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(My initial post for this year's San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) covered the films and events that were announced prior to the festival's official press conference. A follow-up post reported on that event, and also surveyed the festival's line-up of French language films. In this post I'll run through what's looking good to me from the rest of the planet.)
Peering at the SFIFF 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. (I wrote more about this in my initial post). 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 (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.
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 post 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 Peaches Christ/Joshua Grannell 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 film-415 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 Castaneda 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?
Part 2 of my look at the SFIFF53 line-up will focus on the rest of the world.
In a matter of days, the full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) (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 10:45 p.m. “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 Award 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 examines 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)
The 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) kicks off tomorrow night, March 11 and continues throughout the Bay Area until March 21. I've already posted an overview of the line-up and capsule write-ups of some documentary features. Below are capsule write-ups of ten narrative features you'll find in the festival, more or less in order of most favorite to least. All were seen on DVD screener, except where noted.
About Elly (Iran dir. Asghar Farhadi)
Director Farhadi deservedly won Best Director prize at 2009's Berlin Film Festival for this complex psychological thriller about a group of young, upper-middle class Tehranis on holiday at the Caspian Sea. After a harrowing, near-tragic event, Elly, a teacher and interloper in the group who's been set up for some uninvited matchmaking, goes and disappears. The film becomes not so much About Elly, but about the deceptive, flawed personages who are left to deal with the aftermath of her disappearance. This was Iran's 2009 Oscar submission, and it' a glimpse into an Iranian social milieu we rarely see, at least in films which get exported. My favorite Iranian film since 2005's Iron Island. (Seen at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival)
City of Life and Death (China dir. Lu Chuan)
Lu spent five years making this stunning masterpiece about the brutal 1937 siege of Nanking by Japanese occupation forces. Brilliantly walking the line between massive widescreen epic (cast of thousands, impressive sets, sweeping score) and intimate art film (B&W, hand-held camera), the film is constructed as a series of tangentially connected set pieces. A group of resistance fighters battle the enemy while perched atop bombed-out buildings. P.O.W.s are marched along atrocity-strewn roads en route to mass execution. In the film's central story, a Chinese collaborator, a German businessman (real-life figure John Rabe) and a young schoolteacher struggle with increasing desperation to maintain the integrity of the city's International Safety Zone, with its 300,000 refugees. Perhaps most surprising is the film's broadminded portrait of a conflicted Japanese sergeant and his relationship with a comfort woman. This month's scheduled U.S. theatrical release of City of Life and Death has been indefinitely postponed while distributor National Geographic Entertainment 'negotiates' with the Chinese Film Board. Best to see it at SFIAAFF – this is one film that demands a big-screen experience. And be sure to check out the schedule changes which affect the film.
The Housemaid (South Korea dir. Kim Ki-young)
For 2010's Out of the Vaults selection, SFIAAFF has chosen this disturbing 1960 doozy which has been restored by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive. Rat poison, abortion, blackmail, suicide, marital infidelity, murder and a caged squirrel all figure into this transgressive, anti-consumerist cautionary tale of a music teacher and the treacherous live-in maid who shoehorns her way into his home. From the dripping opening titles, to the nerve-racking score and sound design, to Kim's determined, constantly roaming camera, The Housemaid is an unsettling experience that should be enormous fun to watch with a crowd at the Castro Theater. (Seen on streaming video at The Auteurs)
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, Part 4 & Part 5 (China dir. Yang Fudong)
Anyone who's curious what contemporary avant-garde Chinese cinema might look like won't want to miss this. And while I normally have a low threshold for ponderous artiness, I found myself engaged throughout. SFIAAFF will be screening two of the piece's five parts with separate admissions. While they're mostly self-contained, there are overlapping motifs and stylistic similarities – both were shot in B&W with zero dialogue and feature studied compositions, slow and purposeful camera movements, and full frontal nudity. Part 4 is set amidst a seaside community of kelp harvesters and dried cuttlefish cultivators. Part 5 takes place in a modern day Shanghai seemingly overshadowed by nostalgia for the city's opulent past of cafes, bathhouses and rooftop baseball (?!?). A coterie of business-dressed men and women, presumably the titular seven intellectuals, lug suitcases across both sea and city landscapes. Of the two parts, I'd probably recommend the more varied and playful Part 5.
The Forbidden Door (Indonesia dir. Joko Anwar)
Gambir is a successful sculptor of pregnant women who lives a chic lifestyle. He also suffers from erectile dysfunction and has a beautiful wife with her own Forbidden Door in their home. He becomes obsessed with a Lynchian private club where patrons watch unspeakable things being done to people on live TV, including an abused boy who keeps sending him messages for help. These are the key elements of this ultra-stylized metaphysical thriller from Indonesia, which reaches its apotheosis with a Christmas dinner scene worthy of Grand Guignol. Fortunately there's sufficient substance to warrant all that style, at least until the film's rather creaky denouement.
Talentime (Malaysia dir. Yasmin Ahmad)
In her final film (the talented filmmaker passed away last year at age 51), Yasmin Ahmad explores themes that are recurrent in all her works, namely love and loss and the need for tolerance in a multi-cultural/racial/religious society like Malaysia. The story focuses on three students who are finalists in a high school talent competition, each possessing their own set of familial tribulations. The film has a bittersweet, corny charm to it, but is hampered by some overly broad supporting characters, mawkish songs, abrupt editing and an overabundance of Debussy's "Clair de lune."
Like You Know It All (South Korea dir. Hong Sang-soo)
With Hong you either admire his persistence of vision or become really irritated/bored over how he essentially makes the same film over and over again. I'm pretty much in the second camp, but am still interested enough in how he reworks his themes to jump ship just yet. His latest contains all the signature Hong moves – an immature protagonist who's approaching middle-age and has a career in the arts, a bifurcated story structure, a trip away from home and lots of public drinking that leads to fighting or fucking or both. Hong's avatar this time out is an art-film director. In the first half he juries an out-of-town festival (falling asleep during films) and reconnects with an old friend. (I believe this section contains Hong's first dream sequence!). The second half finds him guest-lecturing at an out-of-town university and reconnecting with an old mentor. In both cases he leaves behind a wake of petty resentments and pissed-off people. Many Hong fans are considering this film one of his best.
Dear Lemon Lima, (USA dir. Suzi Yoonessi)
This debut feature about a half Yup'ik Eskimo girl coming to terms with her heritage plays like a sweet and snarky after-school special. 13-year-old Vanessa is the token minority student at a well-to-do school in Fairbanks, Alaska. She's appointed a team captain for the school's annual Snowstorm Survivor Competition, and enlists fellow nerds to do battle against her self-obsessed ex-boyfriend. Some fine performances, worthy intentions and snazzy visuals are nearly enough to overshadow the film's mega-cuteness and strained quirkiness. A shocking tragedy just before the final act nearly capsizes the whole enterprise.
Prince of Tears (Taiwan/Hong Kong dir. Yonfan)
This overwrought, yet stodgy tale of passion and betrayal during the communist witch hunts of 1950s Taiwan was Hong Kong's Oscar submission for 2009. It's based on director Yonfan's memories of growing up in that era, during which time he must have witnessed lots of impossibly gorgeous women and men languorously exhaling cigarette smoke. Come for the history lesson, stay for the truly sumptuous art direction (also by Yonfan). (Seen at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival)
The People I've Slept With
Nothing gives me less pleasure than to slag a festival's Centerpiece Film, but man, this was no fun at all. Putting a broad, Asian-American spin on the sex comedy genre, we watch as a self-avowed slut (Karin Anna Cheung) discovers she's pregnant and sets off on a laborious mission to find the father with the help of her gay best friend. One candidate turns out to be Mr. Right (Archie Kao), and she (cluelessly? maliciously?) withholds the fact of his dubious paternity until seconds before they say their wedding vows. Ha ha ha. On the plus side, Cheung and Kao have an amazing chemistry in their scenes together, which might have worked wonders in a different movie. And I did crack up at a line where Cheung bemoans finding yet another white pubic hair.
Of the five documentaries I previewed on DVD screener for this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), my favorite is one doc-purists might disavow. Indeed, when Variety reviewed Uruphong Raksasad's Agrarian Utopia last year they tagged it a narrative feature, while SFIAAFF is showing it under their Documentary Showcase banner. Whatever. Lyrical, advocative and exquisitely shot, this portrait of rice farmers in Northern Thailand shouldn't be missed.
Scenes of rice planting and harvesting are blended with activities like beehive foraging, mushroom cultivation and snake hunting – extracurricular necessities for these farmers who are essentially hired laborers drowning in debt. Raksasad, who is originally from this area, acts as his own cinematographer and what he captures is unforgettable – men hand-threshing rice stalks by the light of a kerosene lamp, time-lapsed electrical storms zooming over verdant paddies, the horseplay of children, the daunting task of training a water buffalo. His 'characters' appear unconscious of the camera's presence, making us privy to intimate conversations that frequently revolve around fiscal struggles (and which frequently take place during the acts of cooking and eating). The film is bookended with political rallies that place the farmers' plight in the context of recent upheavals in Thai society. If I have one quibble with Raksasad's film, it's that women's voices are largely absent.
Two other worthwhile SFIAAFF docs fit a more traditional mold, and both concern a Japanese-American male with life-changing ties to the U.S. military. Eight years in the army qualified Richard Aoki to become Field Marshall (and an early arms supplier) for the Black Panther Party. Who would have guessed that the iconic marching, drilling and chanting of the Panthers was orchestrated by a self-described "baddest Oriental to come out of West Oakland."
Directors Mike Cheng and Ben Wang filmed Aoki for the last five years of his life and spin a captivating narrative with archival materials, interviews and speeches. Born in San Leandro in 1938, Aoki spent part of his childhood in Topaz Relocation Camp, after which his family moved to Oakland. Following his army stint, he enrolled in Merritt College where he met Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (the latter appears extensively in this film, along with Panthers communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver). In addition to the Panthers, Aoki was involved in the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and more notoriously, the Third World Liberation Front, which instigated the largest student strike in U.C. Berkeley history. He would end up spending most of his life in academia, while remaining a staunch and greatly admired activist. Curiously, the film makes little mention of Aoki's life outside his activism.
In 2006, Lt. Ehren Watada became the first commissioned officer in the U.S. military to refuse deployment to Iraq. In her incredibly moving new film Lt. Watada, Oscar-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) looks at this 
brave, thoughtful young man and the journey his refusal to be "part of something deeply illegal and immoral" took him on. After graduating magna cum laude with a business degree in 2003, this non-pacifist Eagle Scout, mindful of 9/11, joined the army with a desire to protect his country. In 2006, however, after having researched our reasons for invading Iraq, he decided that deployment there would be a violation of his military oath. Watada offered to resign and twice offered to fight in Afghanistan. The army refused. They offered him a cushy, non-combative job in Iraq, which Watada refused. Mock's film expertly lays out what happened next, detailing three years of court martial limbo during which time Watada continued to speak out and dig his hole deeper. Lt. Watada is part of a SFIAAFF spotlight on Frieda Lee Mock, and after the festival's only screening of the film on March 14, the director will take part in an on-stage interview.
Another SFIAAFF documentary by an Oscar-winning filmmaker is the North American Premiere of A Moment in Time by Ruby Yang (The Blood of Yingzhao District). Her film looks at the phenomenon of American Chinatown movie theaters – particularly here in San Francisco – and the role those theaters and the films they screened played in the Chinese community. From melodramas that made Chinatown matrons weep, to the kung-fu pics which established new models of Asian masculinity (and whose themes of loyalty and revenge carried over into Chinatown gang life), these films served as a link to the homeland and were a reflection of community not found in Hollywood films.
San Francisco's Chinatown has had as many as five theaters operating simultaneously and A Moment in Time profiles several, including the Grandview (which had its own film studio) and the Great Star (which if memory serves, is where I saw my first Jackie Chan flick, Operation Condor 2: The Armour of the Gods.) At times this doc overreaches by attempting to provide an entire history of Chinese cinema and consequently loses focus. There are also some strange digressions, like the young woman who praises her current boyfriend for the soy and oyster sauces in his cupboard, while bemoaning the ex who had ketchup and baked beans in his. But overall, it's a satisfying look at a bygone era. By 2000 there wasn't a single remaining Chinatown theater anywhere in the U.S. A Moment in Time will screen with Eric Lin's short, Music Palace, which looks at New York City's final Chinatown movie theater.
Sports documentaries are about as far outside my interest zone as you can get, but I checked out Brigitte Weich's Hana, dul, sed… for that rare glimpse of life in North Korea. The film's first half traces the ascendancy of its women's soccer team – 
culminating in a 2003 Asia Cup win – with profiles of four players and lots and lots of requisite training and game footage. (They get revved-up for a U.S match by visiting the country's Anti-American Museum). After losing a 2004 Olympics qualifying match to Japan, all four women are forced into retirement. That's when the film gets interesting, as we watch them deal with life as ex-sports stars. While hardly a portrayal of 'average' North Koreans (they get to keep their nice state-given Pyongyang apartments and get extra food rations as "Players of the People"), we get to know them and experience the world from their POV: the wide boulevards devoid of auto traffic, the palatial subway stations, a beauty parlor visit, an outing to the National Zoo with its caged dogs and kitty cats, couples rowboating on the Taedong River and a bounty of Socialist Realist poster art (most of it helpfully translated). This film is definitely worth a look.
There are many other documentaries in the festival, which you'll find spread across the Documentary Showcase, CAAM 30th Anniversary Showcase and Documentary Competition sections. One I'm planning to catch during the fest is Tehran Without Permission, a collage of life in Iran's capital city, shot entirely on a Nokia camera phone before last summer's civil unrest.
Peering at the SFIFF 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. (I wrote more about this in my initial post). 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 (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.
