to read reviews. That was my introduction to magazines and newspapers and I hope that when I'm 85 I'll be saying, "Bring me the New York Times so I can see what Manohla Dargis has to say." I really hope it's out there. I am heartened by the fact that there are more than 10 people in this theater. That's a good sign, right?
* * *
Noting the historical structure of Gerald Peary's documentary, Gerhard wondered—if Peary could choose an era of film writing to bring back—which would it be? She asked him when was his favorite moment of American film criticism?
Gerald Peary: I don't like to be some boring nostalgic—which is what we all do when we talk about this "golden age"—but there was one chapter entitled "When Criticism Mattered", which was about the '60s and '70s. I meant that truly, but I also meant it with quotation marks around it. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an interesting attack of the film because he's an up-to-date guy, today's a great period, and I'm being an old fart by talking about that period. I half agree with him. I know the time that I read film criticism with great fervor was definitely the Sarris/Kael period. The Village Voice in the late '60s was the single greatest paper. It had Molly Haskell writing feminist criticism, Sarris writing his auteurist stuff, but it also had the late Stuart Byron who was one of the many film critics who died, an AIDS victim, and he was the first person to write about being gay—maybe even before anything in San Francisco. I remember a column he wrote about a guy who picked his pocket while Byron was giving him a blow job. I remember thinking, "God, what a great critic!"
To repeat a point: there are plenty of really good critics today—there's no problem with that—but, there is the problem of the power and the influence of the critic waning. Film criticism is not just an ego thing. It's not just masturbatory. We actually want people to go see movies that we care about and that clout is mostly dying, I feel. That's what depresses me.
* * *
Addressing the entire panel, Gerhard elicited their commentary regarding 3D technology.
Pols: 3D! Coraline was wonderful. It was one of the first times I enjoyed a 3D move. But Monsters vs. Aliens, which I took my five-year-old to, had him clinging to me the whole time. I'm curious to see what Pixar's going to do with Up. I think they're re-releasing Toy Story in 3D in the autumn and I figure—if anybody can do it well—they can. But, in general, I feel 3D is this awful menace coming off the screen. I hope that not every child's movie that's made in the next five years features 3D because the glasses really give me a headache.
David D'Arcy: But it's the nature of any trend that too many examples of it will be made before the trend dies.
Ruby Rich: 3D, I'm afraid, is going to be not just for kids' movies. Every studio—whatever's left of the mini-majors; I think even Focus has several lined up now—they're all making 3D movies. But you have to remember that—every time there's a technological challenge—the movie studios do this. When television came out, that's probably when they first went to 3D and started going to Cinemascope. When video and DVD came out, that was the rise of film festivals and the rise of special events, the rise of 70mm and all of these kinds of things. I'm sure 3D is a response to download. I'm sure it's, "How do you get people out of their home entertainment systems?" To that extent, I think it's predictable. Hopefully, we'll be happily surprised; but, I doubt it.
Cross-published on Twitch.
As the 29th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) draws near to wrapping up at The Castro Theatre—its San Francisco venue—and continues on through August 8 at Berkeley's Roda Theatre and Palo Alto's Cinearts, I felt now would be a good time to present the first in a series of research interviews I'm entitling "Diaspora By the Bay." This research is for a paper I'm writing for the next volume of The Film Festival Yearbook, which hopes to explore issues of disaporic content and constituency within the film festival circuit. SFJFF Program Director Nancy K. Fishman and Program Coordinator Joshua Moore were the first to make themselves available for this research project. Peter Stein, the festival's Executive Director, was hard-pressed to launch the festival and apologized for not being able to participate.
Establishing straight off that SFJFF follows the now-standard non-profit model of film festivals, bolstered by public funding, private donations, and supplementary membership/box office income, Nancy Fishman also advised that SFJFF is the only Jewish Film Festival in the United States that receives money from the National Endowment for the Arts. Locally, they receive funding from the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
* * *
Michael Guillén: There has been some scholastic indication that Jewish film festivals were the first to organize themselves internationally with regard to community outreach and collaboration amongst each other, rather than the more customary competition expected between film festivals. Certainly, as I reviewed this year's program for SFJFF, I was struck by the festival's community involvement.
Lately, when I read festival programs, I find myself less interested in the capsules—whose synoptic purpose I respect but whose promotional incentive I've come to distrust—and more intrigued by who is co-presenting and co-sponsoring the films. In laymen's terms, could you state the distinction between co-sponsorship and co-presentation?
Nancy Fishman: Sponsors give us money. We're very grateful to have their money and—especially with individual donors—it makes them feel more connected to the festival because they will often gather a crowd of their friends to come to the film they've sponsored. Co-presenters are the people who help us spread the world about a particular film. Basically, we try to match up films with groups that are organized, fit well with that film, or will help us reach a particular constituency. There are probably 60-65 co-presenters at this year's festival. They cover a spectrum. We try very hard to work with a variety. We work with both Jewish and non-Jewish groups, several film groups like the San Francisco Film Society and the Mill Valley Film Festival. At this year's festival, the Asian American Film Festival is co-presenting A Matter of Size, a film about sumo wrestling in Israel. We also interact with groups across the political spectrum.
Guillén: I'm intrigued by SFJFF's diversity of co-presentation. Reviewing this year's program line-up, I saw more community organizations than consulates co-presenting programs. What is the nature of your festival's interaction with consulates?
Fishman: It's hard to get money from consulates. Consulates often fall inbetween sponsors and co-presenters because they don't have enough money to offer full sponsorship but they often will give us a little bit more. Last year, for example, we did a program on Italian Jews during the Holocaust and the Italian Cultural Institute gave us $5,000. That allowed us to bring in a 78-year-old Italian survivor from Auschwitz. This year the French Consulate—who has been hit by the same economic crisis as everyone else—gave money to the San Francisco International and to the Seattle International, who are part of their Northwestern purview. They try to give us help, sometimes through diplomatic pouches; but, we're not as big fry as the San Francisco International, so they don't give us the same amount of financial help. The Goethe Institut has always been very helpful to us, and sometimes the British Film Council, so we definitely work with them and have a friendly relationship. In the cases where we do a large program like last year's Italian program, we usually have been successful at getting more substantial funding.
Guillén: Without ongoing consular sponsorship, it's all the more remarkable what SFJFF has achieved through community outreach, addressing diasporic constituencies. For example, a year or so back SFJFF had a program on Ethiopian Jews. Quite honestly, until then, I didn't even know Ethiopian Jews existed. I interviewed Sirak Sabahat, one of the actors in that year's closing night film Radu Mihaileanu's Live and Become. I thoroughly enjoyed that revelatory conversation and have, since, begun monitoring how SFJFF constructs its programs to be inclusive of these disparate diasporic communities, both abroad and in the United States.
Joshua Moore: Speaking of Ethiopian Jews, at this year's festival we have an Ethiopian film called Zrubavel, based out of Israel. It's a wonderful film about a young boy who envisions himself as a Spike Lee film director and documents his family. His father is a street sweeper and the film shows this small Ethiopian community within Israel, thereby showing a diverse Israel.
Fishman: It's the first Ethiopian feature film made by an Ethiopian.
Guillén: The comment made about Jewish Film Festivals leading the pack in collaborative ventures and having an existing network they can rely upon, do you find that to be true?
Fishman: It's true to a certain extent, though I would say the Lesbian and Gay film festival circuit is incredibly organized. The Asian film circuit is a little bit smaller. The SFJFF was the first Jewish film festival in the world and now there are about 100 of them; 60 in the U.S. and 40 outside. The Jewish community already existed. If you think about the immigrant status of Jews in this country, Jews have been here for a long time, as opposed to some younger communities. There already was an infrastructure to some degree; but there have also been organizations that have played a role. Our's has been one of them. For a long time on our website we kept a list of other Jewish film festivals around the country and then the Foundation for Jewish Culture—which is based in New York and used to be called the National Foundation for Jewish Culture—has every 2 years over the last 6-8 years convened a meeting a Jewish film festivals from around the country. That really helped Jewish film festivals get organized. But it depends in what context. I go to the Berlin Film Festival every year and programmers from the Jewish film festivals still have to read through every program note and decide: "Could that be Jewish? The name of the director is Jewish or the name of one of the characters is Jewish…." Usually, we all read through the program and meet for lunch and discuss, "What do you think of this one?"
Years ago, I used to work for Frameline, San Francisco's gay and lesbian film festival, and when I went to Berlin for them, it was the same thing. But now in Berlin the Panorama office, which is one of the sections of the Berlinale, they actually do all the work for the gay and lesbian programmers. When they arrive, they're handed a list of every single gay film in the festival so they no longer have to do that "underground" thing of meeting in cafes to determine, "Maybe this is. Maybe this isn't." The same thing is now happening at Sundance. The Sundance press office provides an entire list of GLBT films. Different diasporic film festivals are probably organized in different ways; but, I do think it's true that the Jewish community has an infrastructure in most of the cities where Jewish film festivals are venued. Some Jewish film festivals are part of an institution; the Seattle festival is part of the JCC, for example. And some are independent like our's.
Guillén: It strikes me that SFJFF is commendably concerted in its effort to represent the diversity of the Jewish experience as expressed through diasporic content programmed for the festival. This year, by way of example, you have films addressing—as you mentioned earlier—the Ethiopian Jewish community within Israel, you have another about Argentine Jews, and yet another about the Australian Jewish community. How do you become aware of and acquire films with diasporic content? Do programmers from various Jewish film festivals recommend films to each other? Do you consolidate efforts to bring talent to your festivals?
Fishman: What film festival programmers do is not so different from what acquisition executives do, in that you have a tracking database. You look for films. We don't have very much money so we tend to only go to Sundance and Berlin, maybe one other film festival a year. I obviously wish we had the money to be flying all over; but, we don't. A lot of our programming is accomplished by looking at other film festivals—we keep a tracking list, a chronological calendar of festivals that we're interested in—and then Josh and I (more Josh, actually) go through and look at the websites of different film festivals. Of course, there are the key international film festivals: Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Tribeca, whatever. We also look at Jerusalem, Haifa, and Docaviv—the documentary film festival in Israel—and then we look at the program line-ups at other Jewish film festivals all over the world. We talk to other programmers. We definitely talk to the people at the UK Jewish Film Festival, the Amsterdam Jewish Film Festival, and the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival. We also talk to programmers from mainstream film festivals and ask for advice. No one wants to do the work for you, but, you develop relationships over a period of time and you can ask about certain things. A lot of it involves maintaining relationships with filmmakers and distributors as well.
Guillén: With regard to interacting with other film festivals in the Bay Area—you've already mentioned a few—how does that collaboration work? Once you've solicited films, recognized their content, and decided to program them in your festival, do you then go through your rolodex to find the organizations or festivals that would best serve co-presentation? I'm trying to get a sense if there is a professional community of festival programmers whose collaboration is distinct to the Bay Area, in contrast to elsewhere. Also, in the process of interacting with other Bay Area film festivals, are you sharing content? Or costs to bring in talent? Or coordinating calendars to maximize the exposure of films and filmmakers in the Bay Area.
Moore: Yeah, there definitely is collaboration between film festivals in the Bay Area. As we mentioned, CAAM is co-presenting a film this year. We're in constant communication with the San Francisco International. If a film has played in another Bay Area film festival, and has already received a lot of press coverage, we will pass on it for our festival because it's already had its moment here. That's a consideration with all the film festivals, knowing what we are programming, so we don't schedule a film that has already played elsewhere.
Guillén: Whereas you do have a notable exception this year with Jenni Olsen's 575 Castro Street, which I believe has already shown at Frameline?
Moore: With shorts we're not so concerned about that. A lot of the shorts do play around. It's mainly feature films I'm talking about.
Guillén: I like how you acknowledge the importance of a film's "moment" within a festival. One of the avenues of film festival studies is an examination of the value of time and space and how it shapes festival experience. Time, and timing with regard to programming any given film for any given festival, speaks to the impact a film can have by being situated in any particular festival at any particular time.
Fishman: Most festivals want premieres.
Guillén: If a film you programmed in the festival is received well by your audiences, do you let other festivals know? Let's say the Seattle Jewish Film Festival was thinking of showing a film you've shown in your festival, would you tell them: "This film really worked for us and, even though it's not a premiere for you, it's worthy content"?
Fishman: I don't know what the San Francisco International's policies are now; but, most festivals want a Bay Area premiere. I don't know if the San Francisco International insists on a U.S. premiere for certain films. For a community-based festival like ours, I just want a Bay Area premiere because—in order to sell tickets—we receive so many films that it doesn't seem fair to give a slot to something that just played, y'know, a month earlier, with the exception of shorts.
There is a lot of communication between festivals. A lot of the programmers from other Jewish film festivals come to our festival; usually every year about 8-10 of them attend. We usually meet with them for bagels and coffee. People call and ask for advice. We don't have a print source list yet on the website so people are calling me and Josh every other day asking us to please send our print sources. The relationship between Bay Area film festivals is collegial. For example, if I go to a festival and I see something but I didn't end up picking it up for my festival, or even if it's not Jewish, I'll call one of my friends at Mill Valley and say, "This is great." I saw this film at Berlin this year about the slow food movement and I phoned Janis Plotkin—who now works at Mill Valley—and I said, "This would be a perfect Mill Valley film. I think people do that all the time.
We can't all show the same films and a lot of it is based on—for especially the more high quality films—that they're more likely to be bought by distributors or are in the middle of being sold. A lot of what films you get is based on the distributors and whether they want to give you the film and whether it fits into their release schedule. It's not that capricious. It's not that they like you or don't like you, or that you have such a great relationship with them or a terrible one. It helps if you've worked with a distributor year after year and also if you've helped them promote a couple of other films during the year; but, a lot of times it's whether it fits into their release schedule.
What distinguishes our festival from a lot of the other Jewish film festivals—not from all of them but a lot of them—is that we adhere to a tradition started by Janis Plotkin and Deborah Kaufmann, continued by Peter Stein who is the head of the organization and also programming, in selecting high quality films. Josh has only been here a year but one of the reasons I enjoy working with him is because he has fabulous taste in film. So we are excited about showing great films. But in terms of competing with other festivals for U.S. premieres, insisting—let's say—that Seattle can't show a film before us, that's not going to help either the film or the filmmaker. And it's not going to help us sell any more tickets.
We love it when we get a U.S. premiere; we're not so kumbaya that we don't care about having some North American or U.S. premiere. It's always nice to tell the press that; but, we're not going to say to a film, "You can't play here because you played in Seattle three months ago."
Guillén: With regard to the spectacular dimension of your festival, how do you negotiate and secure talent?
Fishman: It's usually connected to a film. It's usually hard to bring talent if they're not in a film. It's expensive for community-based festivals to get high-level talent. It usually requires business or first class tickets and I always joke that—when you say the word business or first class—it's like saying "communism" to Senator McCarthy. We have gotten some high profile people here. We had Gila Almagor here and she's the grand dame of Israeli cinema. We've had Amos Gitai who's a major international director. We do try to get high level talent here; but, it's not always easy. Sometimes it involves paying more money for a ticket.
Moore: This year we tried to get Natalie Portman to come because we found her directorial debut, a short film called Eve, which debuted at Venice last year, I believe. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get her.
Guillén: In negotiating for high-level talent, is that where collaboration with regional festivals and local organizations might help?
Fishman: It's very hard to organize. We brought two documentary filmmakers last year—the Heymann brothers—and we collaborated with a museum in Los Angeles. We shared the cost of their air tickets. But it's very hard to coordinate. Most stars want to come for just a day. I used to work in publicity so I've dealt a lot with talent. It can get very expensive and costly. They sometimes want to travel with a spouse or a friend and—though we usually have drivers hired by the festival, driving nice Toyota Priuses loaned to us thankful to Toyota San Francisco—that's not good enough. You have to get a limo to go pick them up at the airport. Some stars require hair and make-up. I've actually encountered stars who only have certain people work on their hair and face so then you have to fly in the hair and make-up person because it's not acceptable to get the best hair and make-up person in the Bay Area. It can get very expensive.
It's hard to collaborate. I think also because our festival is in the Summer, it's more difficult to collaborate with the universities. If we were situated in November, we could call the Jewish Studies Department at Stanford or—not even just Jewish—we could call the Mideastern contemporary, political or film department and say, "Would you like to split the cost?" We are collaborating with the Israel Center and the JCC to bring in Ari Folman in October. That's a case where three organizations said, "Let's split the cost for this." We're going to show Waltz With Bashir and bring him in.
Guillén: Thank you for those examples. I'm glad to hear such collaborations do exist. So once you've shaped your program with its diasporic content, I'm interested in how you then address diasporic constituencies to encourage them to come see the films? How do you get the word out to them, or do you even try?
Fishman: We certainly try. We have an outreach coordinator. We have marketing people. When we did the Ethiopian program, we distributed flyers and I believe we had them translated into Amharic. I live in Oakland and personally went up and down to every Ethiopian restaurant in Oakland and dropped off flyers. With the Russian community, we occasionally translate fliers or emails and send them out. We've made an effort to reach the community. Not everybody is internet-savvy. For a while there some communities were more internet-savvy than others.
Guillén: So hypothetically then, on your rolodex you have listings of local organizations of specific diasporic identities that—when you get a film that has a particular diasporic theme—you're able to readily contact those people and access their mailing lists? And they're cooperative?
Fishman: Yes, they are. We even do co-presentations with the Arab Film Festival.
Guillén: I am much impressed with SFJFF's policy to maintain dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian communities.
Fishman: We enjoy it. They've co-presented films at our festival; we've co-presented films at their festival.
Guillén: I also admire SFJFF's awareness of the social activism potential in film. This year you're even sponsoring a panel "Reel Change: Social Justice Films" wherein social justice is examined as an element of Jewishness.
Fishman: With our help, Peter Stein curated that program. There was a range of high quality documentaries this year that dealt with different issues of social activism. I get a little uncomfortable personally when people talk about Jews having a monopoly on morality or the whole concept of tikkun olam—healing the world—which is something that's deeply engrained in Jewish culture, both secular and religious. I don't believe we have a monopoly on it. I think other communities are also committed to social activism. Perhaps it's more recognized in Jewish culture? It's a tradition that a range of people in the community have been proud of. Peter has done an excellent job of maintaining a commitment to social activism; but, it started with Deborah and Janis. When the festival was founded, it was somewhat exclusive, whereas now we've become a part of the fabric of the Jewish and cinematic communities.
The festival was founded in reaction to the fact that there weren't many positive images of Jews on film, which is so ironic because there are a lot of Jews behind the Hollywood industry. Also because a lot of mainstream Jewish media didn't deal with either the conflict in Israel or Jewish GLBT representation. Both Janis and Deborah were not lesbian but were prescient and forward-looking in terms of actively pursuing gay and lesbian films to share with the Jewish community, which was pretty radical at that time. Twenty-nine years ago no one would imagine that the Jewish Community Federation would have a gay and lesbian section where people paid to go to this work. There have also been environmental films, like the work of Judith Helfand (Blue Vinyl, 2002). Social activism covers a range; but, it is exciting and has always been a part of our festival. It's something we do well.
Guillén: In terms of press tiering, do you have different categories of press for your festival?
Fishman: No.
Guillén: I'm glad to hear that. I'm aware that many festivals have distinct accreditation for red carpet press assigned to handle celebrity journalism and "regular" press covering the films. But when press is accredited for your festival, they're on equal parity?
Fishman: Yes.
Guillén: And you don't play favorites with any local press?
Fishman: No.
Guillén: That's so nice to hear.
Fishman: It is nice. That's part of being a community-based festival. If we had Natalie Portman or Woody Allen, we'd probably get a red carpet—though we ordinarily don't have a red carpet—but, we wouldn't tier the press. We might engage in some more pomp and circumstance, but we wouldn't start tiering.
Guillén: SFJFF is clearly internet-savvy, how about distinctions between print and online press?
Fishman: We don't distinguish, in terms of amount of time we allow for interviews or access to films. Every accredited journalist is on Karen Larsen's press list. The only event where we sometimes don't have room for all of the press is opening night; but we set aside 55-70 tickets. The Castro is huge and it's very rare that press can't get in. All press can come to everything.
Guillén: Why do you use an external publicist rather than handle publicity in-festival?
Fishman: Because Karen Larsen is fabulous!
Guillén: She's the best in the business, isn't she?
Fishman: Also, it's very hard. During a film festival it's like trying to put an elephant through the eye of a needle. We have so much work. There are times when Josh and Peter and I work 70 hours a week just trying to get everything done. I happen to have a PR background, but most programmers are savvy about it but don't develop the year-round relationships; that's another critical reason to hire an outside publicist. I talk to press people at a few festivals a year when I see them or during this crunch period of time, but someone like Karen is on the phone or email with everybody 10 times a day. It makes much more sense to hire a professional.
Guillén: As a festival, what do you expect or hope press will do for you?
Fishman: I hope that they would help us find an audience. I'm a practical person. I like press who are smart and do their homework because we've all worked very hard. Obviously, if you're writing for 7x7 you're writing a paragraph so I don't expect their writers to watch 20 films; but, I love it when press gets something. Occasionally—like when we did a program of Jews on the Hollywood black list—it's clear if a press person has read about the subject, thought about it, watched the films, and they write about them with insights we hadn't even thought about. That's exciting. I love working with press. They're usually smart and interested and excited about what they're working.
Guillén: In the shift towards digital formats—not only in how films are made and projected—but, in how press can access and preview a program line-up, I commend SFJFF for retaining literal press screenings where journalists can watch a film on a screen as it's meant to be seen. These days, however, most festivals are asking journalists to watch films on DVD screener, with which I'm conflicted. Do you ever fear that by asking press to watch films on screener, they're not actually seeing the film? And can't truthfully review it?
Moore: That's always a concern. We sometimes wish we could attach a webcam to journalists checking out screeners to see if they're genuinely sitting down to watch them or if they're doing their laundry and folding their socks while watching them.
Guillén: How did you know I was folding my socks while watching screeners? [Laughter.]
Moore: The hope is that—whether you watch a film on the small screen or the big screen—you can connect to it.
Guillén: I watch films on DVD screener to catch narratives and storylines; but, I often feel I'm not able to comment on the visual elements of a film, for fear that—as James Quandt recently articulated for me—I'm watching a facsimile. In terms of the shift to digital exhibition, roughly how many films in your festival are on celluloid?
Fishman: I would say maybe a third. It could be a little less.
Guillén: Have your audiences noticed or responded to that shift in technology? Do you think they're even aware that they're watching a digital projection?
Fishman: I would say this is where a community-based audience is maybe less savvy than an audience going to, let's say, the San Francisco International. There's HD and Digibeta, and they're looking better all the time, but I think audiences respond to archival prints, especially if the film is not available on DVD. If you actually list the film as an archival print in the program, or that it's a recently-struck new print, audiences are excited. Audiences still recognize the depth of film.
Guillén: That's another thing I've been observing about the spectacular dimension of film festivals: it's not only about scoring talent, but frequently archival prints. The prints themselves have become like movie stars and you half expect cans to come walking up the red carpet.
Fishman: I went to see Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence when it played at the Castro and they had the guy from the UCLA film and television archive come up to talk about the film for five minutes. Here's a guy who's normally behind a desk who suddenly has his five minutes of glory and he was very articulate. It was exciting to hear him talk about how they restored the print. The audience was rapt and hanging on every word. So I agree with you. People who are veteran cineastes have a taste for knowing what that is and how it's changing.
Guillén: When I recently discussed this with James Quandt, he mentioned that familiarity with DVD commentaries has created a necessity for exhibition "add-ons", either talent, parties, scholars….
Fishman: Value added.
Guillén: Has SFJFF felt a need to satisfy that appetite?
Fishman: Yes, to some extent.
Moore: Within our budget, we try to get as many filmmakers as we can, especially for the discussions afterwards. Q&As are what make a film festival more of an event than just going to a movie.
Guillén: How do you go about structuring what you're going to program? I imagine it's a piecemeal process? You've mentioned you attend festivals and catch films there, or gather recommendations from colleagues?
Fishman: All festivals could do a better job. We could too. Sometimes you end up doing retrospectives or sidebars based on zeitgeist. Suddenly you realize there's a whole bunch of films about Ethiopian Jews. That was actually the case that year with the program on Ethiopian Jews. We did not set out to do that program. We just suddenly realized we had several films on the topic, and they were new and important to showcase. Some years we plan programs in advance. For example, the program on the Jews on the Hollywood black list, the one on Jewish boxers, last year's program of Italian Jews during Fascism, sometimes you realize you have a group of films that fit together in a certain way. For the larger events like the Freedom of Expression Award where we're doing a filmmaker retrospective, we really need to plan in advance. Sometimes it's really the programmer's interest because you're slaving away sending emails back and forth and sometimes you need something that excites you. This year Josh created an animation program. When he hired on he said he wanted to do an animation program and I said, "Go for it."
Moore: "Jewtoons" is the first-ever collection of animated shorts; 15 shorts from Israel and the States. Several of these animators are coming out of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the Minshar School of the Arts in Tel Aviv and they are the future of the animation world. This last year—with Waltz With Bashir being released as the first Israeli animation feature and all the accolades that went along with that—it got me thinking of all the animation in Israel that we don't know about. These young animators coming out of these schools are doing tremendous work and, hopefully, that's indicative of the "Jewtoons" program.
Guillén: Without going film by film, can you state what you are most excited about with this year's festival?
Fishman: I'm excited about Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, the documentary by Aviva Kempner. Some filmmakers make tons and tons of film but she hasn't made that many films—maybe four or five—but they've taken 10 years to research. Her documentary on Hank Greenberg was also like that. Aviva's done a great job with Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg. We're actually showing four archival episodes of The Goldbergs, a television series from 1946-51. I watched about 15-20 episodes and narrowed it down to these four.
Guillén: As a curatorial aside, where did you find those television episodes?
Fishman: Some were housed at the Jewish Museum in New York and some at UCLA's Film and Television Archive.
Guillén: And you, Joshua? Other than your animation program, is there something else you're really excited about?
Moore: I'm excited about our music program actually, which is called the Puppet Folk Revival "Rockin' Puppet Mayhem." It's based off of street performers in Tel Aviv who performed folky-rock songs as puppets. It caught on and they developed a TV show about it called Red Band, about a struggling musician who can only play in Israel because he's so burnt out everywhere else—a '60s rocker washed up—and it's kind of South Park humor meets The Muppets, with Spinal Tap elements.
Guillén: This is the live performance?
Moore: Yes.
Guillén: What is the role of a live performance in a film festival?
Moore: That's a good question. Like Nancy said, it's the value added. It's something else to offer people beside a film. Obviously, it has to have a relation to film and Puppet Folk Revival will have media that they'll be showing as part of their performance. It's more than just a music event.
Guillén: Another "add-on" that I'm finding has become popular among Bay Area festival programmers is the token, free-to-the-public open air screenings. I note that SFJFF is co-presenting an open air screening of Manhattan with the San Francisco Neighborhood Theatre Foundation. Have you done open air screenings before?
Fishman: We have not. It's exciting and should be fun. Hopefully it will be warm that night.
Guillén: The only drawback in San Francisco.
Moore: As Nancy was saying, when we start to program all the films, we notice patterns and evolving themes, and one of those this year was coming-of-age stories, films that focused on teens or people in their early 20s discovering their sexuality or overcoming family tragedies, so we've included several of those films, many of which are from first-time directors.
Guillén: Federico Veiroj's Acné is in that group. Which leads me to another question. Acné premiered last year in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes and then touched down on North American soil at the Toronto International where I found myself wondering who would pick it up for the Bay Area. Would it be the San Francisco International? The Jewish Film Festival? The International Latino Film Festival? It could have been programmed in any of those festivals. How is that negotiated between Bay Area festivals? Do you put out an alert: "I have dibs on Acné?"
Fishman: No, no, no. Sometimes there is some conversation between festival programmers about a film; but, it's rare. Mostly, we just all try for it. My guess is that—with the San Francisco International—it wasn't on their radar or they didn't like it, who knows? Sometimes—with some of the larger film festivals where some of the programmers are more conscientious or may have worked in a community-based festival before—I have called and said, "I want this film for my opening night. Would you consider not going after it?" Some programmers have been very responsive.
Guillén: Interesting. I would say that the programmers with the San Francisco International are "personality" programmers who choose films largely based upon their personal likes and dislikes. You can almost bet that if there's a Latin American film in the festival, it will be a slow-moving character-driven narrative because that's what Linda Blackaby likes. That's a generalization for purposes of discussion and, of course, more power to SFFS. However, what I admire about SFJFF is that it appears the programmers are making efforts to cater to your community. You don't program just what you like.
Fishman: That's what's different about programming for a community-based festival. You have an obligation to think about what the community is interested in. If you program a lesbian and gay film festival and you're interested in slow experimental films but never show a transgender film, you will eventually hear from your community that you're not serving them, or serving part of them. With good reason. The community supports us. As a film festival, we're not beholden to them; but, if you're truly part of the community, you need to keep in mind what people are interested in seeing.
Moore: That being said, we're still looking for the best quality of films that are out there and available. We might not program a film on orthodox Jews simply because there's not one we feel is strong enough. We don't want to throw one in just because we don't have an orthodox Jew film.
Guillén: In terms of new digital platforms, can you talk about SFJFF's New Media Initiative?
Fishman: Yeah, we launched the New Media Initiative when we received some funding from the Righteous Persons Foundation. The New Media Initiative has several components. We are now streaming a short film every month online.
Moore: We debuted with two shorts, which will be up until the end of July. After that there will be a new short every month. The first two are also showing in the festival but it's a chance for people to watch the full version on our website and, hopefully, that will get them excited about the other shorts that we've programmed in the festival this year. One of them is an Israeli animated short called Escapism and the other is a Hungarian short called With A Little Patience.
Guillén: What prompted or motivated the New Media Initiative?
Fishman: The whole world is going in the direction of digital media. It was forward-thinking of Peter Stein.
Guillén: He's pretty smart, isn't he?
Fishman: He's very smart. He didn't want to miss the boat. Over a year ago, he convened a group of new media/new technology people for a visioning session and then he applied for the funding from the Righteous Persons Foundation and received it. It's a phased project. Years ago you could browse our archive, but now it's been updated so that you can browse the entire archive of 1,200-1,400 films that we've shown in the festival over all 29 years. You can look at photos and eventually what we would like to do—though we're not going to go into distribution—we'd like to point people to print sources or advise if the film is available on Amazon, Netflix, or whatever. But it's an exciting resource to be able to search the films by country, language or a specific actor. With most film festival websites, when you want to look up a film that's been programmed in a previous festival, you have to play the shell game and figure out first what year it was in, etc.
Guillén: Does this resource include program capsules?
Fishman: Yes, it does. If someone's doing research 50 years from now, it will be great to look at a film—whether it's Acné or a more political film like Rachel—and compare the program notes from 50 different film festivals, some that were Jewish, some that weren't, to see what people say about it.
Guillén: My final question concerns volunteers. How do volunteers help you run this community-based film festival?
Fishman: We couldn't do it without them. We have more than 200-250 volunteers. We screen at four different venues so we do volunteer solicitation in each community. We gather in our volunteers and do volunteer training. They help us before the festival with office administrative work. They help us by distributing catalogs and the whole marketing effort. And then they help us during the festival taking tickets, showing people their seats, everything. We absolutely couldn't do SFJFF—it couldn't function—without volunteers.
Guillén: Does SFJFF offer internships to young people wanting to break into film festival management?
Fishman: We do. In fact, right now we have probably five or six interns. Sometimes it's for college credit. We have one PR intern right now who goes to Hampton University in Virginia and she's getting college credit by working with us. Some people intern as a way to understand how the festival works. I did some internships when I was younger and the worst thing is to show up and have nothing to do so it's important for a festival to structure its internships so that their interns have something interesting to do.
Guillén: Do you consider SFJFF the mothership of all Jewish film festivals?
Fishman: I'd call it the grandmother of all Jewish film festivals.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Peering at the SFIFF53 films from non-French speaking Europe, I'm especially glad to see a pair of German entries. Maren Ade's Everyone Else won a Silver Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival and follows the dissolution of a young couple on holiday in Sardinia. The film would have been a natural for our now-defunct Berlin & Beyond festival, and I'm assuming it didn't make the recent German Gems program because SFIFF already snagged it. If you've read the reviews and also caught Ade's debut The Forest for the Trees at SFIFF five years ago, you know this is going to be special. The other film is Turkish/German director Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, which is said to be quite different from his previous works like Head On and The Edge of Heaven. This one's a comic look at the efforts to save a failing family restaurant and stars my two favorite German actors, Moritz Bleibtreu and Birol Ünel.
I caught Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues hyper-stylized transsexual melodrama To Die Like a Man at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and loved it. Many loathed it. If you dug his previous works (O Fantasma, Two Drifters aka Odete) you sure don't want to miss this. In his review for the New York Film Festival, critic J. Hoberman called it "the kind of film Pedro Almodóvar should be making." Also Portuguese, at least in title and setting is Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun. I'm totally unfamiliar with the work of this U.S.-born French director who seems to be known for his formalist approach to filmmaking. Ostensibly, the film is about a French actress making a film about a 17th century nun in Lisbon, with Green portraying the director. Variety gave it a scathing review, but I'm planning to give it a chance.
The big Italian film this year is Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the unhappy wife of a Milanese industrialist. It's been compared to the works of Luchino Visconti. Uncoincidentally, the lone SFIFF screening of I Am Love takes place immediately after a restored print revival of Visconti's Senso at the Castro Theater on Sunday, May 2. If you're unable to make the showing, I Am Love opens at a Landmark Theater on July 2. The other Italian film I'm anticipating is Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's La Pivellina, in which a group of circus performers find and keep an abandoned child. Also of interest from Italy is Giorgio Diritti's WWII massacre movie The Man Who Will Come, which won both Grand Jury and Audience Prizes at last year's Rome Film Festival
From elsewhere in Europe we have Serbian director Vladimir Perisic's Ordinary People, a multi-fest prizewinner and (Bruno) Dumont-ian parable of ethnic cleansing and the human potential for brutality. At an opposite extreme lies Nina Hedenius' Way of Nature, a near-silent meditation on life at a remote Swedish farm. According to some reports I've read, the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia might be the next international hotbed of inspired filmmaking. SFIFF53 has programmed one title that keeps popping up, Rusudan Pirveli's Susa, a neo-realist tale of a 12-year-old bootleg-vodka delivery boy. Also from Georgia is the documentary Russian Lessons, which examines the 2008 Georgia-Russia armed conflict.
Headlining what Latin American cinema we do have at SFIFF53 is surely Brazilian director Walter Salles' receiving the Founders Directing Award, along with screenings of his 2008 Linha de Passe and also a new work-in-progress. Also from Brazil come the narrative feature The Famous and the Dead and the musical documentary Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was, about the "spectacular rise and infamous fall of the undisputed king of Brazilian popular music." From Colombia there's Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys, in which a man and teenage boy set off on a roadless road-trip to return a cursed accordion. I've watched this on screener and it's visually stunning. Usually we get a bunch of titles from Argentina in the festival, but this year there's only one. The Peddler documents the work of Daniel Burmeister, a traveling septuagenarian filmmaker who uses local amateur talent to create genre movies. Rounding out the South American roster is You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiest, a Chilean comedy about the pitfalls of being young, horny and male.
While we may not have gotten Revolución, there are three other Mexican films in the SFIFF53 line-up, two of which I've previewed and heartily recommend. Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's documentary Presumed Guilty is an exposé of the Mexican criminal justice systems that follows one young man's efforts to reverse a homicide conviction. In Rigoberto Perezcano's meditative feature Northless, a young man's determination to cross into El Norte gets waylaid by the female proprietor of a Tijuana grocery store. The film I haven't seen is Pedro González-Rubio's docu-fiction hybrid Alamar, in which a half-Mayan boy spends a final summer with his father and grandfather along the Caribbean coast. The film has won a slew of festival awards, most recently a Tiger at Rotterdam, and I'm saving it for a big-screen festival experience (the underwater cinematography is by Alexis Zabé, who also shot Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light and Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe).
OMFG! was the reaction I had to seeing two particular Asian titles in the line-up—and I'm using "Asian" here in its broadest geographical sense. In 2006 I was blown away by The Forsaken Land, a film by Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara for which he won Cannes' Camera d'or for best first feature. I've had fingers and toes crossed that his new film Between Two Worlds would show up at our 3rd i South Asian Film Festival next fall, but I'm just as ecstatic to see it at the SF International. The other title that got a rise out of me is Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows. Rasoulof directed the phenomenal Iron Island, which the fest screened in 2006. I won't even attempt to synopsize what these two allegorical films are "about". Just read the program capsules and prepare yourself for an other-worldly cinematic experience. A million thanks to the programmers for securing these. (Mohammad Rasoulof, by the way, was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran along with director Jafar Panahi on March 1 and released 17 days later).
There are a handful of other Asian films I'm looking forward to. In 2006, Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a big splash with Last Life in the Universe. His two follow-up films took a critical beating and never made it to our neck of the woods. Now he's made Nymph, which garnered mixed to favorable reviews, and I'm really pleased to have the chance to see it. One of the highlights of the 2005 SFIFF was a sidebar devoted to New Malaysian Cinema. One of the directors feted that year was Woo Ming-jin, and his new film called Woman on Fire Looks for Water has come our way. It's described as an "utterly gorgeous meditation on yearning and regret set amid a small fishing village." I caught Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, a wistful social comedy about a blow-up sex doll come to life, at Palm Springs. It's an inevitable disappointment coming on the heels of the director's undisputed masterpiece Still Walking, but is well worth seeing for the lead performance by bug-eyed South Korean star Bae Doo-Na (The Host, Linda Linda Linda). There are two more Iranian films I might catch if time allows. Nader Takmil Homayoun's Tehroun is a crime thriller set in Tehran's slums, while Babak Jalali's Frontier Blues is an absurdist portrait of life along Iran's northern frontier. Anyone with a penchant for star-studded Chinese historical epics probably won't want to miss Bodygyards and Assassins and Empire of Silver.
Finally, we have some films that don't fit in any of these geographic categories. The top prize winner at last year's Venice Film Festival was Samuel Maoz' Lebanon, a film set entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. SFIFF53 also has this year's Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Set in a poor rural Ozark community, a 17-year-old girl must find her meth-cooking father to keep from losing the family home. Ted Kotcheff's 1971 once-considered-lost Australian exploitation shocker Wake in Fright (Outback) has been restored and revived with the hope of appalling a new generation of moviegoers. 2008's Baghead finally sold me on the talents of the directing Duplass Brothers and the festival will be screening their latest Cyrus, starring Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly. Another (truly) American indie film that's sounds promising is Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, the story of an ex-Black Panther returning home to Philadelphia in the year of the bicentennial. Finally, it you're as freaked out about Colony Collapse Disorder as I am, you won't want to miss Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn's documentary Colony.
