Program Guide - San Francisco International Film Festival - San ...

36 

THE gOdFATHER 

Founder’s dIreCTInG AWArd 

FRANCis FORd COPPOLA 

This award is given each year to one of the masters 

of world cinema, in memory of Irving M. Levin. 

PREviOus RECiPiENTs 

2008 Mike Leigh 

2007 Spike Lee 

2006 Werner Herzog 

2005 Taylor Hackford 

2004 Milos Forman 

2003 Robert Altman 

PREviOusLy KNOwN As AKiRA KuROsAwA AwARd 

2002 Warren Beatty 

2001 Clint Eastwood 

2000 Abbas Kiarostami 

1999 Arturo Ripstein 

1998 Im Kwon-Taek 

1997 Francesco Rosi 

1996 Arthur Penn 

1995 Stanley Donen 

1994 Manoel De Oliveira 

1993 Ousmane Sembène 

1992 Satyajit Ray 

1991 Marcel Carnè 

1990 Jirí Menzel 

1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz 

1988 Robert Bresson 

1987 Michael Powell 

1986 Akira Kurosawa 

THE CONvERsATiON 

“For me, the goal is to do work according to my own 

feeling and hope it lives for years, not just a season,” said 

Francis Ford Coppola in 1982. Forty-six years after he 

directed his first film, it’s safe to say that he’s succeeded. 

Before he had turned 39 Coppola had already won five 

Oscars, two Palme d’Ors, solidified his place in the film 

canon with The Godfather and The Godfather: Part 

II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and had 

entertainingly built up and melted down several fortunes in 

the name of Cinema. 

“In a funny way I became an important studio director when 

I was very young,” he recalled in a 1992 interview, “but I 

always wondered what happened to the director I wanted 

to be.” Now, about to turn 70 and as invigorated and 

questioning as ever, this legend of American and world 

cinema is giving himself the chance to find out. 

The past two decades have solidified his non-filmic 

enterprises, with Coppola forging modest empires out of 

wine, cooking, and hospitality (he runs hotels in Belize, 

Guatemala, and Buenos Aires) and giving himself, finally, 

a financial security away from the last film’s gross or the 

next studio’s fee. “I feel like I’m on a track of doing what 

I call ‘personal films’ that I can finance myself,” he said. “I 

don’t just want to make the type of normal movies that 

come out every weekend.” His most recent film Youth 

Without Youth, based on a story by noted philosopher 

Mircea Eliade and filmed in Romania, serves as a prime 

example of Coppola’s new, personal approach. Part 

philosophy, part romance, part meditative fantasy, the film 

afforded Coppola a sense of creative freedom that he 

hadn’t felt since the pre-Godfather days. Unabashedly 

philosophical in its treatment of life, love and language, 

ONE FROM THE HEART 

THE OuTsidERs 

COPPOLA NOw 

By Jason Sanders 

it’s as far from Mafia mythology, Vietnam-War histrionics, 

or, for that matter, Hollywood moviemaking than anything 

he’s done and takes its intelligent adult pleasures not from 

giving answers, but from asking questions. 

Coppola’s current project is the Buenos Aires-set Tetro, 

which from early accounts is as heartfelt-and truly 

independent as a first-time filmmaker’s debut. “Well, as 

a young man I had an old man’s career, now maybe as 

an old man I can have a young man’s career,” he quipped 

recently. “I feel like I’m doing what I wanted to do when 

I was 18.” Coppola’s first original screenplay since 

The Conversation, some 30 years ago, Tetro is the 

bittersweet story of two brothers, their talented musician 

father and the conflicts and tragedies within a highly 

creative Argentine-Italian family. Surrounded by longtime 

colleagues like Walter Murch and newer ones like the 

brilliant Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. 

(who also shot Youth Without Youth), Coppola draws 

from his own family memories to create this, his most 

personal work yet. “Even though this is a fictional story,” he 

says, “I used what I know best, my life.” 

Such personal filmmaking is truly a return to Coppola’s 

roots. As a student at UCLA Film School, Coppola worked 

as a script doctor for the legendary cult impresario Roger 

Corman. Impressed by Coppola’s writing skills, Corman 

gave the tyro a chance to direct with the 1963 horror 

quickie Dementia 13, but it was his next films, the satirical 

coming-of-age tale You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) and 

the brilliantly improvised road-trip movie The Rain People 

(1969) that truly announced Coppola as a talent to watch. 

And from there, The Godfather: Brought on at the 

last minute, the young Coppola spent the entire shoot

APOCALyPsE NOw 

sELECTEd FiLMOgRAPHy 

2009 Tetro 

2007 Youth Without Youth 

1997 The Rainmaker 

1996 Jack 

1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula 

1990 The Godfather: Part III 

1989 New York Stories (segment “Life 

without Zoe”) 

1988 Tucker: The Man and His Dream 

1987 Gardens of Stone 

1986 Peggy Sue Got Married 

1984 The Cotton Club 

1983 The Outsiders 

Rumble Fish 

1982 One from the Heart 

1979 Apocalypse Now 

1974 The Conversation 

The Godfather: Part II 

1972 The Godfather 

1969 The Rain People 

1968 Finian’s Rainbow 

1966 You’re a Big Boy Now 

1963 The Terror 

Dementia 13 

imagining he was about to be fired, with nearly his every 

decision countered and dismissed by studio heads. 

Brando? No way. Pacino? Never heard of him. Gordon 

Willis’s cinematography? Too dark. The result? The biggest 

money-maker in film history at the time, which launched 

Coppola towards a career he could barely have imagined. 

“I wanted to do little Antonioni films, little Fellini films,” he 

recalled in 1992. “I never planned on being part of the big 

stuff. I never imagined it.” 

Where some artists hoard their career success for their 

own personal gain, Coppola reinvested his in meaningful 

films and the professional development of his friends and 

colleagues. His collaborative studio, American Zoetrope, 

founded with George Lucas and John Korty 40 years 

ago this year, in 1979, became the epicenter of a new 

cinematic culture, and Coppola (to paraphrase Iranian 

director Mohsen Mahkmalbaf) started making not only 

films, but also filmmakers. 

“American Zoetrope, San Francisco’s only major movie 

studio, is full of longhaired, bearded types,” stated a 

bemused 1984 article, and within its confines Coppola 

helped nurture (and fund) such filmmakers as Lucas 

(who started as an intern on The Rain People) and 

Philip Kaufman; international legends like Werner Herzog, 

Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa also benefited from 

Coppola’s generosity as a financier and producer. “Francis 

was the great white knight,” recalled George Lucas in a 

recent New Yorker profile. “He was the one who made 

us hope.” Meanwhile, Bay Area icons like editor and 

sound designer Walter Murch and director Carroll Ballard 

became Coppola’s most trusted colleagues, and, by 

extension, among the industry’s most leading talents. 

yOuTH wiTHOuT yOuTH 

Breathing new life into American film, Coppola set about 

reinvigorating the San Francisco cultural landscape. He 

bought buildings, a radio station, a magazine, a theater 

and, in Napa Valley, an old winery that later became an 

exemplary career in itself. His fervent, visionary embrace 

of new technology prefigured the digital film movement 

by decades. “I think electronic cinema is going to make art 

less expensive to make, available to more people. I think in 

two years there won’t be any more film shot,” he said, back 

in 1981. His films became as wide-ranging, idiosyncratic, 

and bold as his interests, with now-classic works like The 

Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), 

clearly ahead of their time, criticized on release as too arty 

or incomprehensible. 

Like a modern-day Don Quixote, Coppola has spent 

his career getting knocked down, but getting back up, 

proclaimed a genius one year and foolhardy the next, 

but tenaciously staying true to his own vision. In 1997, 

Coppola was asked of his legacy. “If I could widen the 

cinema one little percentage point more, at a time when 

it’s not being widened, that would be very, very gratifying,” 

he responded. His career has accomplished far more than 

that. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the true geniuses of 

world cinema. And he’s not done expanding the frame yet. 

Jason Sanders is an archivist and writer at the Pacific Film 

Archive in Berkeley. His writing has appeared in publications 

including Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Scope, Release 

Print and International Documentary. 

37

PeTer J. oWens AWArd 

RObERT REdFORd 

Named for the longtime San Francisco benefactor 

of arts and charitable organizations Peter J. Owens 

(1936–91), this award honors an actor 

whose work exemplifies brilliance, independence 

and integrity. 

FEsTivAL sCREENiNg 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 


2008 Maria Bello 

2007 Robin Williams 

2006 Ed Harris 

2005 Joan Allen 

2004 Chris Cooper 

2003 Dustin Hoffman 

2002 Kevin Spacey 

2001 Stockard Channing 

2000 Winona Ryder 

1999 Sean Penn 

1998 Nicolas Cage 

1997 Annette Bening 

1996 Harvey Keitel 

PREviOusLy KNOwN As PiPER-HEidsiECK AwARd 

1995 Tim Roth 

1994 Gérard Depardieu 

1993 Danny Glover 

1992 Geena Davis 

1991 Anjelica Huston 

The Peter J. Owens Award is made possible 

by a grant from the Peter J. Owens trust at The 

San Francisco Foundation. Gary Shapiro and 

Scott Owens, trustees. 

38 

A Hollywood executive famously quipped, “He’s just 

another California blond—throw a stick at Malibu, you’ll 

hit six of them!” That was before said blond went on to 

become the most bankable international male star of 

his time: an everyman matinee idol, at once accessible, 

impenetrable, untouchable, transforming blinding male 

beauty into box-office success. 

Redford stands outside Hollywood proper, where he has 

never been one of the pack, with his quiet magnetism 

and cipher-like impenetrability belying hidden depths 

underneath that most handsome of faces. The one-time 

baseball scholarship student bit by the acting bug 

transformed a promising Broadway career into movie 

gold through a series of iconic performances, each one 

greater in magnitude than the last. 

The golden boy of ’70s American cinema didn’t swagger 

across the screen like McQueen, his principal rival 

among bankable male stars with international pull, nor 

did he step with De Niro’s zeitgeist angst or Hoffman’s 

chutzpah or Pacino’s bossy machismo. Nicholson’s 

rebellion and Reynolds’ horseplay played to baser tastes, 

THE NATuRAL 

By Andrew Bailey 

leaving Redford in a classier league of characters and 

performances, encapsulated in 1975 at the peak of his 

powers by the immortal and tragic Jay Gatsby, pining away 

in his Long Island estate: elegant, tortured, stoic, alone. 

Gatsby was no Byronic hero and Redford was not easily 

pegged as the archetypal tall, dark and handsome figure 

with a past, a tendency that screenwriter William Goldman 

insisted the actor avoided from his inception, first as 

Broadway upstart, then TV player and, finally, big-screen 

icon, in his star-making turn as the Sundance Kid, opposite 

Paul Newman’s bank-robbing Butch Cassidy, in George 

Roy Hill’s rousing blockbuster, the first of the so-called 

buddy movies. 

Redford won his breakthrough role over Brando, McQueen 

and Beatty in the wake of his success in Barefoot in 

the Park, middlebrow fare hinting at a young actor’s 

flair for romantic comedy. With the Sundance Kid he 

had something else to prove—that he could hold his own 

against top-billed Newman and preserve equilibrium 

inside a duo, all while finding stolen moments to enhance 

a burgeoning star quality. Redford achieved this by not


2007 Lions for Lambs 

2005 An Unfinished Life 

2004 The Clearing 

2001 Spy Game 

1998 The Horse Whisperer 

1996 Up Close & Personal 

1993 Indecent Proposal 

1992 Sneakers 

1990 Havana 

1986 Legal Eagles 

1985 Out of Africa 

1984 The Natural 

1980 Brubaker 

1979 The Electric Horseman 

1977 A Bridge Too Far 

1976 All the President’s Men 

1975 The Great Waldo Pepper 

Three Days of the Condor 

1974 The Great Gatsby 

1973 The Way We Were 

The Sting 

1972 The Candidate 

Jeremiah Johnson 

1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here 

Downhill Racer 

1967 Barefoot in the Park 

sNEAKERs 

THE sTiNg bRubAKER 

saying much, letting his blue-eyed costar lead, watching 

wide-eyed in the wings as the duo wandered through a 

revisionist West. No actor is more generous in sharing 

screen time with other stars, even ones with greater star 

power than his own, something Redford would repeat in 

The Way We Were, All The President’s Men and Out of 

Africa, among others. 

Through classic screen characters, his choices time and 

again come to define both the actor and the man, hinting 

at future off-screen roles honed from the raw material of 

the parts he played, as though he had skied off the screen 

in Downhill Racer onto the slopes of Utah, in the vicinity 

of Park City, where his Sundance Institute originated in 

1981 as a nurturing ground for independent film, well 

outside the Hollywood mainstream and with a nod toward 

environmental and Native American concerns—something 

Redford had previously explored in Jeremiah Johnson, 

the first of six films he appeared in for the late director 

Sydney Pollack. 

This is fascinating alchemy. One can look at the political 

corruption examined in The Candidate, Three Days of 

LiONs FOR LAMbs 

the Condor and All the President’s Men—three of his 

key ’70s works—and watch Redford working in top form 

as an actor and, at the same time, becoming energized 

as political activist and whistle-blower, characteristics 

expressed during later phases of his career behind the 

camera, most recently in his provocative Gulf War drama 

Lions for Lambs, in which Redford served as director, star 

and producer. 

Such intention of purpose and unwavering quality are rare 

enough in careers a quarter as long or as illustrious. In 

Robert Redford—a onetime matinee idol of uncommon and 

indeed, for at least one long-ago movie mogul, unexpected 

depth and mettle—these features define several decades 

of vital work. It is with great pleasure that we award the 

2009 Peter J. Owens Award to the incomparable Robert 

Redford. 

Andrew Bailey is the San Francisco–based author of the 

Taschen volume Cinema Now. 

39

KAnbAr AWArd 

JAMEs TObACK 

The Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting 

acknowledges the crucial role that strong 

screenwriting plays in the creation of great films. 


Tyson 


2008 Peter Morgan 

2007 Robert Towne 

2006 Jean-Claude Carrière 

2005 Paul Haggis 

40 

This coming November, James Toback will be 65, and 

entitled to social security benefits. I mention that because 

in our lengthy friendship, he used to promise me that he 

was not going to get past 40. In 1978, when we first met— 

the moment of the opening of his first picture, Fingers— 

there were reasons for thinking his prediction would come 

true. To be blunt, he was living at every extreme he could 

get his hands on. There were women, there were gambling 

debts (and the occasional win), there was a lot of alcohol 

and there was Jim’s constant and ferocious humor about 

everything being doomed, so let’s get on with it 

He was a wild and dangerous character, and Fingers was 

a debut film that horrified and alarmed many people. It 

was visceral in its sense of psychic nakedness—remember 

Harvey Keitel crouching in the corner like a feral creature 

on the run. It was greedily sexual—recollect Tanya Roberts 

and Tisa Farrow. And it was a menacing portrait of 

blackness—just consider the presence of Jim Brown, the 

great running back, who had taken Toback into his home 

and his inner circle as Toback attempted to map out the 

parameters of risk. (This actually led to a book by Toback— 

called Jim.) 

At that time, Toback looked like a vagrant force in 

mainstream cinema: He had written The Gambler for 

Karel Reisz; he was attached to Warren Beatty as friend, 

OuT THERE, 

dANgEROus 

ANd EssENTiAL 

By David Thomson 

adviser and role model; he had other scripts out with 

major directors—George Cukor, for one, who was about 

to direct Faye Dunaway in Jim’s script on the life of 

Victoria Woodhull. 

But times changed, the movie landscape shifted and Jim 

survived. There are projects that defy belief (and do not 

always earn it on screen)—like Exposed, with Rudolph 

Nureyev and Nastassja Kinski, fabulous creatures but 

hardly existing in the same world or in exchanged dreams. 

Jim was a director or a filmmaker, yet he was always 

writing scripts, sometimes three at a time, a ploy that 

assisted his reluctance to actually finish or deliver anything. 

But life was giddy then when Jim was likely to call and 

read you a passage from a script over the phone (a pay 

phone at the same Manhattan intersection)—so long as 

you could accommodate the interlude in which he chatted 

up a woman passing by (that interruption was probably 

going to be embraced in the next draft of the script). Jim 

was a Harvard man, who loved the melodrama of public 

phones. He was a musical fanatic, so long as you knew 

that Mahler and the Chiffons were equally valid. 

His career has been unpredictable—he has a selfdestructive 

streak, no matter how many people felt urged 

to help his jazzy voice. He is not just “independent,” in that


2004 When Will I Be Loved 

2001 Harvard Man 

1999 Black and White 

1997 Two Girls and a Guy 

1991 Bugsy 

1989 The Big Bang 

1987 The Pick-up Artist 

1983 Exposed 

1982 Love and Money 

1978 Fingers 

1974 The Gambler 

wHEN wiLL i bE LOvEd 

bugsy HARvARd MAN 

THE gAMbLER 

now rather composed sense—he is out there, dangerous 

and essential. As you can judge, I cannot write an objective 

or impartial tribute to Toback. We’re much too close as 

friends. But he is as funny, generous and warm as anyone 

you will find, even if he has had to put up with a critic who 

feels bound to confess that not all his films are great. 

But over the years Toback has done such astonishing 

things—not just The Gambler and Fingers (this is still a 

model film on how the concert pianist and the hoodlum 

may be brothers), but the pioneering The Big Bang, a 

breakthrough in free form and rhapsodic talk; Two Girls 

and a Guy, the film that established the genius of Robert 

Downey, Jr (and don’t forget that Downey was doing Jim); 

and Bugsy, the Warren Beatty picture at last, the amazing 

story of Las Vegas (a city that Jim himself might have 

invented and which he has surely helped finance) and, of 

course, Tyson. 

Toback loves sports and sporting arenas. Most of his films 

refer to athletic events and he has always kept company 

with the real demons of the game. Mike Tyson may be 

his dream subject: a Caliban figure who turns out to have 

some of the song of Ariel and the sadness of Prospero. 

But it is typical of Toback that he should take such an 

outsider figure and reveal his pathos. Bugsy Siegel was 

a famous monster, too, but Toback knew that he also 

possessed the distracted charm and the whimsical notions 

of a Warren Beatty. 

So the Festival presents James Toback with its award for 

screenwriting. That’s fair enough. No one has done better 

dialogue in the last 30 years. No one is more prone to 

see events in life as the ghosts of coming scenario. For 

there’s the truth: Toback is a filmmaker, a film-dreamer, 

a film-fabulist. To be with him, to talk to him on the phone, 

is to enter into that film. He is quite simply a remarkable, 

hellacious fellow—a devoted father now, just as he was a 

loving son; a man who has won and lost many women and 

bets. And a friend who has survived, and shows every sign 

of planning to be a garrulous and hair-raising old man. 

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical 

Dictionary of Film, “Have You Seen. . .?”: A Personal 

Introduction to 1,000 Films, and the memoir, Try to Tell 

the Story. The last person he interviewed on stage for the 

Festival was screenwriter Peter Morgan. 

41

Golden GATe PersIsTenCe 

oF VIsIon AWArd 

LOuRdEs PORTiLLO 

The POV Award honors the achievements of a 

filmmaker whose work is crafting documentaries, 

short films, animation or work for television. 


Al Más Allá 


2008 Errol Morris 

2007 Heddy Honigmann 

2006 Guy Maddin 

2005 Adam Curtis 

2004 Jon Else 

2003 Pat O’Neill 

2002 Fernando Birri 

2001 Kenneth Anger 

2000 Faith Hubley 

1999 Johan van der Keuken 

1998 Robert Frank 

1997 Jan Svankmajer 

42 

I am a guest in Lourdes Portillo’s home. A fresco of vintage 

Italianate stencils grace the ceiling over her living room, 

the music is a symphonic John Adams. She is away today, 

in Cuidad Juárez, investigating the femicides of young 

women murdered by psychopaths, or the narcos, or the 

police. The targets of her investigation are not pleased. 

I find a knife and a key placed by a stranger, ominously 

and intentionally, on the sidewalk in front of her door. 

This, the home of a woman who once inspired my stoic 

husband to pose in front of MacArthur Park with a Selena 

doll under his raincoat. 

These are the dissonant sensibilities of Lourdes Portillo— 

the elegant, the insurgent, the fearless, the wickedly 

funny—which she orchestrates with transcendent skill into 

an exhilarating body of work. Consider Las Madres: The 

Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, her emotionally charged 

documentary of women standing for justice for the 

desaparecidos in Argentina; Columbus on Trial, in which 

the official story of conquest and the legacy of the explorer 

himself are sliced, diced and fried in a hilarious send-up 

by the comedy troupe, Culture Clash; or Al Más Allá, 

her latest experimental documentary/fiction (never a 

contradiction in terms within Portillo’s genre-defiant 

oeuvre). This most recent work puts globalization and 

filmmaking practice itself on trial. In its film within a film, 

a documentary director and her crew pursue the allegorical 

story of a Mexican fishing-cum-resort village caught up in 

transnational drug trafficking. Filmmakers beware. Portillo’s 

sly lampoon of the pretensions and absurdities of the 

filmmaking process will make you think she’s been spying 

on your shoot. 

THE ELEgANT 

iNsuRgENT 

By Renee Tajima-Peña 

Portillo reminds us what a restless imagination can, and 

must, produce. No two of her films are ever alike. There 

is, however, a definite Portillo style distinguished in part 

by a stunning visuality, from the hallucinatory portrait 

of diasporic Mexican culture in her early La Ofrenda: 

The Days of the Dead to the edgy landscapes of 

Ciudad Juárez’s own particular vision of hell in Señorita 

Extraviada and the sumptuous, surrealism-infused visual 

feasts of The Devil Never Sleeps and Al Más Allá. It is 

an aesthetic of reinvention, formally daring and bound by 

a filmmaking ethos that cultural critic Rosalinda Fregoso 

calls a politics of love. 

Fregoso, who literally wrote the book on Portillo’s work, 

cites Che Guevara’s, “Sin amor no hay revolución” 

(“Without love there can be no revolution”) to describe 

the compassion and meaning that courses through 

Portillo’s films. Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena could 

have stopped at parody in its tour of the Tejana singer’s 

hometown and center of fandom, Corpus Christi. After 

all, Selena Quintanilla’s outsized legend was matched by 

a voluptuous physicality and a style that borders on high 

camp. But beneath the adulation, Portillo finds a liberating 

self-love on the part of the singer’s fans. Selena embodied 

the brown Mexicana girls. Her gorgeous, everyday beauty 

defied a world of white visual privilege in which even the 

Spanish-language television stars are güera-dominant. 

Portillo first emerged as a filmmaker amid the ferment of 

cultural and social movements in 1970s San Francisco: 

feminism, Chicana/o cinema, social documentary, avantgarde 

art. No doubt adherents of all would claim Portillo

LAs MAdREs: THE MOTHERs OF PLAzA dE MAyO 


2001 Señorita Extraviada 

1999 Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena 

1996 Sometimes My Feet Go Numb 

1994 The Devil Never Sleeps 

1992 Columbus on Trial 

1989 La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead 

1985 Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo 

1979 After the Earthquake 

as their own, but as an artist she has always been too 

singular a force to be bound by any collective template. In 

an era of identify formation, Portillo embodied all manner 

of contradiction. Wife, mother, lesbian. Brown within 

white independent cinema. A woman within male-centric, 

Chicano cinema. 

Although Portillo worked on the outside of political 

formations, her films are no less disruptive and decentering. 

The Devil Never Sleeps is a murder mystery as telenovela, 

for instance, and at the same time an implicit critique of 

family, nation and the hypocrisy of social mores that 

shadows both. A personal investigation of the death of her 

favorite uncle in Mexico, Tío Oscar, the tale is ripe with 

Portillo’s particular brand of irony. It is the first of her films 

that she narrates; she is a neo-noir sleuth of her own 

family’s secrets. The Devil Never Sleeps has been 

variously described as postmodern, queer-identified, 

a vision of border-crossing hybridity. Like a specter, though, 

Portillo can’t be pinned down. Her stylized visual devices, 

especially the photographs from the past literally and 

metaphorically adrift, are inventively productive rather than 

merely referential. 

The feature documentary, Señorita Extraviada, is the 

culmination of Portillo’s formal strategy and critical 

humanism. Hundreds of young, poor women have 

been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty metropolis of 

maquiladoras and near-apocalyptic sprawl, just over the 

border from El Paso. Señorita Extraviada catalogues 

the horror. Severed skulls are left for mothers to identify, 

bodies are left to decay in the desert, anonymous. Portillo 

sEñORiTA ExTRAviAdA 

CORPus: A HOME MOviE FOR sELENA 

LA OFRENdA: 

THE dAys OF THE dEAd 

names these women, and insists upon their humanity. The 

visible evidence of their lives is pictured with a symbolic 

religiosity. Shoes, shrouds, a girl’s dress laid out for a 

communion. Or a burial? 

Portillo imagines the landscape of femicide with a 

disharmony of visual elements and a tense, dirge-like 

soundtrack. As interrogator she is relentless, probing 

the police, the state and the alleged perpetrators with 

the same skepticism, until a larger picture of male 

impunity and official impotence—or complicity—emerges. 

Like canaries in a coal mine, the murdered women of 

Juarez signal a deeper, prophetic menace. One witness 

describes photos of atrocities that were shown to her by 

her uniformed torturers. These shades of Abu Ghraib–like 

perversion make Señorita Extraviada less a mystery than 

a portrait of a terrorism that keeps the city’s population 

perpetually on edge. “I could have killed you and no one 

would have known,” one victim remembers being taunted 

by her attacker. Lourdes Portillo’s 30 years of filmmaking 

demand that we never forget these voices. She is an 

alchemist who lures us inside her imagination, and we 

have no other choice but to watch, listen and remember.. 

Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award–nominated 

documentary filmmaker and graduate director of the social 

documentation program at UC Santa Cruz. 

43

Mel noVIKoFF AWArd 

bRuCE gOLdsTEiN 

Named in honor of legendary San Francisco film 

exhibitor Mel Novikoff (1922–87), this award 

is given annually to an individual or institution 

whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s 

knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. 


Nights of Cabiria 

MEL NOviKOFF AwARd PREviOus RECiPiENTs 

2008 J. Hoberman 

2007 Kevin Brownlow 

2005 Anita Monga 

2004 Paolo Cherchi Usai 

2003 Manny Farber 

2002 David Francis 

2001 Cahiers du Cinéma 

San Francisco Cinematheque 

2000 Donald Krim 

David Shepard 

1999 Enno Patalas 

1998 Adrienne Mancia 

1997 Judy Stone 

Film Arts Foundation 

1996 David Robinson 

1995 Institut Lumière 

1994 Naum Kleiman 

1993 Andrew Sarris 

1992 Jonas Mekas 

1991 Pauline Kael 

1990 Donald Richie 

1989 USSR Filmmakers Association 

1988 Daniel Talbot 

44 

There are programmers, there are programmers’ 

programmers, and there is Bruce Goldstein, programmer’s 

programmer and cine-showman extraordinaire. 

Is there any aspect of movie exhibition where this guy 

lacks firsthand knowledge? The teenage Goldstein 

dropped out of college to run a movie house in the 

outermost town on Cape Cod. Returning to New York by 

way of London, he became a legendary publicist (for New 

York’s no less legendary Thalia revival house). He’s now 

a canny distributor (cofounder of Rialto Pictures, an outfit 

dedicated to making the black-and-white art house hits of 

the ’50s look better than new) and, since 1987, he’s been 

the man who books the retrospectives and premieres the 

restorations at New York’s Film Forum. 

Film Forum director Karen Cooper recruited Goldstein 

even as revival programs all over America were buckling 

under the home-video onslaught. Taking a cue from posttelevision 

Hollywood, he devoted his first series, Bigger 

Than Life: Movies in Scope, to the wide screen. Showman 

that he is, Goldstein believes in showing movies as they 

were meant to be seen. (Indeed, dedicated to giving the 

public the best that motion pictures have to offer, Bruce 

is the most print-conscious of exhibitors.) Another early 

Film Forum series was Gimmick-o-Rama, for which 

Goldstein appropriated William Castle’s Percepto process, 

wiring every third Film Forum seat with a small motor for 

THE iNdisPENsibLE 

MAN 

By J. Hoberman 

a screening of The Tingler—undoubtedly the first time 

in three decades that the movie was shown in the form 

that its director intended. (Goldstein has subsequently 

presented The Tingler in Percepto in Paris, Munich 

and Tel Aviv.) It’s thanks to Bruce’s various 3-D series 

and individual presentations that Film Forum was for 

many years the lone New York City theater with an oldfashioned 

silver screen and the double-system interlock 

necessary for 3-D projection. (When Martin Scorsese 

purchased a number of vintage 3-D prints, he had to come 

down to Houston Street to screen them.) 

As anyone who has ever had the benefit of his voluminous 

press kits can attest, Bruce Goldstein is an archivist as 

well as movie historian who has organized pioneering 

retrospectives for filmmakers ranging from Chantal 

Akerman to Samuel Z. Arkoff—and also promoted them. 

(For years, he kept Arkoff’s thank-you letter framed on 

his office wall: “You’re a brilliant publicist!”) Bruce believes 

honest ballyhoo is no vice. Old hands at the Thalia still 

remember the Fay Wray scream-alike contest, complete 

with man in monkey suit, that he organized for the 50th 

anniversary of the original King Kong. No detail is too 

small. Bruce spares no effort in producing a quarterly 

calendar that is studied by buffs and emulated by 

programmers across the nation. Coprogramming a theater 

known for its cosmopolitan mix of the arcane and the

NigHTs OF CAbiRiA 

MEL NOviKOFF AwARd COMMiTTEE 2008 

Francis J. Rigney, chair 

Linda Blackaby, ex officio 

Helena R. Foster 

George Gund III 

Maurice Kanbar 

Philip Kaufman 

Tom Luddy 

Gary Meyer 

Anita Monga 

Janis Plotkin 

Peter Scarlet 

popular, avant- and derriere-garde, he has based series 

on half a dozen newly identified strains of film noir while 

more or less inventing the idea of Pre-Code Hollywood 

cinema as a genre. (I can almost believe the ultimate ’30s 

bad girl movie, Barbara Stanwyck’s Baby Face was his 

creation—in fact, thanks to a call from a contact at the 

Library of Congress, he was the first to show the uncut 

Baby Face at the first sold-out weekday matinee in Film 

Forum history.) 

Can we doubt that this man loves his job? Although 

Bruce’s mother, Betty Horowitz Goldstein, worked for 

years for the Screen Publicists’ Guild and his father, 

Murray Goldstein, was employed by Columbia Pictures as 

a commercial artist, their son attributes his vocation to the 

richness of the TV programming available in New York 

in the ’50s, in particular the week-long runs afforded by 

Million Dollar Movie—proof that if television ended the 

golden age of moviegoing, it also kept movies going, albeit 

by other means. 

I began by calling Bruce a programmer’s programmer 

and a cine-showman extraordinaire. But he’s more than 

that—he’s a man of remarkable good humor and great, 

great taste, a guy characterized by admirable ingenuity 

and a boundless, infectious enthusiasm. He’s remarkably 

persuasive—a skillful wrangler of studio execs and film 

collectors alike—and he obviously has a good head for 

business. Rialto Pictures, which Goldstein runs with 

entertainment lawyer Adrienne Halpern, began in 1997 

with Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and now boasts a 

library of some 40 titles—all of them, as Mae West might 

say, cherce. 

Speaking of which, Bruce is also a chevalier (perhaps 

the only son of Hicksville, Long Island, as he likes to 

claim, awarded France’s medal of the Order of Arts 

and Letters.) I guess that makes him a knight-errant 

but he’s also something rarer, maybe even sui generis. 

Bruce Goldstein is a celluloid warrior, a dedicated 

cinephile-activist, a fighter for old movies and new prints, 

for weeklong revivals and knowledgeable reviews. For 

going on a quarter of a century, he’s been New York film 

culture’s indispensible man. 

J. Hoberman recently celebrated his 30th year as a film 

critic for the Village Voice. He teaches film history at the 

Cooper Union and is the author of ten books including 

The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of 

the ’60s, and was last year’s recipient of the Mel Novikoff 

Award. 

45

46 

vAsERMiL Mushon sAlMonA, IsrAel, 2008 WInner 

NEw diRECTORs 

PRizE 

The New Directors Prize is awarded to the director 

of a debut narrative feature in the San Francisco 

International Film Festival. It is accompanied by a 

$15,000 cash award. Films selected to compete for 

the New Directors Prize are first narrative features 

that exhibit a unique artistic sensibility or vision and 

deserve to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. 

An independent jury of film professionals from various 

fields screens the 11 international selections during the 

Festival. The New Directors Prize will be announced 

at the Golden Gate Awards Wednesday, May 6 at 

Temple Nightclub–Prana Restaurant. 

In suPPorT oF 

InnoVATIVe FIlMMAKInG

official selections 2009 

AUTUMN 

(Sonbahar) 

Özcan Alper 

Turkey/Germany 

CAN GO THROUGH SKIN 

(Kan door huid heen) 

Esther Rots 

Netherlands 

CLAUSTROPHOBIA 

Ivy Ho 

Hong Kong/China 

DON’T LET ME DROWN 

Cruz Angeles 

USA 

VASERMIL 2008 

Mushon Salmona 

Israel 

THE VIOLIN 2007 

Francisco Vargas 

Mexico 

TAKING FATHER HOME 2006 

Ying Liang 

China 

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW 2005 

Miranda July 

USA 

neW dIreCTors PrIze Jury 

FRENCH GIRL 

(Française) 

Souad El-Bouhati 

France/Moroccol 

GASOLINE 

(Gasolina) 

Julio Hernández Cordón 

Guatemala/Spain/USA 

HOME 

Ursula Meier 

Switzerland/France/Belgium 

KABULI KID 

Barmak Akram 

France/Afghanistan 

PAsT WInners oF The neW dIreCTors PrIze 

ANNE HUBBELL 

Anne Hubbell is the feature film account manager at 

Kodak in New York City, where she works with over 

100 film projects annually. She has been a freelance 

producer and consultant on numerous film and 

television productions and not-for-profit media and 

arts events. She produced Lipstick & Dynamite, 

a feature documentary distributed by Koch Lorber 

in 2005, and she is currently developing two 

independent narrative features and writing a script 

for an animated project. For five years, Anne served 

as Executive Director of Atlanta’s IMAGE Film & 

Video Center. 

SqUINT YOUR EYES 2004 

Andrzej Jakimowski 

Poland 

THE MAN OF THE YEAR 2003 

José Henrique Fonseca 

Brazil 

THE WILD BEES 2002 

Bhodan Sláma 

Brazil 

THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS 2001 

Patrick Stettner 

USA 

BARRY JENKINS 

Barry Jenkins is a writer/director living in San 

Francisco and a member of the Bandry Films 

collective consisting of himself, Justin Barber, 

James Laxton and Alejandro Cruz. His recent or 

current projects include the feature film Medicine 

for Melancholy, as well as the recently completed 

short A Young Couple and a commissioned work 

for the Northwest Film Forum’s One Shot Film 

Series. He is a contributor to the zine Short End 

magazine, where he continues to work on the 

dialogue series Notes on a Cinematographer. 

MID-AUGUST LUNCH 

(Pranzo di Ferragosto) 

Gianni Di Gregorio 

Italy 

THE PARANOIDS 

(Los paranoicos) 

Gabriel Medina 

Argentina/Spain 

SNOW 

(Snijeg) 

Aida Begic 

Bosnia and Herzegovina/Germany/France/ 

Iran 

EENY MEENY 2000 

Alice Nellis 

Czech Republic 

XIAO WU 1999 

Jia Zhangke 

China 

SOMERSAULT IN A COFFIN 1998 

Dervis Zaim 

Turkey 

HONEY AND ASHES 1997 

Andrzej Jakimowski 

Poland 

LAURA THIELEN 

Executive director of Aspen Film since 1995, 

Laura Thielen was formerly the program director 

for the San Francisco Film Society. Her other 

professional experience includes working for Francis 

Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, the Pacific Film Archive 

and Audio Brandon Films. With more than 30 years 

in media arts, most of them in the nonprofit sector, 

she has also taught, written and lectured about film. 

Thielen has served on several panels and juries 

including the National Endowment for the Arts, 

Rockefeller Foundation and Sundance Film Festival. 

47

48 

uP THE yANgTzE yunG ChAnG, CAnAdA, 2008 WInner, besT doCuMenTAry FeATure 

Golden GATe AWArds 

The Golden Gate Awards were established to augment 

the San Francisco International Film Festival’s 

tradition of recognizing and promoting excellence in 

independent and world cinema. For more than 50 

years, the competition has exhibited the best of Bay 

Area and international filmmaking talent by honoring 

superior innovation in narrative, documentary, animation, 

experimental and television works. 

The prestige of the Golden Gate Awards competition 

has grown along with the Festival, and is reflected in 

the recent substantial increases in monetary awards. 

This year, nearly $100,000 in cash prizes will be given 

to the winners in 14 categories. The prize for Best 

Documentary Feature has grown to $20,000, and the 

Best Bay Area Documentary Feature is now valued 

at $15,000. In addition, SFIFF52 will inaugurate 

the Golden Gate Award for Best Investigative 

Documentary Feature with a juried cash prize of 

$25,000. One of the largest film festival prizes 

in the country, and one of the few for work that 

probes issues of social and political importance, this 

new award is designed to embolden courageous 

filmmakers working to uncover the truths about 

topical issues. 

The Golden Gate Awards are distinguished in 

large part due to the participation and expertise 

of members of our vital and dedicated Bay Area 

film and video community. Each year, a core group 

of filmmakers, journalists, exhibitors, curators and 

academics devote hours to screening hundreds of 

entries. Each submission is thoughtfully reviewed and 

evaluated by these participants who then recommend 

films for Golden Gate Awards competition. Four juries 

view the Official Selections at the Festival and choose 

Golden Gate Awards in 14 categories. 

The Golden Gate Awards are only one of many 

ways in which the Film Society fulfills an important 

Festival function: to increase attention and resources 

available to independent filmmakers and to support 

the development of local and international cinema. We 

are especially proud of the world-class films selected 

for competition and invite you to join us in celebrating 

the cinematic accomplishments of the distinguished 

filmmakers whose works enliven and uplift audiences 

and the San Francisco International Film Festival itself.


doCuMenTAry FeATures 

THE AGE OF STUPID 

Franny Armstrong, England 

BURMA VJ: REPORTING FROM A CLOSED 

COUNTRY 

Anders Østergaard, Denmark 

CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN 

Lee Anne Schmitt, USA 

CITY OF BORDERS (Bay Area) 

Yun Suh, USA 

doCuMenTAry FeATure Jury 

CRUDE 

Joe Berlinger, USA 

D TOUR (Bay Area) 

Jim Granato, USA 

KIMJONGILIA 

N.C. Heikin, USA 

MY NEIGHBOR, MY KILLER 

Anne Aghion, USA 

NEW MUSLIM COOL (Bay Area) 

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, USA 

Robb Moss is codirector of the documentary Secrecy 

(SFIFF 2008). His previous film, The Same River Twice, 

premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, was 

nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit award and 

played theatrically in more than 80 cities across North 

America. He was on the 2004 documentary jury at the 

Sundance Film Festival and has thrice served as a creative 

advisor for the Sundance Institute documentary labs. He 

has taught filmmaking at Harvard University for the past 

20 years. 

NOMAD’S LAND 

Gaël Métroz, Switzerland 

THE RECKONING 

Pamela Yates, USA 

SPEAKING IN TONGUES (Bay Area) 

Marcia Jarmel, Ken Schneider, USA 

Z32 

Avi Mograbi, Israel 

ELLEN bRuNO RObb MOss 

b Ruby RiCH 

Ellen Bruno’s documentary work has focused on leading 

human rights issues including Burmese prostitution, Tibetan 

nuns, health care in Cambodia and homelessness. Her highly 

awarded films have been used extensively in universities, 

as lobbying tools in Congress and to raise funds for global 

issues. Her films include House of the Spirit (1984), 

Requiem (1985), Mamie (1986), No Fairytale (1986), 

Samsara (1989), Blessed (1995), Sacrifice (1997), A 

Call to Prayer (2000), Leper (Nepal, 2004) and Sky Burial 

(Tibet 2005). 

ROd wEbb 

Rod Webb is head of programming at the Australian 

Broadcasting Corporation’s international television service, 

Australia Network. Over a long career he has had prominent 

positions at the National Film Theatre of Australia, the 

Australian Film Commission and the Sydney Film Festival, 

which he directed for five years. In the 1990s, he worked 

at SBS Televsion and on the establishment of the World 

Movies subscription channel. In early 2005 he was appointed 

head of programming at Australia Network. 

B Ruby Rich is professor and chair of the Community 

Studies department and Social Documentation program at 

UC Santa Cruz. She has been a working critic, curator and 

cultural theorist since the mid-’70s, Rich has been closely 

identified with a number of important film movements, 

notably feminist film and Latin American cinema. Her 

work and voice can be found in countless magazines, 

newspapers, academic journals, books, panel discussions, 

and public radio programs. She is the author of Chick 

Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film 

Movement. 

49

50 


DOCUMENTARY SHORT 

THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN (BAY AREA) 

Steven Okazaki, Cambodia 

A DAY LATE IN OAKLAND (BAY AREA) 

Zachary Stauffer, USA 

575 CASTRO ST. (BAY AREA) 

Jenni Olson, USA 

TONGZHI IN LOVE (BAY AREA) 

Ruby Yang, USA 

WAITING FOR A TRAIN: THE TOSHIO HIRANO 

STORY (BAY AREA) 

Oscar Bucher, USA 

UTOPIA, PART 3: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SHOP- 

PING MALL (BAY AREA) 

Sam Green, Carrie Lozano, USA 

ZIETEK 

Bartosz Blaschke, Poland 

NARRATIVE SHORT 

ANGELS DIE IN THE SOIL 

Babak Amini, Iran 

HISTORY OF SOLITUDE 

Mathew Szymanowski, Poland 

IMMERSION (BAY AREA) 

Richard Levien, USA 

KONVEX-T 

Johan Lundh, Sweden 

THE LAKE 

Boaz Lavie, Israel 

NEXT FLOOR 

Denis Villeneuve, Canada 

TELEVISION NARRATIVE 

LONG FORM 

ARTEMISIA 

Chiang Hsui-chiung, Taiwan 

shorTs Jury 

JEssE HAwTHORNE FiCKs 

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks programs the popular Midnites 

for Maniacs extravaganzas at the Castro Theatre. He 

specializes in “neo-sincere” revivals of underrated and 

overlooked films of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In 

2008, he honored director Peter Bogdanovich during a 

three-day retrospective. Ficks also teaches film history at 

the Academy of Art University, works for the San Francisco 

Silent Film Festival and reviews films for the San Francisco 

Bay Guardian. 

ANIMATED SHORT 

AANAATT 

Max Hattler, England 

FAR AWAY FROM URAL 

Katarina Lillqvist, Finland 

THE HEART OF AMOS KLEIN 

Uri Kranot, Michal Kranot, Israel 

KANIZSA HILL 

Evelyn Lee, USA 

LIES 

Jonas Odell, Sweden 

PHOTOGRAPH OF JESUS 

Laurie Hill, England 

SLAVES 

David Aronowitsch, Hanna Heiborn, Sweden 

NEW VISIONS 

CIRCLES OF CONFUSION (BAY AREA) 

Phoebe Tooke, USA 

DANSE MACABRE 

Pedro Pires, Canada 

FRIDA IN THE MIRROR (BAY AREA) 

Adrian Arias, USA 

THE LAST RITES 

Yasmine Kabir, Bangladesh 

LAST THOUGHTS (BAY AREA) 

Paul Burke, USA 

ME BRONI BA (MY WHITE BABY) 

Akosua Adoma Owusu, USA 

RUNNING SUSHI 

Mara Mattuschka, Chris Haring, Austria 

Shorts Programs Sponsor 

Amy Hicks has been making experimental work in film, 

video and analog/digital combinations for ten years. She 

teaches digital media at California College of the Arts 

and Stanford University. Her videos and films have been 

presented in museums, galleries and film festivals around 

the globe. Hicks is currently working on a multichannel 

video project funded by the San Francisco Art Commission 

and is a member of the San Francisco Film Society 

Filmmakers Advisory Board. 

WORKS FOR KIDS AND FAMILIES 

GOOD ADVICE 

Andreas Tibblin, Sweden 

MUTT 

Glen Hunwick, Australia 

THE TURTLE AND THE SHARK 

Ryan Woodward, USA 

WAWA 

Mona Achache, France 

YOUTH WORKS 

THE FREEZE (BAY AREA) 

Roxanne Smith, USA 

A GENERATION OF CONSOLIDATION * 

Samantha Muilenburg, Brooke Noel, USA 

NO LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 

Charlotte Burger, USA 

NUESTRA DIGNIDAD * 

Kathy Vega-Muñoz, USA 

DAILY BREAD * 

Yianeth Saenz, USA 

POETRY IN THE DARK 

Daniel Kharlak, USA 

YOUTH VOICES * 

Sydney Paige Matterson, USA 

* Films in Adobe Youth Film for Change 

Award competition 

Golden Gate Awards Youth Works Sponsor 

AMy HiCKs JAsON sANdERs 

Jason Sanders is an archivist and writer at the Pacific Film 

Archive in Berkeley. As a journalist he has covered film 

festivals such as Rotterdam, Toronto, New York and Hawaii 

for publications including Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema 

Scope, Release Print and International Documentary. 

He is also a writer for film festivals around North America, 

including the Tribeca, Miami, Seattle and SFIFF, and is the 

editor of the San Francisco Asian American International 

Film Festival Program Guide.

Golden GATe AWArds 

2008 Golden GATe AWArds PArTy 

PARTY 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6 

7:00–10:00 pm 

Temple nightclub–Prana restaurant 

540 howard street (First/second) 

Free admission; ticket required 

Meet and mingle at Temple Nightclub, one of SOMA’s 

hippest and most socially and environmentally responsible 

venues. Enjoy drinks and tastes from the city’s top 

restaurants. 

The Golden Gate Awards honor exceptional filmmakers 

with the prestigious New Directors Prize, the FIPRESCI 

Prize, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant, 

the Adobe Youth Film for Change Award, as well as 

awards in 14 Golden Gate Award categories. Award 

winners will be announced live and the evening will 

provide filmmakers and guests the opportunity to discuss 

and celebrate cinematic accomplishments. 

SFIFF 2008 GOLDEN GATE AWARD WINNERS 

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE 

UP THE YANGTZE 

Yung Chang, Canada 

BEST BAY AREA DOCUMENTARY 

FEATURE 

FAUBOURG TREMé: THE UNTOLD STORY OF 

BLACK NEW ORLEANS 

Dawn Logsdon, USA 

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT 

THE LADIES 

Christina A. Voros, USA 

BEST BAY AREA SHORT, FIRST pRIzE 

CABINET 

Todd Herman, USA 

AdObE yOuTH FiLM FOR CHANgE AwARd 

Golden Gate Awards Youth Works Sponsor 

BEST BAY AREA SHORT, 

SECOND pRIzE 

ON THE ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT 

Adam Keker, USA 

BEST NARRATIVE SHORT 

THICK SKINNED 

Jean-Bernard Marlin, Benoit Rambourg, France 

BEST ANIMATED SHORT 

MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI 

Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski, Canada 

BEST NEW VISIONS 

CABINET 

Todd Herman, USA 

BEST WORK FOR KIDS AND FAMILIES 

WHEN I GROW UP 

Michelle R. Meeker, USA 

In partnership with Adobe Youth Voices, Adobe Foundation’s 

global youth media initiative, the San Francisco Film Society 

announces the inaugural Youth Film for Change Award, 

a juried cash prize of $1,500 plus an Adobe software package, 

as part of its annual Youth Works competition. The new award 

will be presented at the 52nd San Francisco International Film 

Festival to the best youth-produced film addressing issues of 

social change. 

JoIn The FIlM CoMMunITy In CelebrATInG 

bAy AreA And InTernATIonAl FIlMMAKers In 

CoMPeTITIon AT ThIs hIGhly AnTICIPATed eVenT 

FIlled WITh eXCITeMenT And ConVIVIAlITy. 

Food generously donated by Cortez Restaurant & Bar, PopChips, Prana 

Restaurant, Ramblas Tapas Bar, Serendipity! a catering company, La 

Tempesta Bakery, and ThirstyBear Brewing Company. 

Beverages generously donated by Blue Angel Vodka, FIJI Water, Honest 

Tea, Magnanimus Wine Group, Martha & Brothers Coffee, Mendocino 

Farms, Stella Artois, Talmage Collection and Zola Brazilian Superfruits. 

Wed MAy 6 7:00 TeMPle GGA069 

BEST YOUTH WORK 

WRITING HISTORY WITH LIGHTNING: THE TRIUMPH AND 

TRAGEDY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLOCKBUSTER 

Charlotte Burger, USA 

BEST TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY LONG 

FORM 

CALAVERA HIGHWAY 

Renee Tajima-Peña, USA/Mexico 

BEST TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY 

SHORT FORM 

THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND PAINTING 

Muriel Edelstein, France 

BEST TELEVISION NARRATIVE 

LONG FORM 

OPERATION TURqUOISE 

Alain Tasma, France 

The Youth Film for Change Award was created to honor the 

work of young people across the globe who are using their 

cameras, computers and creativity to boldly explore issues of 

social justice, offer ideas for change and make their voices 

heard. The award provides a valuable platform for young media 

makers to share their perspectives on the important issues they 

face in their lives and their communities and that they witness 

around the world. 

51

52 

bALLAsT lAnCe hAMMer, usA, FIPresCI PrIze WInner 

THE PuRPOsE OF FiPREsCi is TO 

suPPORT CiNEMA As ART 

By Klaus Eder 

Festivals offer an exciting opportunity to become 

acquainted with world cinema. As film critics, it is our 

interest and often our pleasure to support national 

cinema in all its forms and diversity, considering it 

an important part of national culture and identity. 

We do this by writing and talking about cinema in 

newspapers or specialized magazines, on radio and 

television or the Internet. And we do it by awarding 

the best of them (from our point of view) the 

International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI Prize). This 

prize is established at international film festivals, 

and its aim is to promote film art and to particularly 

encourage new and young cinema. We hope (and 

sometimes we know) that this prize can help films to 

get better distribution, or distribution at all, and to win 

FIPresCI Jury 

MiHAi CHiRiLOv 

Mihai Chirilov lives in Bucharest and is a film critic and 

director of the Transylvania International Film Festival, 

which he cofounded in 2002. He also works as a curator 

for the Romanian Film Festival in New York. He writes for 

several publications, runs a film and music Web site called 

Rekino and is coauthor of The Films, the Women, the 

Ghosts, a book about Lars von Trier. He has served as 

jury member in film festivals such as Hong Kong, Berlin, 

Gothenburg, Chicago, Cleveland and Moscow. 

greater public attention. FIPRESCI, the International 

Federation of Film Critics, has been in existence 

for more than 65 years. The basic purpose of the 

organization, which now has members in over 60 

countries all over the world (among them, of course, 

in the U.S., the National Society of Film Critics), is 

to support cinema as an art and as an outstanding 

and autonomous means of expression. We do 

this for cultural, not political, reasons: Our interest 

is focused only on cinema itself and its artistic 

development. FIPRESCI also organizes conferences 

and seminars and is increasingly playing a part 

in a number of cultural activities designed to 

protect and encourage independent filmmaking 

and national cinemas. We are cooperating with the 

ROb NELsON 

Rob Nelson has been a member of the National Society 

of Film Critics since 1998. His writing appears regularly 

in Variety, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, and 

has also appeared in Spin, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, 

Utne Reader, and Mother Jones, among many other 

publications. For five years Nelson was the curator of 

Get Real, a documentary film festival in Minneapolis. 

He teaches film studies at the Minneapolis College of 

Art and Design. 

European Film Academy and are deciding, within the 

framework of the European Film Awards, a “Felix of 

the Critics.” It is with pleasure that we come to the 

San Francisco International Film Festival. We are 

excited to participate in this event with its precious 

tradition of half a century. 

Klaus Eder is the general secretary of FIPRESCI, 

which can be found on the Web at www.fipresci.org. 


FIPresCI PrIze 

2008 Ballast 

2007 A Parting Shot 

2006 Half Nelson 

2005 Private 

2004 The Story of the Weeping Camel 

CHARLEs-sTéPHANE ROy 

Charles-Stéphane Roy is a film critic, journalist and lecturer 

based in Montreal. He is a contributing writer to Sequences, 

Cahiers du Cinéma, ICI and Cinema Scope magazines. 

A member of FIPRESCI since 2002, Roy has sat on juries 

at the Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, Locarno, Palm Springs 

and Moscow festivals. He is currently the editor-in-chief 

of qui Fait quoi (www.qfq.com), a Web-based trade 

magazine. His reviews and writings on cinema are collected 

at ecrantrifugeuse.blogspot.com.

BIG NIGHTS 

SpecIal Gala ScreeNINGS aNd eveNTS 

54 Opening Night: La Mission 

55 Midnight Awards 

56 Film Society Awards Night 

57 Centerpiece: 500 Days of Summer 

58 Closing Night: Unmade Beds 

53

Big Nights 

54 

La Mission 

WeST coaST premIere 

Usa 

2009 

117 Min 

DiR Peter Bratt 

PRoD Peter Bratt, Benjamin Bratt, Alpita Patel 

sCR Peter Bratt 

CaM Hiro Narita 

ED Stan Webb 

MUs Mark Kilian 

CasT Benjamin Bratt, Erika Alexander, Jeremy 

Ray Valdez, Jesse Borrego, Talisa Soto Bratt 

PRinT soURCE San Francisco Film Commission, 

City Hall, Room 473, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett 

Plaza, San Francisco, CA 94102. FAX: 415- 

554-6503. EMAIL: peterbratt@yahoo.com. 

CaUsEs Bay Area Community, Family Issues, 

LGBT Issues 

Peter Bratt’s powerful and moving film is an ardent love 

letter to the vibrancy of San Francisco’s Mission District 

and an urgent corrective to the violence that plays out in 

its streets. Full of affection for its characters and despair 

for their situations, La Mission is a story of community 

and family and one man’s struggle to unlearn a lifetime 

of destructive habits. Che, in a commanding performance 

by Benjamin Bratt, is an ex-con who has turned his life 

around and now devotes himself to his lifelong Mission 

Boyz friends, his passion for building classic lowrider 

cruisers and his honor student son, Jess (Jeremy Ray 

Valdez). On the eve of Jess’s graduation, as Che’s new 

romance with an attractive neighbor (Erika Alexander) 

starts to bud, a sudden revelation shatters the peace, 

drawing a brutal reaction from Che. Lashing out at 

those around him, he finds himself emotionally broken 

and isolated, before beginning a hard climb toward 

understanding and acceptance. And it is a hard climb. 

Handsome, charismatic bad-ass though he may be, Che 

gets no slack from best friend Rene (Jesse Borrego) 

or his pals, all of whom are trying to live decent lives in 

difficult circumstances, and doing a better job of it. The 

film’s greatest virtue, and the crux of Che’s redemptive 

journey, is its refusal to accept violence as a necessary 

outcome of, far less a solution to, troubling conditions. Full 

of compassion and love, La Mission is not only tough but 

hopeful, beautiful and true. 

—Graham Leggat 

oPEninG niGHT 

THUrSdaY, aprIl 23 

FiLM 

7:00 pm caSTro THeaTre 

429 caSTro STreeT (Near marKeT) 

PaRTY 

9:30 pm BrUNo’S/el capITaN 

2389 mISSIoN STreeT (19TH/20TH) 

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival kicks 

off with a premiere screening, special guests and a 

festive celebration with live entertainment, dancing, hors 

d’oeuvres, drinks and a complimentary gift bag. Director 

Peter Bratt and actors Benjamin Bratt, Erika Alexander, 

Jeremy Ray Valdez and Talisa Soto-Bratt are expected to 

attend the evening’s screening. After the film, celebrate 

Opening Night Mission style at two historic venues, the 

iconic Bruno’s and an adjoining outdoor setting within the 

remains of the former El Capitan theater. Treat yourself 

to cool cocktails and international culinary delights while 

dancing to the Latin beats of salsa and rumba. You must 

be 21+ to attend the party. 

PETER BRaTT 

San Francisco–based Peter Bratt’s well-received independent 

debut feature, Follow Me Home, screened at SFIFF in 1996. 

He is back in 2009 with La Mission, which stars his brother, 

actor Benjamin Bratt. Follow Me Home explored race and 

identity from the multiple perspectives of Chicanos, African 

Americans, and Native Americans. The film earned Bratt the best 

director award at the American Indian Film Festival as well as the 

Audience Award at SFIFF. 

THU apr 23 7:00 caSTro opeN FIlm & parTY 

THU apr 23 7:00 caSTro opeNv vIp FIlm & parTY

Evan RaCHEL WooD ELiJaH WooD 

MiDniGHT aWaRDs 

SaTUrdaY, aprIl 25 

10:30 pm, W SaN FraNcISco HoTel 

181 THIrd STreeT 

The Midnight Awards honor a dynamic young American 

actor and actress who have made outstanding 

contributions to independent and Hollywood cinema 

and who bring striking intelligence, exemplary talent and 

extraordinary depth of character to their roles. The third 

annual Midnight Awards go to Evan Rachel Wood and 

Elijah Wood. 

This after-hours cocktail reception is one of the Festival’s 

most sought-after special events and a key event for the 

city’s most discerning film lovers. With a relaxed late night 

talk show format, it is a unique opportunity to mingle with 

the actors in an intimate setting. Beth Lisick, local literary 

luminary and budding actor (Everything Strange and 

New, see page 75), will interview the two recipients, show 

film clips of their work and present their awards. 

Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served, accompanied 

by live musical entertainment. Festive dress is required! 

You must be 21+ to attend. 

Special thanks to Miracle Pictures. 

Evan RaCHEL WooD 

Born in 1987 into a theater family in Raleigh, North 

Carolina, Evan Rachel Wood started acting in outdoor 

plays and television before 2002’s Little Secrets. Her 

breakthrough performance in Catherine Hardwicke’s 

controversial Thirteen (2003)—as a teen mired in drugs, sex 

and petty crime—earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors 

Guild nods. Equally memorable roles followed, including 

Pretty Persuasion (2005), Running with Scissors (2006) 

and Across the Universe (2007), until 2009’s turn as 

Mickey Rourke’s estranged daughter in Darren Aronofsky’s 

The Wrestler. Wood voices alien Mala in Battle for Terra, 

the animated feature in SFIFF’s New Directors section. 

ELiJaH WooD 

Born in 1981, Elijah Wood made his film debut with a cameo 

in Back to the Future Part II (1989). He has contributed 

remarkable performances to such critically acclaimed 

films as The Ice Storm (1997), Eternal Sunshine of the 

Spotless Mind (2004), Sin City (2005), Everything Is 

Illuminated (2005) and Bobby (2006), as well as playing 

the unforgettable Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Lord 

of the Rings trilogy. He was the voice of Mumble in the 

animated film Happy Feet (2005). Elijah’s next project is 

the upcoming Iggy Pop biopic The Passenger. 

SaT apr 25 10:30 mIdN25W W HoTel 

55 

Big Nights

Big Nights 

56 

FiLM soCiETY aWaRDs niGHT 

FraNcIS Ford coppola 

roBerT redFord 

JameS ToBacK 

THIS FIlm SocIeTY HoNorS THIS Year’S dIrecTING, acTING aNd ScreeNWrITING 

aWardS recIpIeNTS aT a GlamoroUS BlacK-TIe eveNING FeaTUrING oNSTaGe 

appearaNceS, dINING aNd daNcING. 

BeNeFITS THe FIlm SocIeTY’S YoUTH edUcaTIoN proGram 

THUrSdaY, aprIl 30 

Penelope Wong and Tim Kochis, Chairs 

Celeste and Anthony Meier, Honorary Chairs 

AWARDS NIGHT GALA 

6:00 PM Cocktail reception with celebrity guests 

7:00 PM dinner and awards program 

Westin St. Francis Hotel, Grand Ballroom 

TABLES $5,000/$10,000/$15,000/$25,000 

TICKETS $500/$1,000/$1,500 

The Founder’s Directing Award is given in memory of Irving 

M. Levin, and is made possible by Nancy Livingston and 

Fred M. Levin. 

The Peter J. Owens Award is made possible by a grant from 

the Peter J. Owens Trust at The San Francisco Foundation, 

Gary Shapiro and Scott Owens, trustees. 

The Kanbar Award is given for excellence in screenwriting. 

For Awards Night tickets and information, call 415-561- 

5005. For all other ticket information, call 925-866-9559 or 

visit www.sffs.org. 

No cameras please. Proceeds benefit the San Francisco 

Film Society Youth Education Program. 

FRanCis FoRD CoPPoLa 

RoBERT REDFoRD 

JaMEs ToBaCK

500 DaYs oF sUMMER 


Usa 

2009 

95 Min 

DiR Marc Webb 

PRoD Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters, Mason 

Novick, Steven J. Wolfe 

sCR Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber 

CaM Eric Steelberg 

ED Alan Bell 

MUs Mychael Danna, Rob Simonsen 

CasT Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, 

Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler, Chloe 

Moretz 

PRinT soURCE Fox Searchlight Pictures, 10201 

W Pico Blvd, Bdg 78, Rm 8, Los Angeles, CA 

90035. EMAIL: russell.nelson@fox.com. 

Tom is an architect by training, a romantic by nature and a 

“perfectly adequate” greeting-card writer by trade (“Today 

you’re a man. Mazel tov on your Bar Mitzvah!”). He meets 

Summer—the sexy, quirky dream girl who doesn’t believe 

in love—when she takes a job in his office. This is Day 

1 of their 500 days together, and if the set up sounds 

predictable, veteran music-video director Marc Webb does 

much to turn this tale on its head. For starters, Webb tells 

the story out of llinear sequence, with Summer dumping 

Tom over pancakes in the first ten minutes. The rest of the 

film reveals how they got to that point, and its aftermath, 

each segment beginning with the number of the day the 

couple is on—a delicious clue as to whether what follows 

will involve awkward courtship, playful flirtation, shower 

sex or the breaking of common household objects. 

With a soundtrack that includes the Smiths, Belle and 

Sebastian and current punks Black Lips, there’s a lot to 

love here: crisp dialogue, drunken karaoke, a bar fight, 

ironic voiceover, a split-screen fantasy sequence and a 

dance number set to Hall and Oates that’s nothing short 

of glorious. Leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey 

Deschanel sizzle onscreen, with fine support from Geoffrey 

Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler as Tom’s well-intentioned, 

inept-at-love friends and Chloe Moretz as his wise-beyondher-years 

sister. 500 Days of Summer is a slickly made 

anti-romantic comedy that happens to have plenty of 

romance and lots of comedy. 

—Benjamin Friedland 

CEnTERPiECE 

SaTUrdaY, maY 2 

FiLM 

7:30 pm SUNdaNce KaBUKI cINemaS 

1881 poST STreeT (aT FIllmore) 

PaRTY 

9:30 pm, clIFT HoTel 

495 GearY STreeT (aT TaYlor) 

This not-to-be-missed date night features the West Coast 

premiere of Sundance Film Festival favorite 500 Days of 

Summer, followed by a chic lounge party at the CLIFT 

hotel, one of San Francisco’s hottest nightspots. Buy a 

ticket and be a part of one of the Festival’s sexiest events, 

with star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and director Marc Webb in 

person. You must be 21+ to attend the party. 

MaRC WEBB 

Marc Webb made his name directing music videos for the likes 

of My Chemical Romance, Regina Spektor, Snow Patrol, Green 

Day and many more. His short film Seascape premiered at 

the Aspen Comedy Festival. 500 Days of Summer, which 

premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, is his feature 

directorial debut. 

SaT maY 2 7:30 KaBUKI daYS02K FIlm oNlY 

SaT maY 2 7:30 KaBUKI daYS02 FIlm & parTY 

57 

Big Nights

Big Nights 

58 

UnMaDE BEDs 


EnGLanD 

2008 

92 Min 

DiR Alexis Dos Santos 

PRoD Soledad Gatti-Pascual, Peter Ettedgui 

sCR Alexis Dos Santos 

CaM Jakob Ihre 

ED Olivier Bugge Coutté 

CasT Déborah Francois, Fernando Tielve, 

Michiel Huisman, Iddo Goldberg, Richard Lintern 

PRinT soURCE The Bureau Film Company, 2nd 

Floor/18 Phipp Street, London EC2A 4NU, 

UK. FAX: 44-20-7033- 0555. EMAIL: mail@ 

thebureau.co.uk. 

In English, Spanish and French with English 

subtitles. 

The youthful, sensuous and beautifully assured second 

feature from Argentine filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos 

(Glue, 2006) is a lyrical tale of two solitary expats, 

wayward young souls crossing paths in the cosmopolitan 

art-rock milieu of a sprawling East London squat. Twentyyear-old 

Axl (played with striking, reckless innocence 

by a superb Fernando Tielve) has come from Spain to 

find his long-lost English father. Raised traveling, Axl’s 

rootlessness has become a restless way of life. He drinks 

himself into forgetting at night, awaking like a promiscuous 

foundling among another set of nonchalant hosts and 

lovers. Meanwhile, posing as a student in need of housing, 

he hires his realtor father but hovers on the edge of 

revealing himself. Vera (an achingly vulnerable, gently arch 

Déborah François) is a wounded French-speaking beauty 

who oozes continental ennui at her bookstore job—where 

she’s not above discouraging a customer from buying 

a book she finds ridiculous. Responding to a stranger’s 

flirtation by wrapping caution and control in adventure 

and mystery in pursuit of a casual affair, she finds herself 

falling (like him) desperately in love. Visceral yet dreamlike, 

Unmade Beds lolls moodily and infectiously in a fluid 

visual style, heightened by a stirring soundtrack featuring 

cameos by contemporary U.K. bands. When Axl and Vera 

finally meet, the encounter is both decidedly low-key and 

deeply resonant, a drunken tête-à-tête between strangers 

wearing costume animal heads. It is Dos Santos’ sly, pitchperfect 

nod to both our most basic natures as well as the 

masks we hide them behind. 

-Robert Avila 

CLosinG niGHT 

THUrSdaY, maY 7 

FiLM 

7:00 pm caSTro THeaTre 

429 caSTro STreeT (Near marKeT) 

PaRTY 

9:30 pm–1:00 am 

mezzaNINe 

444 JeSSIe STreeT (aT mINT) 

Join us for an extraordinary closing night celebrating the 

wrap of another great Festival. Following a screening of 

Unmade Beds, the exuberant feature from Argentine 

filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos (with actors Déborah 

François and Fernando Tielve and director Santos in 

person), mingle with fellow film lovers and dance the night 

away at Mezzanine, one of SOMA’s hottest clubs. You 

must be 21+ to attend the party. 

aLExis Dos sanTos 

Alexis Dos Santos’s first feature was 2006’s internationally 

hailed, multiple award–winning Glue, an improvisationfueled 

coming-of-age story set in a small town in his 

native Argentina. Having studied film in Buenos Aires and 

Barcelona, Dos Santos came to London’s National Film 

and Television School in 1998, honing his craft under 

Stephen Frears and making several shorts, including 

the award-winning Sand. It’s striking, if appropriate, that 

his second feature, a film about people trying to find 

themselves in a chaotic and uncertain world, comes 

grounded in such confident cinematic instincts. 

THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro UNma07c FIlm oNlY 

THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro cloSe FIlm & parTY 

THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro cloSev vIp FIlm & parTY

tributes 

big AwArds, big tAlents, big stAtements 

62 Mel Novikoff Award 

Bruce Goldstein 


63 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award 

Lourdes Portillo 

Al Más Allá 

64 Founder’s Directing Award 

Francis Ford Coppola 

65 Peter J. Owens Award 

Robert Redford 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 

66 Kanbar Award 

James Toback 

Tyson 

61

tributes 


lA notti di CAbiriA 

italy 

1957 

117 miN 

Dir Federico Fellini 

ProD Dino De Laurentiis 

sCr Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, 

Pier Paolo Pasolini 

Cam Aldo Tonti 

ED Leo Cattozzo 

mUs Nino Rota 

Cast Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Franca 

Marzi, Dorian Gray 

PriNt soUrCE Rialto Pictures. EMAIL: rialto. 

sales@verizon.net. 

62 

The humorous and deeply affecting story of a spunky 

prostitute’s misfortunes in postwar Rome, Nights of 

Cabiria still resonates with the same transformative 

power audiences first encountered in 1957. The third film 

in Fellini’s so-called trilogy of loneliness, which includes 

La Strada and Il Bidone, Nights of Cabiria again stars 

Fellini’s wife and muse, Giulietta Masina, this time as the 

waiflike Cabiria, whose brassy, boisterous exterior masks 

a wistful yearning for love that makes her constantly 

vulnerable to heartache and exploitation. Even though 

she spends a lot of time bucking up and sticking her chin 

out to meet the bad luck that inevitably comes her way, 

underneath her survivor’s armor Cabiria is a woman of 

great compassion and feeling. If it is this capacity for love 

that inevitably proves Cabiria’s undoing, it is also what 

allows her to survive beyond the tragedy that befalls her. 

Masina won the best actress award at Cannes for her 

portrayal, and it is her brilliantly mannered and emotionally 

touching performance—recalling the expressive physicality 

of Charlie Chaplin-that is at the heart of the film’s success. 

The final sequence is a beautifully realized parable of hope 

and disillusionment that ends in a now famous coda, one 

of cinema’s greatest depictions of the resilient human 

spirit. It’s all there in Masina’s face, and in Fellini’s genius 

at capturing it. 

—Beverly Berning 

One of the world’s most beloved filmmakers, Federico Fellini 

(1920-93) was born in the Italian seaside town of Rimini, which 

figures heavily in the autobiographical La Strada (SFIFF 1976), 

Nights of Cabiria (SFIFF 1980), 8 1⁄2 (1963) and Amarcord 

(1973), which won best foreign film Oscars. Fellini’s La Dolce 

Vita is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. 

His last, The Voice of the Moon, screened at SFIFF in 1991. 

Fellini married actress Giulietta Masina in 1943. Their lifelong 

partnership spawned a fruitful creative collaboration as well as a 

great love story. 

aN aftErNooN 

With brUCE 

golDstEiN 

sundAY, mAY 3 

5:00 Pm CAstro tHeAtre 

429 CAstro street (neAr mArket) 

brUCE golDstEiN 

The distinguished recipient of this year’s Mel Novikoff 

Award—bestowed on an individual or institution whose 

work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s appreciation 

of world cinema—is the innovative programmer, archivist 

and showman extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein. He will 

present a reel of trailers from his distribution company, 

Rialto Pictures, followed by an onstage interview with Anita 

Monga, and capped by a screening of Fellini’s enthralling 

Nights of Cabiria, in what is destined to be a fascinating 

treat for all citizens of film culture at large. 

A complete article with biographical information on Mel 

Novikoff Award recipient Bruce Goldstein can be found on 

page 44. 

sun mAY 3 5:00 CAstro AwAr03C 

tue mAY 5 8:30 PFA nigH05P

al más allá 

u.s. Premiere 

Usa 

2008 

43 miN 

Dir Lourdes Portillo 

ProD Lourdes Portillo 

sCr Lourdes Portillo 

Cam Kyle Kibbe, Antonio Scarlata 

ED Vivien Hillgrove 

mUs Todd Boekelheide 

Cast Ofelia Medina, Kyle Kibbe, Jose Araujo 

PriNt soUrCE Xochitl Films, 981 Esmeralda 

Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. FAX: 415- 

642-1609. EMAIL: lportillo@mac.com. 

CaUsEs The Arts 

A documentary film crew arrives at a tranquil aqua-toned 

beach town on Mexico’s Mayan coast, chasing the story 

of three fishermen who happened upon a wayward 

package of cocaine—flotsam from a steady narco-stream 

flowing up from South America en route to northern 

markets. The fishermen sold it to the local police chief, 

who warned them (in vain) not to spend their money 

in town and prophesied, “Whatever comes from the 

ocean, has to go back to the ocean.” “I think it will take 

a few days to nail this one down,” opines real-life sound 

recordist Jose Araujo to the crew’s somewhat flustered 

and self-important director, played by renowned Mexican 

actress Ofelia Medina-a delightfully arch stand-in for 

this sly, prodding film’s real-life director, acclaimed Bay 

Area-based filmmaker Lourdes Portillo. Gazing at a nearby 

ruin, meanwhile, Portillo’s fictional alter ego resolves, “I 

have to find out what this has to do with the Mayas.” A 

playfully serpentine, semi-fictionalized investigation of a 

true incident thus de-centers its ostensible subject-three 

fishermen who never do appear, increasingly seeming the 

stuff of parable-while undercutting the “heroic” pretensions 

of the documentary genre itself. What emerges is a 

rumination on globalization’s violent erasure of local 

culture-but also on the manufacture of stories and the 

circulation of “truths” as the counterparts, and uneasy 

accomplices, of circulating goods, services and people in 

a voracious economic system that leaves much more than 

the occasional bag of narcotics in its wake. 

—Robert Avila 

aN EVENiNg With 

loUrDEs Portillo 

mondAY, APril 27 

7:00 Pm sundAnCe kAbuki CinemAs 

1881 Post street (At Fillmore) 

This year’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award 

goes to acclaimed Bay Area–based filmmaker Lourdes 

Portillo, whose three-decade focus on Latino experience 

on both sides of the Latin America–U.S. border has taken 

myriad forms through a keen, interdependent harnessing 

of imagination, self-reflection and narrative excavation, 

always with a profound commitment to the justice and 

dignity owed her subjects. Portillo will discuss her work 

in an onstage interview with film critic John Anderson, 

followed by a screening of her latest film, Al Más Allá. 

A complete article with biographical information on POV 

Award recipient Lourdes Portillo can be found on page 42. 

loUrDEs Portillo 

Fri APr 24 7:00 PFA AlmA24P 

mon APr 27 7:00 kAbuki AwAr27k 

63 

tributes

tributes 

64 

aN EVENiNg With fraNCis forD CoPPola & friENDs 

Francis Ford Coppola has opened an exciting new 

chapter in an already encyclopedic career, signaled by 

a return to more personal independent films. Beginning 

with Youth Without Youth (2007) and the highly 

anticipated Tetro, which opens in mid-June, Coppola is 

recapturing a youthful flair and curiosity in both subject 

and style. “In a funny way I became an important studio 

director when I was very young,” he recalled in a 1992 

interview, “but I always wondered what happened to the 

director I wanted to be.” Now, about to turn 70 and as 

vigorous and questioning as ever, he’s giving himself the 

chance to find out. 

The Founder’s Directing Award is presented each year 

to one of the “masters of world cinema” and is given 

in memory of Irving M. Levin, who founded the Festival 

in 1957. It was first bestowed in 1986 upon iconic 

filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and for many years was given 

in his name. The award has over the years brought many 

of the world’s most visionary directors to San Francisco, 

from A-list American directors such as Clint Eastwood 

and Spike Lee to well-respected international talents 

such as Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek, English 

director Mike Leigh and Germany’s Werner Herzog. 

The recipient will be presented with the award at the 

Film Society Awards Night on April 30 at the Westin St. 

Francis Hotel. 

FridAY, mAY 1 



Join us for a special evening at the Castro Theatre 

honoring the brilliant career of one of the seminal 

figures in American film, director and producer Francis 

Ford Coppola. In a variation on the Festival’s standard 

interview format, Coppola will be joined onstage by 

a number of his esteemed friends and collaborators, 

who, in a moderated discussion, will cover all manner of 

subjects, cinematic and otherwise. Film clips, including 

the new Tetro trailer, and extended audience Q&A will 

round out this remarkable evening. 

A complete article with biographical information on 

Francis Ford Coppola, this year’s Founder’s Directing 

Award recipient, can be found on page 36. 

Fri mAY 1 7:30 CAstro AwAr01C

UtCh CassiDy aND thE sUNDaNCE KiD 

world Premiere restored Print 

Usa 

1969 

110 miN 

Dir George Roy Hill 

ProD John Foreman 

sCr William Goldman 

Cam Conrad Hall 

ED John Howard, Richard Meyer 

mUs Burt Bacharach 

Cast Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Katharine 

Ross, Strother Martin, Cloris Leachman, Sam 

Elliott 

PriNt soUrCE 20th Century Fox, 10201 

W. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90035. 

EMAIL: caitlin.robertson@fox.com. 

When Robert Redford and Paul Newman leapt off that 

cliff in the climactic scene of Butch Cassidy and the 

Sundance Kid, they leapt straight into movie mythology. 

The exploits of two 19th-century bank robbers who find 

it increasingly difficult to stay ahead of the law, the film 

reinvented the Western even as it mourned its passing. 

Writer William Goldman had been fascinated by the 

exploits of the real-life Butch and Sundance, and spent 

years researching the story. The studio intended it for 

Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, but McQueen balked 

at Newman getting top billing. Director George Roy 

Hill suggested Redford, not yet a major star. Redford’s 

chemistry with Newman was immediate and launched 

an enduring partnership. The film’s tone—at once elegiac 

and comic, modern and traditional—confused some critics 

but resonated with audiences, who made it the biggest 

grossing film of the year, success that boosted the careers 

of both its principals: Newman, used to playing brooding 

loners, proved he could handle comedy, and Redford 

became a star. The film won Oscars for Conrad Hall’s 

burnished cinematography, Burt Bacharach’s score and 

Goldman’s screenplay. Hill moved to the top ranks of 

Hollywood directors, reuniting with Redford and Newman 

for another phenomenally successful buddy caper, The 

Sting (1973). The importance of Butch Cassidy and the 

Sundance Kid to its stars is reflected in the names they 

gave to their personal projects: Newman’s Hole in the 

Wall Gang Camp for critically ill children, and Redford’s 

Sundance Institute. 

—Margarita Landazuri 

aN EVENiNg With 

robErt rEDforD 

wednesdAY, APril 29 



The Film Society is honored to present this year’s Peter 

J. Owens Award to the incomparable Robert Redford. 

Leaping to the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom after his 

breakthrough role as the Sundance Kid, Redford’s several 

decades of vital work express an intention of purpose and 

unwavering quality that remain exceptional. He will be 

celebrated in a series of retrospective clips followed by 

an onstage interview and a world premiere screening of a 

brand new print of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 

A complete article with biographical information on Peter 

J. Owens Award recipient Robert Redford can be found 

on page 38. 

gEorgE roy hill 

Born in Minneapolis in 1922, George Roy Hill graduated 

from Yale and served in World War II and Korea. He began 

as an actor, turning to writing and directing for television 

and Broadway in the 1950s. His first film was Period of 

Adjustment (1962). Hill proved equally adept at box office hits 

like Hawaii (1966) and critical successes like The World of 

Henry Orient (1967). After his Oscar for The Sting (1973), he 

worked with Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and 

Newman in Slap Shot (1977). He taught at Yale after 1988. 

Hill died in 2002. 

wed APr 29 7:30 CAstro AwAr29C 

65 

tributes

tributes 

tysoN 

Usa 

2008 

90 miN 

Dir James Toback 

ProD Damon Bingham, James Toback 

Cam Larry McConkey 

ED Aaron Yates 

mUs Salaam Remi 

PriNt soUrCE Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York NY 

10022. EMAIL: info@spe.sony.com 

66 

Mike Tyson was a boxer raised on the streets and trained 

by Cus D’Amato, but he was a character who might have 

been dreamed up by Norman Mailer or Dostoyevsky. In the 

bloated and fraudulent world of professional boxing, he 

made “the most frightening man on earth” seem reliable 

yet modest as a label. After the charms and poems of 

Muhammad Ali, Tyson was Black Vengeance Returns. And 

in the entire history of boxers on film, he is perhaps the 

most tragic and enlightening. But how can the ear-biter, 

the man who squandered $300 million and the convicted 

rapist be the central figure in a poignant, thoughtful 

entertainment? The answer to that is the astonishing 

chemistry made between Tyson the lifelong fighter and 

James Toback, the relentless pursuer of heroes caught in 

their own existential chaos. And how does it work? Tyson 

talks. The film Tyson is a documentary-with clips from the 

many fights-but it is a heart song, too, as Tyson talks about 

a life of near constant abuse and humiliation. And as he 

talks, so his innate violence becomes clearer. Tyson is not 

an apology or an apologia, but a piercing insight into how 

our society creates its villains and then despises them for 

behaving badly. Whatever you think of Mike Tyson now 

(before you see this film), we guarantee your mind will be 

changed. 

—David Thomson 

aN aftErNooN 

With JamEs 

tobaCK 

sAturdAY, mAY 2 

4:00 Pm sundAnCe kAbuki CinemAs 

1881 Post street (At Fillmore) 

The Film Society proudly presents this year’s Kanbar 

Award for excellence in screenwriting to the inimitable 

James Toback. The brilliantly scandalous pen behind such 

films as Fingers and The Gambler, Toback will discuss 

and show clips from his work during the course of an 

onstage interview. A screening will follow of Toback’s 

latest project, a fascinating portrait simply titled Tyson, 

capping this very special evening with a fearless writer. 

A complete article with biographical information on Kanbar 

Award recipient James Toback can be found on page 40. 

JamEs tobaCK 

sAt mAY 2 4:00 kAbuki AwAr02k

LIVE & ONSTAGE 

FILMS, MuSIc, PErFOrMANcES 

68 the boys: the sherman brothers’ story 

69 The Lost World with Dengue Fever 

70 Proving Ground 

71 State of Cinema Address 

Mary Ellen Mark 

67

Live & Onstage 

68 

the boys: the sherman brothers’ story 

WOrLd PrEMIErE 

Usa/england 

2009 

dIr Jeffrey C. Sherman, Gregory V. Sherman 

Prod Gregory V. Sherman, Jeffrey C. Sherman 

Cam Richard Numeroff 

ed Rich Evirs 

mUs Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman 

Cast Dick Van Dyke, Angela Lansbury, Lesley 

Ann Warren, John Landis, Karen Dotrice, John 

Lasseter, Jim Dale, Micky Dolenz, Jon Turteltaub 

PrInt soUrCe Walt Disney Studios, 500 South 

Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA 91521. 

CaUses The Arts, Family Issues 

This world premiere screening will be followed 

by a special reception for film and party ticket 

holders with the filmmakers in the reception 

space of the Disney Family Museum (which will 

open this coming fall). 

When asked how long it takes to write a song, the 

Sherman Brothers often say, “It takes your entire life . . . 

plus the time required to jot it down.” And what unexpected 

lives surface in this intriguing story of the sibling 

songwriting team behind such classic scores as Mary 

Poppins, The Jungle Book and It’s a Small World, told 

against a backdrop of some of the most popular works of 

our time. As staff songwriters for Walt Disney and popular 

hitmakers on their own, the Shermans’ credits read like a 

virtual history of the American family musical: Winnie the 

Pooh, The Aristocrats, Charlotte’s Web, Chitty Chitty 

Bang Bang and many more. Their personal relationship, 

however, is far from child’s play. The two became so 

estranged that their own sons grew up without knowing 

each other, despite living only a few blocks apart. How 

the brothers could collaborate so extensively on Oscarwinning 

soundtracks, most of which defined wholesome 

family entertainment, and yet have a relationship so volatile 

they could never bring their own families together, is 

very much at the heart of this remarkable dissection of 

creativity, genius and family ties. It’s made, after all, by the 

sons themselves, first cousins Gregory and Jeff Sherman, 

who upon meeting for the first time as young adults were 

moved to do some collaborating of their own. 

gregory V. sherman JeFFrey C. sherman 

Directors Gregory and Jeffrey Sherman are cousins. Before 

directing the boys, each was a successful screenwriter in his 

own right. The documentary the boys is their feature debut. 

SAT APr 25 2:00 LETTErMAN BOYS25L FILM ONLY 

SAT APr 25 2:00 LETTErMAN BOYS25 FILM & PArTY

the lost World WIth dengUe FeVer 

Usa 

1925 

100 mIn 

dIr Harry O. Hoyt 

Prod Jamie White, Earl Hudson 

sCr Marion Fairfax 

Cam Arthur Edeson 

ed George McGuire 

mUs Dengue Fever 

Cast Wallace Beery, Bessie Love, Lewis Stone 

PrInt soUrCe George Eastman House, 900 

East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607. FAX: 585- 

271-3361. EMAIL: yeager@geh.org 

Esurance is proud to support 

animation in all its forms. 

Based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same 

name, The Lost World revels in adventure-flick thrills 

but is equally effective as a cinematic document of our 

fascination with our own prehistory. Featuring amazing 

stop-motion sequences by animation pioneer Willis 

O’Brien, who later animated King Kong, and enlivened by 

outlandish costumes and sets, this dyno-dino epic was a 

smash hit upon its release in the mid-Roaring Twenties. An 

explorer’s journal points to the existence of dinosaurs in a 

far-flung locale, so reporter Edward Malone makes a deal 

with the robust Professor Challenger and joins a pseudoscientific 

expedition to find the mythical monsters. Vicious 

battles with a menagerie of real and imagined creatures 

ensue. If only Malone and his fellow explorers stopped to 

consider the grave consequences before hauling a madas-hell 

Brontosaurus back to their ultramodern metropolis. 

While the film exemplifies groundbreaking cinematic 

techniques and razzle-dazzle storytelling, it also serves 

as a reminder of (hopefully) obsolete American attitudes 

toward the big, bad world at large. Amid its now dissonant 

charms are anachronistic cultural stereotypes regarding 

science, marriage and race (complete with a white actor in 

blackface). Dengue Fever’s score will playfully and lovingly 

evoke worlds both known and unknown and elevate the 

The Lost World’s offbeat humor and singular beauty. 

—Sean Uyehara 

dengUe FeVer 

Dengue Fever’s repertoire isn’t simply Cambodian music or a 

Cambodian/American hybrid. Bollywood glitz, psychedelic rock, 

spaghetti Western twang, klezmer, ska, funk and Ethiopian jazz 

all contribute to the band’s unique sound. Singer Ch’hom Nimol’s 

powerful singing voice, in Khmer and more recently also English, 

is a luminous vibrato that adds exotic ornamentations to her 

vocal lines and complements the band’s driving sound. 

harry o. hoyt 

Born in Minneapolis in 1885, Harry O. Hoyt sent scripts to 

Hollywood businessmen while attending Yale. He directed his 

first film in 1915, and over the span of a 30-year career he 

wrote or directed over 100 films. The Lost World is Hoyt’s best 

known film project and was hailed for the stop-motion animation 

wizardry created by Willis O’Brien. Hoyt’s final directing project 

was the talkie The Jungle Bride (1933). He died in 1961 in 

Los Angeles. 

TuE MAY 5 8:00 cASTrO LOST05c 

69 

Live & Onstage

Live & Onstage 

70 

ProVIng groUnd 

Usa 

2007 

60 mIn 

dIr Travis Wilkerson 

sCr Travis Wilkerson 

ed Travis Wilkerson 

mUs Los Duggans 

Cast Travis Wilkerson 

PrInt soUrCe Extreme Low Frequency, 855 

East Kensington Road, Los Angeles, CA 90026. 

EMAIL: extremelow@gmail.com. 



Is now the right time to present a Leninist agitation 

on the history of American imperialism and war? The 

answer may depend on whether you believe that things 

like carpet-bombing, the tactics of decimation and the 

role of capitalism have something to teach us moving 

forward. We think it does. Leading the way is filmmaker 

Travis Wilkerson (An Injury to One, Who Killed Cock 

Robin?), whose unapologetic diatribe—some might call 

it screaming—is set against the surprisingly engaging 

music of death-folk musicians Los Duggans of Los 

Angeles. Wilkerson mans the Kaptivator, a tiny box filled 

with images and video intended for use in dance clubs. 

Wilkerson stocks his toy with visual evidence of the 

history of worldwide conflict and destruction, and Los 

Duggans provides the live soundtrack. The result is an 

intense mixture of theater, punk show, political rally and 

film screening. No matter which side you are on, you 

won’t be able to leave this performance without questions, 

ideas and conversations about the politicization of art 

or the aestheticization of politics. Proving Ground, first 

presented at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, has 

undergone many changes and incarnations, and the crew 

is prepared to get back in the saddle and lay it down. You 

won’t want to miss this rare chance at thought-provoking, 

enjoyable and powerful political theater. 


traVIs WIlkerson 

A chance meeting in Havana with legendary Cuban film 

propagandist Santiago Álvarez changed the course of Travis 

Wilkerson’s life. He now makes films in the Third Cinema 

tradition, wedding politics to form in an indivisible manner. 

His best-known work is an agitprop essay on the lynching of 

Wobbly Frank Little called An Injury to One (2002). His other 

films include Accelerated Underdevelopment (2003) on 

Santiago Álvarez, and Who Killed Cock Robin? (2005), one of 

the most divisive films ever screened in the Sundance dramatic 

competition. Wilkerson is an assistant professor of film studies at 

the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

los dUggans 

With their release CD Cavalry in 2007, Los Duggans appeared 

to hail from Appalachia, by way of CBGB’s and the Sunset 

Strip. Featuring “honest music about American working people,” 

the death folk rockers take American roots music in and send 

it out as electrified, punk-style metal riffs. Most recently, Los 

Duggans played at Café du Nord as part of the alternative lineup 

at the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival. For this 

performance, Los Duggans performs as a duo with electric 

guitar, gutbucket and drums and amplification at full volume. 

THu APr 30 10:00 KABuKI PrOV30K

FederICo FellInI marlon brando 

STATE OF cINEMA AddrESS 

mary ellen mark 

sUnday, may 3 

1:00 PM SuNdANcE KABuKI cINEMAS 

1881 POST STrEET (AT FILLMOrE) 

Each year, the Film Society invites a well-known 

public figure to talk about the intersecting 

worlds of contemporary cinema and visual arts, 

culture and society, images and ideas. This year, 

the State of Cinema Address will be delivered 

by acclaimed photographer Mary Ellen Mark. 

PREVIOUS ADDRESSES 

2008 Kevin Kelly 

2007 Peter Sellars 

2006 Tilda Swinton 

2005 Brad Bird 

2004 B. Ruby Rich 

2003 Michael Ciment 

Presented with support from Lynn Kirshbaum. 

On SeT WITh MARy eLLen MARK 

By Michael Read 

For 40 years Mary Ellen Mark has been publishing 

photographs of uncommon immediacy and insight. Her 

signature imagery and particular genius belong in the realm 

of the long-form photo essay. With an uncanny ability to 

forge deep, extemporaneous connections with her subjects, 

she has proven to be a consummate storyteller, be it among 

Bombay prostitutes, Seattle street kids or residents of an 

Oregon mental hospital. Through several seminal exhibitions 

and books her body of work—inspired as much by Diane 

Arbus and Garry Winogrand as by the hallowed traditions of 

the Magnum photo agency—has long been recognized as an 

inimitable touchstone in the photo documentary canon. 

The sensibilities that anchor Mark’s personal work—strength, 

compassion, and fearlessness—have also brought her 

great success on assignment for many of the world’s best 

magazines. In this capacity she has been much sought-after 

by legendary directors as a “special stills photographer” on 

more than 100 movie sets. Beginning with Arthur Penn’s 

Alice’s Restaurant and a Look magazine assignment 

documenting Federico Fellini directing Satyricon in Rome, 

she quickly has established herself as a photographer 

unusually suited to capturing actors and directors at work 

on what she knowingly calls the surreal atmosphere of the 

film set. 

Her newest book, Seen Behind the Scene: Forty years 

of Photographing on Set (Phaidon, 2008), collects scores 

of illuminating portraits of consummate actors—Brando, 

Nicholson, Deneuve, Blanchett and Depp—and superlative 

directors, including Coppola, Forman, Allen, Forman, Buñuel 

mary ellen mark 

and Truffaut. Many of these images—a bloodstained Marlon 

Brando contemplating a dragonfly perched on his fingertip 

on the set of Apocalypse now, for instance, or Benicio Del 

Toro, shrouded in cigar smoke, channeling Che Guevara— 

transcend the photographic to become objects of beauty 

and contemplation in themselves. 

Mark’s experience as a producer on documentaries 

Streetwise, Twins and Alexander, as well as on the 

feature American heart—inspired by her own photographs 

of homeless Seattle teens, and directed by her husband, 

Martin Bell—further adds to her insight into the state of 

cinema. “I’ve seen amazing people work,” she acknowledges 

modestly, “and I’ve learned some things.” 

In this year’s State of Cinema Address, Mark will take the 

audience on a private tour of her film-set images, discussing 

the legendary figures in the frame, as well as what was 

going on around them, and how what she experienced has 

informed her photographic and film work. She will also 

show and discuss her photo essay Twins and screen its 

companion short film, made with Martin Bell; and discuss 

photography and film with the audience. 

Michael Read was the editor of Film Arts magazine and is 

now the SFFS publications manager. 

SuN MAY 3 1:00 KABuKI STAT03K 

71 

Live & Onstage

CINEMA BY THE BAY 

THE CREATIVE HEART OF THE WEST 

74 Empress Hotel 

75 Everything Strange and New 

76 Ferlinghetti 

77 My Suicide 

78 (Untitled) 

73

cinema by the bay 

74 

EmprEss HotEl 

WEST COAST PREMIERE 

UsA 

2008 

85 min 

Dir Allie Light, Irving Saraf 

proD Allie Light, Irving Saraf, Roberta Goodman 

CAm Andrew Clark, Irving Saraf 

ED Allie Light, Irving Saraf 

mUs Larry Seymour 

print soUrCE Light-Saraf Films, 264 Arbor 

Street, San Francisco, CA 94131. FAX: 415- 

469-0139. EMAIL: sarafilm@comcast.net. 

CAUsEs Disabilities, Economic Justice, 

Family Issues, Bay Area Community 

The tenants of the Empress Hotel, a Tenderloin facility 

established by the San Francisco Department of Public 

Health to house the recently homeless, come from 

widely diverse backgrounds. Each resident of these 

small furnished rooms has a story to tell, including 

the amateur boxer who has spent years of his life 

behind bars and still struggles with violent urges, the 

woman with two master’s degrees who found herself 

homeless when her specialized area of expertise fell 

into technological obsolescence, the former publisher 

who follows the spiritual voices he hears almost to 

the point of suicide and the recovering crack addict 

desperate to get her weight to rise above 84 pounds. 

Local filmmaking duo Allie Light and Irving Saraf 

masterfully imbricate the residents’ life stories and 

their daily interactions with service providers and 

building staff to craft a moving portrait of a building, a 

neighborhood and all of the lives that intersect within. 

Light and Saraf won an Academy Award in 1991 for 

their look at the S.F. Opera, In the Shadow of the Stars, 

and their most recent film bears the mark of two lifetimes 

of documentary craftsmanship, perhaps most admirably 

in its resolute reluctance to sentimentalize the plights of 

its marginalized subjects as they struggle with mental 

illness, drug addiction and poverty. The film leaves some of 

its stories hopefully, others precariously close to despair, 

but its patron saint, building manager Roberta Goodman, 

provides the greatest reason for optimism as she tirelessly 

tries to improve her residents’ lives. 

—David Gray 

AlliE liGHt irvinG sArAf 

Allie Light and Irving Saraf won the Academy Award for 

Best Documentary Feature for In the Shadow of the Stars 

(1991) and an Emmy for Dialogues with Madwomen 

(1994). As filmmaking partners, they have directed a number 

of documentaries, including Visions of Paradise (1982), a 

series of five portraits of folk artists, and Rachel’s Daughters: 

Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer (1997), which 

aired on HBO. Longtime residents of the Bay Area, they both 

taught for many years at San Francisco State University. 

SAT APR 25 3:15 KABUKI EMPR25K 

MON APR 27 6:00 KABUKI EMPR27K 

WED APR 29 6:15 KABUKI EMPR29K

EvErytHinG strAnGE AnD nEw 


UsA 

2008 

83 min 

Dir Frazer Bradshaw 

proD Laura Techera Francia, A.D. Liano 

sCr Frazer Bradshaw 

CAm Frazer Bradshaw 

ED Frazer Bradshaw, Jesse Spencer 

mUs Kent Sparling 

CAst Jerry McDaniel, Beth Lisick, Luis Saguar, 

Rigo Chacon Jr. 

print soUrCE Lucky Hat Entertainment, 

1438 North Gower Street, Box 28, Hollywood, 

CA 90028. FAX: 323-993-7001 EMAIL: 

stevebanna@gmail.com. 

CAUsEs Family Issues, Bay Area Community 

Married with two young sons and mired in a state of 

arrested development, Wayne surveys his life as if from 

a great distance. Enduring a daily regimen steeped in 

malaise, he reports to his carpentry job dressed in dingy 

overalls to make payments on a house that will soon be 

worth less than its mortgage. Meanwhile, at home his 

marriage is buckling under the weight of disillusionment 

and parental exhaustion. An unflinching contemplation of 

spiritual inertia and downward mobility, Frazer Bradshaw’s 

feature debut chronicles a life that is in actuality neither 

strange nor new. Invoking in its title Robert Browning’s 

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (It’s dull in our town since 

my playmates left! / I can’t forget that I’m bereft / Of 

all the pleasant sights they see / Which the Piper also 

promised me), Everything Strange and New ponders a 

bewildered life in which holding onto what one has is a 

losing proposition. “No one really ends up wanting what 

they think they want,” Wayne tells his drinking buddies 

who, like him, are adrift in introspection and ineffectuality. 

Photographed in Oakland with an evocative visual style 

all its own, Bradshaw’s film is moored by lingering, 

artfully composed shots of urban traffic, nondescript 

rooftops and rundown streets. Equally resonant is the 

brilliant soundscape, tempered by Kent Sparling’s hushed 

electro-acoustic score and featuring a recurrent explosive 

composition by East Bay saxophonist Dan Plonsey. All 

coalesce to create a piercing, meditative film that raises 

uncomfortable questions about the broken promises of the 

American dream. 

—Michael Read 

frAzEr BrADsHAw 

“Being a middle class American is an infinitely more complex 

experience than it’s given credit for,” Frazer Bradshaw remarked 

recently in indieWire. Building on a foundation laid in the visual 

arts and experimental music, his first semi-narrative short film, 

Every Day Here, played the 2000 Sundance Film Festival 

and went on to the New York Film Festival. Harnessing a deep 

connection with the visual aspects of the medium, Bradshaw has 

built a substantial résumé as director of photography for over 

200 independent productions. Everything Strange and New, 

which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, is his first 

narrative feature. 

SUN APR 26 8:45 KABUKI EVET26K 

TUE APR 28 4:15 KABUKI EVET28K 

SAT MAY 2 6:30 KABUKI EVET02K 

75 

cinema by the bay


76 

fErlinGHEtti 

WORlD PREMIERE 

UsA 

2009 

76 min 

Dir Christopher Felver 

proD Christopher Felver, Bruce Ricker 

CAm Christopher Felver 

ED Brett Marty 

mUs Rick DePofi 

witH Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Billy Collins, 

Robert Scheer, Dennis Hopper, Dave Eggers, 

Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence 

Ferlinghetti 

print soUrCE Felver Photography, 511 

Johnson Street #1, Sausalito, CA 94965. FAX: 

415-332-4499. EMAIL: chris@chrisfelver.com. 

CAUsEs The Arts, Free Speech, Social Justice, 

Local Bay Area Community 

One of the most powerful moments in Christopher 

Felver’s portrait of Lawrence Ferlinghetti takes place 

during World War II, when the young Navy serviceman 

found himself walking through the ruins of Nagasaki, less 

than two months after the atomic blast. “It made me an 

instant pacifist,” he says simply. The realization that his 

own country was capable of such an act, coupled with 

exposure to radical San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, 

helped Ferlinghetti forge his path from disillusioned G.I. 

to philosophical anarchist, bookstore owner and publisher 

under the famed City Lights moniker (poet Billy Collins 

compares City Lights’ impact to “rolling a grenade into 

a library”), free-speech icon and, eventually, the world’s 

most-read poet. Felver’s long friendship with Ferlinghetti 

yields some rare interviews with his subject, supplemented 

by an impressive set of testimonials from, among others, 

Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Anne 

Waldman, Dennis Hopper, Amiri Baraka, Dave Eggers and 

Jack Hirschman. Deftly interspersing these voices with 

archival photos, video and audio, Felver vividly reveals a 

true American literary legend, turning 90 this year and still 

writing, painting, publishing and speaking out. At the dawn 

of the age of television, despite the complacent mood 

of the nation, a generation of American youth actually 

became excited about literature as a means of pushing 

the culture forward. That powerful contradiction, and the 

vibrant literary community that continues in San Francisco 

today, is a direct result of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

—Jack Boulware 

CHristopHEr fElvEr 

Christopher Felver is a photographer and filmmaker whose work 

has been presented at libraries and museums worldwide. He has 

chronicled the lives and work of many creative American artists, 

from Beat icons Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to musician 

John Cage and sculptor Donald Judd. His collaborations with 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti span over 20 years. He lives in Sausalito, 

California. 

TUE APR 28 6:00 KABUKI FERl28K 

THU APR 30 4:00 KABUKI FERl30K 

WED MAY 6 6:30 PFA FERl06P

my sUiCiDE 


UsA 

2008 

105 min 

Dir David Lee Miller 

proD Todd Traina, Larry Janss, 

David Lee Miller, Eric J. Adams 

sCr Eric J.Adams, David Lee Miller, 

Gabriel Sunday 

CAm Lisa Wiegand, Angie Hill 

ED Jordan J. Miller, Gabriel Sunday 

mUs Tim Kasher 

CAst Gabriel Sunday, Brooke Nevin, Mariel 

Hemingway, Joe Mantegna, David Carradine, 

Nora Dunn 

print soUrCE Red Rover Films, 8265 West 

Sunset Blvd. Suite 202, West Hollywood, 

CA 90046. FAX: 805-497-8609. EMAIL: 

shaehorton5@gmail.com, todd@redroverfilms. 

com. 

CAUsEs Youth 

“Have you ever felt like your life is just one big movie?” 

asks lost 17-year-old Archie Williams (played with moody 

madcap brilliance by multitalented Gabriel Sunday) near 

the beginning of My Suicide. The normally ignored Archie 

provokes a vortex of charged reactions in his suburban 

Southern California community when he announces his 

intention to commit suicide on camera. David Lee Miller 

and crew deftly capture the fragile psychic world of 

contemporary teens—its dancing demons, devouring angst, 

suffocating alienation, dysfunctional family dynamics, 

surging sexuality and dark narcissism—all within the 

maddening and accelerating swirl of media overload 

Archie’s generation endures. Born a “TV fetus,” Archie can 

only tolerate the life he perceives through his ever-present 

cameras. His voluminous digital video output is edited and 

regurgitated into a cacophonous suicide documentary 

comprised of hilarious skits, animation, clips from 1950s 

films, family movies and video game effects. Archie’s 

project brings unintended but devastating consequences, 

forcing everyone to confront the duplicitous chasm 

between fantasy and reality. The dizzying emotional pace 

of My Suicide is fed and enhanced by music from Bright 

Eyes, Radiohead, Joanna Newsom, My Morning Jacket, 

Devandra Barnhart, The Eels, Daniel Johnston and the 

Pixies. David Carradine, Mariel Hemingway, Joe Mantegna 

and Nora Dunn all appear as characters ranging from the 

slightly disturbed to greatly tweaked. My Suicide breaks 

new ground in presenting a portrait of teen despair to 

which teens can actually relate and respond. 

—Gustavus Kundahl 

DAviD lEE millEr 

My Suicide evolved from David Lee Miller and his son’s work 

in Regenerate, a nonprofit organization they created in 2002 

to address the leading causes of death among teenagers: 

car crashes, suicides and violence. A graduate of Stanford 

University’s film and journalism programs and Princeton’s 

creative writing program, Miller has written several screenplays, 

composed scores and produced and created video games. He 

wrote and directed the comedy horror feature Breakfast of 

Aliens (1993). 

FRI MAY 1 6:00 KABUKI MYSU01K 

TUE MAY 5 1:00 KABUKI MYSU05K 

WED MAY 6 9:00 KABUKI MYSU06K 

77 

cinema by the bay


UsA 

2009 

96 min 

78 

(UntitlED) 

Dir Jonathan Parker 

proD Catherine di Napoli, Jonathan Parker, 

Andreas Olavarria 

sCr Jonathan Parker, Catherine di Napoli 

CAm Svetlana Cvetko 

ED Keiko Deguchi 

mUs David Lang 

CAst Adam Goldberg, Marley Shelton, Eion 

Bailey, Vinnie Jones, Lucy Punch 

print soUrCE Parker Film Company, 1101 

Fifth Ave. Ste. 300, San Rafael, CA 94901. 

FAX: 415-456-2414. EMAIL: catherine@ 

parkerfilmcompany.com. 

CAUsEs The Arts 

The director of cult favorite Bartleby returns with 

this satiric comedy on that battleground of creativity, 

commerce and love: the downtown art scene and the 

self-obsessed, remarkably dressed individuals that pose 

and preen within. Busy crumpling paper and kicking 

buckets during his “sound performance,” avant-garde 

composer Adrian (Adam Goldberg, Two Days in Paris) at 

first has little time for his brother’s date, the aggressively 

fashionable art gallery dealer Madeleine (Marley Shelton). 

Finally aroused by the sounds of her vinyl clothes and 

apparently sincere flattery (“I’m still shaking from your 

bucket kick: Is it a death knell? A call to manual labor?”), 

Adrian soon finds himself in a new world of fancy gallery 

openings, collector courtships and difficult artistes, where 

opinions are “judgments” and the one with the most jargon 

wins. Unfortunately, his brother, a painter whose work is 

better suited to hotel lobbies than museums, also wants 

Madeleine’s love and (even worse) a chance to prove he’s 

a real artist. A former modernist musician and collector of 

abstract expressionism, director Jonathan Parker flavors 

his smart and sexy love triangle between three narcissists 

with an insider’s perspective on the pretensions and 

passions of the contemporary art and new music scenes, 

ably assisted by a razor-sharp script and excellent support 

from a cast that includes Vinnie Jones as a Damien 

Hirst–like firebrand and Zak Orth as a befuddled collector. 

“Sometimes you hide behind intellectual mannerisms,” 

notes one character about another’s artwork. As this 

urbane film makes clear, it’s a comment that applies 

both hilariously and sometimes horrifyingly to everyone 

onscreen. 

—Jason Sanders 

JonAtHAn pArkEr 

Bay Area–based writer, composer and director Jonathan Parker 

debuted in 2001 with Bartleby, an update of the classic Melville 

tale. It was nominated for the Grand Prize at the Deauville Film 

Festival and was selected to be the opening night film of the 

prestigious New Directors/New Films series. A musician in 

his youth, he is also a collector of the San Francisco school of 

abstract expressionism, using many of his experiences in both 

worlds as a basis for (Untitled). 

FRI APR 24 9:00 KABUKI UNTI24K 

SAT APR 25 8:45 KABUKI UNTI25K 

MON APR 27 4:15 KABUKI UNTI27K

THE LATE SHOW 

THRILLS AND CHILLS FROM AROUND THE WORLD 

80 Grace 

81 Hansel and Gretel 

82 The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle 

83 Zift 

79

THE LATE SHOW 

80 

Grace 


USa 

2008 

85 min 

Dir Paul Solet 

PrOD Ingo Volkammer, Cory Neal, Adam Green, 

Kevin DeWalt 

Scr Paul Solet 

cam Zoran Popovic 

eD John Coniglio, Darrin Navarro 

mUS Austin Wintory 

caST Jordan Ladd, Samantha Ferris, Gabrielle 

Rose, Malcom Stewart, Stephen Park, Serge 

Houde 

PrinT SOUrce Anchor Bay Entertainment. 

EMAIL: james.shapiro@starz.com. 

With Nadya Suleman’s extreme maternal cravings all over 

the news, the shocks and chills of Paul Solet’s debut 

feature could hardly be timelier—or more disturbing. In 

Grace, protagonist Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) isn’t 

carrying octuplets, but she is bearing the result of three 

years of fertility drugs. With a history of miscarriages and 

eight months into her current pregnancy, Madeline and 

her husband are doing all they can to ensure a healthy 

child—soy milk, tempe, a trusted midwife. Tragedy strikes 

the hopeful mom, however, rendering the baby dead in her 

womb. Determinedly, she carries the child to term—and 

wills the newborn to life. But, as little Grace develops 

cravings for “special food,” matters take a much darker 

turn. Madeline’s mother-in-law starts making demands, 

an evil doctor enters the picture and flies start appearing 

around the crib. As Solet ratchets up the tension, he also 

broadens the scope of the film to make compassionate 

but critical points about maternal desperation. The images 

are full of shadows and mired in gloom as Madeline keeps 

her house in low light and shuns visitors and friends. Ladd, 

meanwhile, sharply conveys Madeline’s acceptance of her 

predicament and unconditional love for her child. There is 

a history of horror movies involving pregnancy and wicked 

kids, but Grace references Cronenberg and Polanski more 

than It’s Alive. Solet’s discomfiting film makes one actually 

question human desire for procreation, when the result 

could be a creature as demanding as Grace. 

—Rod Armstrong 

PaUl SOleT 

Paul Solet studied film and psychology at Emerson College. He 

has made two prize-winning shorts, one of which he expanded to 

make Grace. Commenting on the film and its hoped-for impact, 

he says, “This isn’t your average horror film. When the hairs on 

your neck go down and you swallow the knot of terror in your 

throat, you’re going to take this film home like a cancer.” 

FRI MAY 1 11:59 KABUKI GRAC01K 

MON MAY 4 12:30 KABUKI GRAC04K

HanSel anD GreTel 

HANSEL GUA GRETEL 

U.S. PREMIERE 

SOUTH KOrea 

2008 

116 min 

Dir Yim Phil-Sung 

PrOD Choi Jae-Won, Seo Woo-Sik 

Scr Kim Min-Sook, Yim Phil-Sung 

cam Kim Jee-Yong 

eD Kim Sun-Min 

mUS Lee Byeong-Woo 

caST Chun Jeong-Myoung, Eun Won-Jae, Shim 

Eun-Kyoung, Jin Ji-Hee 

PrinT SOUrce Finecut, 4F, Incline Bldg, 891- 

37, Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South 

Korea. FAX: 822-569-9466. EMAIL: cineinfo@ 

finecut.co.kr. 

Talents as varied as Angela Carter, Jean Cocteau, Walt 

Disney and Terry Gilliam have all mined the fertile ground 

of Grimm fairy tales to create memorable work. In Hansel 

and Gretel, director Yim Phil-Sung takes the familiar story 

and transforms it to offer an unsettling cautionary tale 

about what happens when kids get everything they want. 

It all begins when Lee Eun-Soo (Chun Jeong-Myoung) 

crashes his car and is rescued by a girl in a bright red 

cape. She brings him to her house in the woods, and 

introduces him to her two siblings and the overly cheerful 

parental figures residing there. Everything in the toy-laden 

home smacks of spoiled children and hyper-attentive 

parents—but the truth is a little more sinister than that. 

When Lee tries to return to his car, for example, he finds it 

impossible to find his way back to the road. His cell phone 

doesn’t get a signal and can’t make outgoing calls from 

the house. And the television plays without being plugged 

in. When the mother disappears and a strange new couple 

arrives, matters get even more disturbing. Twisting the 

fairytale to constantly disrupt viewer assumptions about 

heroes and villains, Yim cleverly riffs on the story’s conceits 

while commenting on kids’ expectations of their parents 

and vice versa. With eye-popping art direction, a trio of 

terrific child actors and a passel of disquieting moments, 

Hansel and Gretel is a Grimm delight. 


Yim PHil-SUnG 

Director Yim Phil-Sung began making films in 1997. His short 

Baby played at the Venice and Karlovy Vary festivals. His first 

feature, Antarctic Journal, explores a series of mysterious 

deaths in the Antarctic and won the Orient Express Award at 

the 38th Sitges Festival of Fantastic Film. He made Hansel and 

Gretel under the aegis of film company Barunson, which also 

produced The Good, the Bad and the Weird. 

FRI APR 24 11:15 KABUKI HANS24K 

MON APR 27 3:15 KABUKI HANS27K 

THU APR 30 7:00 ROXIE HANS30R 

81 

THE LATE SHOW

THE LATE SHOW 

82 

THe immacUlaTe cOncePTiOn Of liTTle Dizzle 


USa 

2009 

100 min 

Dir David Russo 

PrOD Peggy Case 

Scr David Russo 

cam Neil Holcomb 

eD Billy McMillin 

mUS Awesome 

caST Marshall Allman, Natasha Lyonne, Tania 

Raymonde, Tygh Runyan, Matt Smith, Vince 

Vieluf 

PrinT SOUrce Visit Films, 89 Fifth Ave, Suite 

1002, New York, NY 10003. FAX: 718-362- 

4865. EMAIL: al@visitfilms.com. 



David Russo’s witty and imaginative film debut explores 

key issues of today, including corporate malfeasance, the 

search for religion and, of course, male pregnancy. Dizzle’s 

protagonist is Dory (Marshall Allmann), a toiler in the world 

of data, who processes useless information about necrotic 

kitten kidneys as he looks for life’s meaning. After getting 

fired, he joins the ranks of Spiffy Jiffy, a ragtag bunch of 

stoner janitors led by Oliver (Vince Vieluf) who dreams 

of attending art school. One of the offices within Spiffy 

Jiffy’s purview is a market research firm, which happens 

to be testing a batch of self-heating “oven fresh” cookies. 

Dory and his fellow sweepers sample the product, become 

addicted and are soon experiencing some comical but 

worrisome side effects. When these include giving birth 

to semi-animate beings, Russo’s film takes on additional 

hilarity and weight. For beyond all the toilet humor and 

ribald observations about men’s fears of their own bodies, 

Little Dizzle is basically an affirmation of the miraculous, a 

message of hope tucked inside in a bottle of despair and 

alienation. As Dory wends his way through a multitude of 

belief systems—conveyed by a variety of witty T-shirts— 

and Oliver gets his shot at artistic stardom, the film 

suggests that meaning and fulfillment arise in surprising 

ways. Incorporating Russo’s prize-winning animation 

techniques—and a bravura sequence by Dutch animator 

Rosto—The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is 

a fable about creation, scurrilous and scatological, but also 

deeply felt and passionately rendered. 


DaviD rUSSO 

David Russo is an independent film artist based in Seattle, 

Washington. Named by Filmmaker magazine one of the “25 

New Faces of Independent Film,” he has made a number of 

prize-winning short films including I Am (Not) Van Gogh (SFIFF 

2006) and Populi (SFIFF 2007). He worked as a janitor for 

11 years and believes that the “janitorial perspective informs 

everything I do.” The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle 

is his first feature-length work. 

SAT MAY 2 11:00 KABUKI IMMA02K 

WED MAY 6 3:30 KABUKI IMMA06K

zifT 


BUlGaria 

2008 

91 min 

Dir Javor Gardev 

PrOD Georgi Dimitrov, Ilian Djevelekov, Matey 

Konstantinov 

Scr Vladislav Todorov 

cam Emil Christov 

eD Kevork Aslanyan 

mUS Kalin Nikolov 

caST Zachary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir 

Penev, Mihail Mutafov 

PrinT SOUrce IFC Films, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th 

floor, New York, NY 10001. FAX: 646-273- 

7250. EMAIL: ifcfilmsinfo@ifcfilms.com. 

Communist slogans, valuable diamonds, rare poisons, 

glass eyes and scatological humor—these are just a 

few of the elements driving the plot of Javor Gardev’s 

immensely energetic debut feature. Using a film noir 

framework, exquisite black-and-white cinematography 

and rapid-fire dialogue, Zift depicts an ex-con named 

Moth (Zachari Baharov) on the night after his release 

from prison. Falsely incarcerated for murder in the 1940s, 

he proves himself a model Communist while inside and 

is released on good behavior two decades later into a 

drastically different Bulgaria. On the run from local officials 

who want to know the whereabouts of a diamond he is 

suspected of stealing, while searching for his ex-girlfriend 

and the son he’s never met, Moth is a hardboiled hero who 

nevertheless finds time for the poignant reminiscences of 

his one-eyed cellmate. With its breathless leaps among 

the multiple stories nestled in its overarching narrative, 

Zift recalls the masterpieces of American film noir, the 

cinema of the Coen brothers or the literature of Roberto 

Bolaño. Even with all of these referents, however, Gardev 

and screenwriter Vladislav Todorov—adapting his novel of 

the same name—have created something sui generis, a 

darkly comic riff on Bulgaria’s Communist past. Featuring 

a bathhouse scene that equals in visceral audacity the 

one in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, and a revelation 

concerning a cache for jewels that tops The Maltese 

Falcon, Zift is an unforgettable story about fate, freedom 

and society’s various notions of justice. 


JavOr GarDev 

Javor Gardev graduated from Sofia University with a Master’s 

degree in philosophy and later received another M.A. from the 

Krastyo Sarafov Academy in stage directing. He has directed 

several stage productions as well as two prior short films. With 

Zift, Gardev and screenwriter Vladislav Todorov decided to 

employ a “radical attack” on contemporary Bulgarian cinema 

in order to trigger productive debate. One of their goals was to 

“frame the banality of communist evil . . . to render it utterly odd 

by using a set of genre devices.” He is currently working with 

Todorov on two other film projects. 

SAT APR 25 11:00 KABUKI ZIFT25K 

MON APR 27 2:00 KABUKI ZIFT27K 

THU APR 30 3:30 KABUKI ZIFT30K 

83 

THE LATE SHOW

NEW DIRECTORS 

FIRST- aND SECOND-TImE DIRECTORS 

EmERgINg ON ThE INTERNaTIONal SCENE 

IN COmpETITION FOR 

NEW DIRECTORS pRIZE 

87 Autumn 

89 Can Go Through Skin 

91 Claustrophobia 

93 Don’t Let Me Drown 

94 French Girl 

95 Gasoline 

96 Home 

99 Kabuli Kid 

102 Mid-August Lunch 

106 The Paranoids 

109 Snow 

OUT OF COmpETITION 

86 Artemisia 

88 Battle for Terra 

90 Chaturanga (Four Chapters) 

92 Confessional 

97 Hooked 

98 In the Loop 

100 Kisses 

101 Lake Tahoe 

103 Mohandas 

104 Moon 

105 Our Beloved Month of August 

107 Rudo y Cursi 

108 Small Crime 

110 Son of a Lion 

111 Tulpan 

112 Versailles 

113 A Week Alone 

85

New Directors 

86 

aRTEmiSia 

aI-TSaO 

NORTh amERICaN pREmIERE 

Taiwan 

2008 

85 min 

DiR Chiang Hsiu-chiung 

PROD Wu Jui-yen 

SCR Tseng Yu-chieh 

Cam Chin Ting-chang 

ED Chen Po-wen 

mUS Li Hsin-yun 

CaST Pan Li-li, Mo Tzu-yi, Chuo Heng-yin 

PRinT SOURCE Public Television Service 

Foundation, No. 100, Lane 75, Sect. 3, Kang- 

Ning Road, 114 Taipei, Taiwan. FAX: 886-22- 

630-1895. EMAIL: prg70126@mail.pts.org.tw. 

CaUSES LGBT Issues, Youth 

GGa TElEviSiOn naRRaTivE winnER 

In Taiwanese with English subtitles. 

Presented with support from Taipei Economic 

and Cultural Office, San Francisco. 

Like many of her male predecessors in the Taiwanese 

New Wave, director Chiang Hsiu-chiung probes the 

generational and cultural conflicts confronting modern 

families in Taiwan. Her well-scripted debut is a matrilineal 

drama about three generations of resilient women. In a 

powerfully subdued performance, famed Taiwanese opera 

star and actress Pan Li Li portrays the title role of Ai-tsao, 

a single 58-year-old woman who cares for her critical, 

penny-pinching mother and closeted gay son. As a young 

woman, Ai-tsao defied her conservative family to marry 

an older mainlander and pursue an independent life in 

Taipei. Now widowed for over 20 years, she proudly dotes 

on her two children, for whom she has dutifully worked 

to provide a good life and first-rate education. Chiang’s 

compassionate, observant camera tracks the small and 

sometimes playful details of Ai-tsao’s unwavering daily 

routine: morning tai chi in the park, coastal bus rides to 

her mother’s house, dinner conversations with her son 

and the occasional visit to model apartments for extended 

family. When small clues begin to expose her son’s 

gay relationship, Ai-tsao struggles to quietly accept his 

unspoken transgression. However, when her daughter 

returns from abroad harboring a secret as well, Ai-tsao 

is forced to find the courage to reevaluate her own past 

and her most fundamental values. Like the wild and hardy 

plant of her namesake, she discovers that she must adapt 

to her ever-changing environment if she is to protect and 

preserve the family she cherishes. 

—Kyle Stephan 

ChianG hSiU-ChiUnG 

While completing her graduate studies in theater and 

screenwriting at the Taipei National University of the Arts, 

Chiang Hsiu-chiung delivered a Golden Horse–nominated 

performance in Edward Yang’s epic A Brighter Summer Day 

(SFIFF 1992). Behind the scenes, Chiang worked as assistant 

director and performance supervisor on Yang’s films, including 

A Confucian Confusion (SFIFF 1995) and A One and a Two, 

and those of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Flowers of Shanghai, SFIFF 

1999) and Millennium Mambo (SFIFF 2002). After directing 

several short films and television segments, she presents her 

debut feature film, Artemisia. 

SUN apR 26 9:15 KaBUKI aRTE26K 

SUN maY 3 12:45 KaBUKI aRTE03K 

ThU maY 7 8:30 KaBUKI aRTE07K

aUTUmn 

SONBahaR 

TURkEy/GERmany 

2008 

106 min 

DiR Özcan Alper 

PROD F. Serkan Acar 

SCR Özcan Alper 

Cam Feza Çaldiran 

ED Thomas Balkenhol 

mUS Yur Rydahencko, Aysenur Kolivar, Sumru 

Agiryürüyen, Onok Bozkurt 

CaST Onur Saylak, Raife Yenigül, Megi 

Kobaladze, Serkan Keskin, Nino Lejava 

PRinT SOURCE Media Luna Entertainment, 

Aachener Strasse 26, Cologne, Germany. 

FAX: 49-221-801-498-21. EMAIL: festival@ 

medialuna-entertainment.de 

CaUSES Family Issues, Human Rights, Social 

Justice 

nEw DiRECTORS PRizE COnTEnDER 

In Turkish, Georgian and Hemsin with English 

subtitles. 

Özcan Alper is an emerging filmmaker of unusual 

confidence and a new voice in Turkish cinema. His feature 

film debut—the first full-length narrative in the northeast 

Hemsin language—is an intense yet understated elegy 

to lost youth, in which the plot mirrors the inexorable 

drift from autumn to winter. Released after ten years as 

a political prisoner, Yusuf struggles to engage with a 

world that has moved on. His health severely damaged, 

he returns to his widowed mother in an isolated mountain 

region near the Black Sea, where he passes hours in 

solitary games of chess and briefly stirs to help a local 

boy with his math lessons. Isolated in a region deserted 

by young people, Yusuf contacts his old friend Mikhail, the 

married village carpenter, who takes him to a coastal town 

and sets him up with Eka, a prostitute who sends money 

to her daughter and mother in post-Soviet Georgia. Yusuf 

rejects an empty sexual encounter, but he and Eka come 

to share a bleak understanding between disillusioned and 

lonely souls. Masterful use of color and landscape sparely 

suggests the interior states of the central characters. As 

green and golden mountains are quietly buried in snow, 

and the steel gray sea rises to pound a lonely pier, we feel 

the characters’ desperation and loss. Autumn was inspired 

by Alper’s life as a university student in Istanbul and by the 

violent actions of the Turkish government to stop ongoing 

hunger strikes in political prisons. 

—Kathleen Denny 

ÖzCan alPER 

Variety hails Özcan Alper as “an impressive new voice in Turkish 

cinema.” His award-winning short film, Grandmother (2001), 

was the first film shot in the Hemsin language of northeast 

Turkey. He directed two documentaries, Voyage in the Time 

with a Scientist (2005) and Rhapsody and Melancholy in 

Tokai City (2005), before writing and shooting his own feature. 

Autumn received the best film award at the Adana Golden Boll 

Festival and the NETPAC Award at the fourth Antalya Eurasia 

International Film Festival. Alper also won the Silver Prometheus 

Award for Best Director at the Tblisi Film Festival. 

SaT maY 2 4:30 ClaY aUTU02Y 

mON maY 4 1:30 KaBUKI aUTU04K 

TUE maY 5 9:00 KaBUKI aUTU05K 

87 

New Directors

New Directors 

88 

BaTTlE fOR TERRa 

WEST COaST pREmIERE 

USa 

2007 

100 min 

DiR Aristomenis Tsirbas 

PROD Keith Calder, Dane Allan Smith, Jessica 

Wu, Ryan Colucci 

SCR Evan Spiliotopoulous 

Cam Aristomenis Tsirbas 

ED J. Kathleen Gibson 

mUS Abel Korzeniowski 

CaST Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Dennis 

Quaid, Brian Cox, Chris Evans, James Garner, 

Danny Glover 

PRinT SOURCE Roadside Attractions, 7920 

Sunset Boulevard, Suite 402, Los Angeles, 

CA 90046. FAX: 323-882-8493. EMAIL: 

meghannb@roadsideattractions.com. 

CaUSES Environment; War, Conflict & 

Reconciliation 



In his first feature-length, independently produced 

animated film, director Aristomenis Tsirbas has created a 

beautiful, tranquil world most anyone would love to inhabit. 

That’s just the problem. While the moon-eyed, tadpole-like 

denizens of Terra live peacefully amid towering reeds and 

gentle space whales, another species is eyeing the planet 

as a potential new home—and this time the invaders are 

us. As Earth Force’s giant ship appears in the sky, the 

predominantly passive Terrareans are slow to recognize 

they are under attack. But freethinking, strong-willed 

Mala (voiced by SFIFF52 Midnight Award recipient Evan 

Rachel Wood) sees her father being abducted and knows 

something is terribly wrong. She comes across wounded 

pilot Jim Stanton (Luke Wilson) and decides to rescue 

and revive him, with the understanding that he will help 

secure her father’s release. Mala and Jim gradually forge 

an unexpected alliance and begin to understand both the 

motivations and moral failings of their two species, as 

the conflict between Earthlings and Terrareans escalates 

into a desperate fight for survival. With an all-star vocal 

cast (including Brian Cox, James Garner, Dennis Quaid 

and a hilarious David Cross as the WALL-E-esque robot 

sidekick) and lush CGI animation, Battle for Terra’s 

family-friendly, sci-fi action comes with a socially conscious 

spin—posing tough ethical and philosophical questions 

around the environment, war and human compassion. 

We’ve experienced many on-screen alien invasions over 

the years. It’s an intriguing turn of events to find ourselves 

on the opposite side of the death ray. Who’s the alien 

now? Recommended for ages seven and up. 

—Joanne Parsont 

aRiSTOmEniS TSiRBaS 

Aristomenis Tsirbas worked as a production designer, visual 

effects artist (Titanic) and visual and digital effects supervisor 

(A Wrinkle in Time, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) before 

making the leap to writing and directing, founding the production 

company MeniThings in 2000 to support original CGI and 

live-action content for film and TV. Tsirbas wrote and directed 

a series of successful short films, including Ray Tracey in Full 

Tilt (2000), Mech Warrior: Vengeance (2000) and the awardwinning 

The Freak (SFIFF 2002), before turning his animated 

short film Terra (2003) into a feature directorial debut. 

SaT apR 25 12:00 KaBUKI BaTT25K 

WED apR 29 6:45 KaBUKI BaTT29K

Can GO ThROUGh Skin 

KaN DOOR hUID hEEN 


nEThERlanDS 

2008 

94 min 

DiR Esther Rots 

PROD Trent, Hugo Rots, Esther Rots 

SCR Esther Rots 

Cam Lennert Hillege 

ED Esther Rots 

mUS Dan Geesin 

CaST Rifka Lodeizen, Wim Opbrouck, Tina de 

Bruin 

PRinT SOURCE Films Boutique, Lübbener 

Strasse 19, 10997 Berlin, Germany. EMAIL: 

charlotterenaut@gmail.com. 

CaUSES Women’s Issues 


Life hangs by a very fine thread. Marieke, a young Dutch 

woman, is shattered by a random act of violence in 

Amsterdam. She moves to a decrepit shack in the country 

with unclear hopes of finding peace, but what she finds is 

quite different. The first feature from director Esther Rots 

(who also wrote and edited) creates a haunting world of 

dread and isolation that slowly is dissipated by intimations 

of light and hope as the film progresses and the seasons 

change. In a hypnotic performance, actress Rifka Lodeizen 

commands virtually every scene as we witness her mental 

disintegration mirrored by her decaying surroundings. As 

she plans her revenge with a cryptic online confidante it 

becomes unclear as to what is real and what might be 

hallucinated. An unlikely friendship with a local farmer 

slowly begins to open her up and alleviate her loneliness 

and grief. The technical brilliance of this film is manifest in 

the soaring, complex sound design, ranging from swirling 

abstract tones to plaintive female voice and piano, and 

the extraordinary cinematography, which captures every 

detail of the beautiful rural Dutch landscape and gritty 

dark urban spaces with exquisite finesse. Exploring what 

happens when one’s basic sense of safety is ripped away 

by an irrational act, Can Go Through Skin is a promising 

and stimulating debut from a gifted filmmaker. 

—Joel Shepard 

ESThER ROTS 

Can Go Through Skin is Esther Rots’ first feature. In 2002 and 

2003 she had short films vying for the Palm d’Or in Cannes, and 

a work from 2005 won her a Golden Calf, the national Dutch 

prize, for Best Short Film. She studied at the Dutch Film and 

Television Academy. 

SaT maY 2 4:15 KaBUKI CaNg02K 

mON maY 4 9:30 KaBUKI CaNg04K 

WED maY 6 4:30 KaBUKI CaNg06K 

89 

New Directors

New Directors 

90 

ChaTURanGa (fOUR ChaPTERS) 


inDia 

2008 

125 min 

DiR Suman Mukhopadhyay 

PROD Avik Saha, Vishal Jhajharia 

SCR Suman Mukhopadhyay 

Cam Indranil Mukherjee 

ED Arghyakamal Mitra 

mUS Debojyoti Mishra 

CaST Rituparna Sengupta, Dhritiman Chaterji, 

Joy Sengupta, Subrata Dutta, Kabir Suman 

PRinT SOURCE Campfire Films, 3A/1, 3rd Floor, 

Hastings Chambers, 7C, Kiran Sankar Roy Road, 

Kolkata, West Bengal 700001, India. FAX: 91- 

33-22426466. EMAIL: avik@saharay.com. 

CaUSES Economic Justice, Religion & 

Spirituality 

In Bengali with English subtitles. 

Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 novella, 

Chaturanga concerns Sachish, a young, upper caste 

Bengali who rebels against his conservative father and 

joins his reformist uncle in helping the lower caste. 

Sachish further scandalizes the family by offering to 

marry the pregnant mistress of his cavalier brother. Two 

unexpected tragedies—the young mother’s suicide and the 

beloved uncle’s deat—turn Sachish increasingly toward the 

world he has criticized. He joins a religious cult and follows 

a path of Hindu asceticism that leads to disillusionment, 

fueled by unfulfilled desire and dysfunctional relationships 

with his best friend and a young widow. As in his first film, 

Herbert, Mukhopadhyay proves himself an idiosyncratic 

filmmaker concerned with the interiors of both places and 

people. Early on he shows Sachish’s father angrily dividing 

the ancestral property, then tracks the complex trajectory 

of his son—an idealist who straddles diametrically opposing 

habits of mind—from rational atheism to spiritual mysticism. 

Tagore’s novella has elsewhere been translated as 

“Quartet,” which captures the “foursomes” connoted by the 

original title: the four main characters and their interlocking 

relationships; the four elements of the classical Indian 

army; and the four-player version of chess. Mukhopadhyay 

uses an English title of comparable subtlety, referring to 

the four parts of the novella itself, a story of love both 

played as a game and fought as a war of ideas and caste 

struggle. Mukhopadhyay says Tagore’s story has been 

“provoking” him since his university days. “It interrogates 

our perception of human evolution [and] proposes an 

unending journey, a timeless quest.” 

—Roger Garcia 

SUman mUkhOPaDhyay 

Suman Mukhopadhyay was born near Kolkata in West Bengal 

and graduated from Kolkata’s Jadavpur University. He trained 

in theater and film in New York and is a leading theater director 

in India. His 2000 play, Teesta Paarer Brittanto, adapted from 

Debesh Roy’s novel, is one of the most celebrated in Bengal. 

He made several documentaries and television dramas before 

making his feature debut, Herbert (2005), which has played at 

many festivals and recently at New York’s Museum of Modern 

Art. Chaturanga is his second feature film. 

TUE apR 28 3:30 KaBUKI ChaT28K 

WED apR 29 6:00 KaBUKI ChaT29K 

FRI maY 1 8:35 pFa ChaT01p

ClaUSTROPhOBia 


hOnG kOnG/China 

2008 

100 min 

DiR Ivy Ho 

PROD Cary Cheng, Yee Chung Man 

SCR Ivy Ho 

Cam Mark Lee Ping Bing 

ED Kong Chi Leung 

mUS Anthony Chue 

CaST Karena Lam, Ekin Cheng, Felix Lok, Derek 

Tsang, Chucky Woo, Eric Tsang, Andy Hui 

PRinT SOURCE Edko Film, 1212 Tower 2, 

Admiralty Center. 18 Harcourt Rd, 040 Hong 

Kong, China. FAX: 852-2529-5339. EMAIL: 

wujune@edkofilm.com.hk. 


A sensitive and deceptively serene portrayal of an office 

relationship marks this intelligently crafted feature debut 

by one of Hong Kong’s best known screenwriters, Ivy Ho 

(Comrades, Almost a Love, SFIFF 1997; Story; July 

Rhapsody, SFIFF 2002). Five office colleagues share the 

daily drive home after work. Each represents a facet of 

the career cycle: youngish boss Tom (Ekin Cheng) at the 

wheel, time-serving veteran Karl, nerdy executive trainee 

John, sexy assistant Jewel and recent hire Pearl (Karena 

Lam). They gossip and bicker, and John gets angry at 

Jewel (with whom he has had a one-night stand), as the 

narrative centers on Pearl. Her calm and quiet demeanor 

masks a simmering mutual attraction for Tom that may or 

may not have been consummated. Much to her dismay, 

Tom retreats into the pragmatism of family and career 

concerns as excuses to end their relationship. The film 

then moves back in time to trace the evolution and origin 

of the relationships between all five characters. Somewhat 

like Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Ho teases us 

with did-they-or-didn’t-they questions and the suspicion 

that it may not really matter in the end. Ho’s expert 

dialogue is a model of deflected intentions and emotions, 

a web of subtexts that captures the passions raging 

under the formal structures and “claustrophobia” of the 

daily grind. An intriguing effect of the film’s retrospective 

conceit is that, as the narrative progresses, the characters 

are happier and more open, their melancholia giving way to 

new hopes and new beginnings. 


ivy hO 

Born in Hong Kong, Ivy Ho (aka On Sai) began working in TV 

in her late teens. She wrote and appeared in episode three of 

Patrick Tam’s Seven Women series (1976), a startling half-hour 

monologue for commercial television. Her film breakthrough 

came with the award-winning Comrades, Almost a Love Story 

(Peter Chan, 1996). Now Hong Kong’s leading scriptwriter, her 

work includes Jackie Chan’s Gorgeous and The Accidental 

Spy, Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody (SFIFF 2002) and Jade 

Goddess of Mercy, Johnnie To’s Linger (SFIFF 2008), among 

others. 

SUN maY 3 8:30 KaBUKI ClaU03K 

TUE maY 5 8:45 KaBUKI ClaU05K 

ThU maY 7 3:15 KaBUKI ClaU07K 

91 

New Directors

New Directors 

92 

COnfESSiOnal 


PhiliPPinES 

2007 

90 min 

DiR Ruel Dahis Antipuesto, Jerrold Tarog 

PROD Ronald Arguelles 

SCR Jerrold Tarog 

Cam Ruel Antipuesto 

ED Jerrold Tarog 

mUS Jerrold Tarog 

CaST Jerrold Tarog, Publio Briones III, Owee 

Salva, Greg Fernandez, Donna Gimeno 

PRinT SOURCE Cinema One Originals (ABS- 

CBN), CPI Programming Office, 8th Floor, ELJ 

Comm. Center Bldg., Eugenio Lopez Drive 

corner Mo. Ignacia Avenue, 1103 Quezon City, 

Philippines. FAX: 632-415-4344. 

EMAIL: ourcinema@gmail.com. 

In Cebuano and Tagalog with English subtitles. 

Videographer Ryan Pastor travels from Manila to Cebu 

with his girlfriend to film the annual religious Sinulog 

festival with hopes of entering his finished work in a 

documentary competition. On the way, he falls out with 

his girlfriend, films some of the religious procession and 

then gets drawn into the dark world of small-town politics 

when he interviews the ex-mayor, Lito, who sees Pastor 

as a kind of “confessor” with a video camera. Lito reveals 

sordid details about a starlet known intimately by his circle 

of friends, the corrupt building practices that led to a 

school collapse and the deaths of many children and even 

his murder of a drug lord. He also makes known that he 

has a fatal disease; nonetheless, as Ryan films, fate has 

something else in store for Lito. Confessional is a smart 

indie mockumentary that makes the most of its limited 

resources—including codirector Jerrold Tarog pulling 

double duty in the part of Ryan and effective use of Ryan’s 

handheld footage. (In real life, Tarog and Antipuesto 

have each consecutively won the Sinulog Festival’s 

documentary film competition.) But what elevates the 

film is its witty play between fiction and reality (is Lito a 

fantasist or for real?), a strategy that reveals essential 

truths. With his dark power, Lito distills and personifies all 

that is wrong in Philippine society, while Pastor represents 

the impotent observer—an intersection of morals that begs 

more questions than it answers. 


RUEl DahiS anTiPUESTO 

JERROlD TaROG 

Ruel Dahis Antipuesto is a self-taught photographer 

and filmmaker. He has been making music videos, 

documentaries, shorts (he shot Jerrold Tarog’s awardwinning 

short Carpool) and commercials since 2002. He 

runs a visual communications company in Cebu and also 

teaches film. Confessional is his feature directorial debut. 

Jerrold Tarog is an award-winning composer for films whose 

work includes The Bet Collector (Jeffrey Jeturian), Foster 

Child, Manoro and Masahisa (all by Brillante Mendoza), among 

others. He took a degree in composition from the University of 

the Philippines-Diliman, where he also studied film theory. He 

has directed several short films. Confessional is his first feature. 

FRI apR 24 9:30 KaBUKI CONF24K 

SUN apR 26 2:30 KaBUKI CONF26K 

WED apR 29 4:00 KaBUKI CONF29K

DOn’T lET mE DROwn 


USa 

2008 

105 min 

DiR Cruz Angeles 

PROD Maria Topete, Jay Van Hoy, Lars 

Knudsen, James Lawler, Ben Howe 

SCR Cruz Angeles, Maria Topete 

Cam Chad Davidson 

ED Andrew Hafitz 

mUS Daniel Belardinelli 

CaST E.J. Bonilla, Gleendilys Inoa, Gina Torres, 

Ricardo Antonio Chavira, Damián Alcázar, Yareli 

Arizmendi 

PRinT SOURCE Rollin’ Deep Productions, 1567 

E 38th St, New York, NY 11234. EMAIL: 

cruzangeles@gmail.com 

info@rollindeep.com. 

CaUSES Family Issues, Youth 


A love affair set amid the ruins of post-9/11 New York 

powers this strong feature debut by UC Berkeley graduate 

Cruz Angeles, who adapts a street-level neo-realist 

aesthetic to capture the vibrancy (and frictions) of a 

community rarely portrayed realistically onscreen, the city’s 

Latino Caribbean population. For two Brooklyn teenagers, 

life has changed after 9/11: The charismatic, Mexicanborn 

Lalo has a father who once worked in the World 

Trade Center but now risks his health cleaning up debris 

at Ground Zero, while the Dominican Stefanie nurses a 

greater sorrow as she helps her father and mother deal 

with the loss of her sister, who died in the attacks. Meeting 

at a birthday party only a month after the disaster, Lalo and 

Stefanie begin a relationship that starts off rocky, but soon 

seems the only force for good in their lives. Merging a 

cinema verité portrait of the city’s Mexican and Dominican 

communities with a romantic lyricism, Don’t Let Me 

Drown possesses the toughness of its New York setting 

(and the sorrow of its specific time) but is, at heart, a love 

story. As Lalo, E.J. Bonilla gives his street-swaggering 

“Mexi-Yorker” a youthful charm and vulnerability, 

while Gleendilys Inoa balances a natural beauty with a 

combustible spark as Stefanie. Discovered after a lengthy 

casting process, the two first-time leads are joined by 

a who’s who of Latino actors, including Gina Torres 

(Firefly, Angel), Ricardo Antonio Charira (Desperate 

Housewives) and Damián Alcázar (who started his career 

in the films of Arturo Ripstein). 

CRUz anGElES 

Born in Mexico and raised in south central Los Angeles, 

director Cruz Angeles attended UC Berkeley (where he met 

his screenwriting/producing partner Maria Topete) and NYU’s 

graduate film program. He participated as a directing and writing 

fellow at the 2005 Sundance Institute Filmmaker’s Lab, and 

has garnered many accolades (including a Director’s Guild of 

America award) for his short works. Don’t Let Me Drown is his 

feature debut. 

FRI apR 24 6:00 KaBUKI DONT24K 

SUN apR 26 3:30 KaBUKI DONT26K 

mON maY 4 4:00 KaBUKI DONT04K 

93 

New Directors

New Directors 

94 

fREnCh GiRl 

FRaNçaISE 


fRanCE/mOROCCO 

2008 

84 min 

DiR Souad El-Bouhati 

PROD Jacques Kirsner, Jean-David Lefebvre 

SCR Souad El-Bouhati 

Cam Florian Bouchet, Olivier Chambon 

ED Josiane Zardoya, Caroline Dulac 

mUS Patrice Gomis 

CaST Hafsia Herzi, Farida Khelfa, Maher 

Kamoun, Amal Ayouche, Léa Fontana 

PRinT SOURCE Wide Management Enterprise, 

40 rue Sainte Anne, Paris, France. FAX: 33-1- 

5395-0465. EMAIL: cr@widemanagement.com. 

CaUSES Family Issues, Immigration, Women’s 

Issues, Youth 


In French and Arabic with English subtitles. 

“So which are you: French, African, Moroccan or Arab?” 

This loaded question, posed to the titular ten-year-old of 

Souad El-Bouhati’s wonderfully assured first feature, has 

no easy answer, for although young Sofia was born in 

France and fully embraces her Gallic origins, her North 

African parents prefer that their headstrong daughter 

retain the traits and traditions of their homeland. Having 

lost his job, Sofia’s father whisks the family away from 

their French suburb and returns to Morocco. Eight years 

later, Sofia, now a rambunctious university student, divides 

her time between her dorm room and her family’s olive 

farm, shuns her mother’s entreaties to marry her fawning 

boyfriend and pleads with her reluctant father to relinquish 

her passport so that she can return to the beloved France 

of her childhood. “If I stay here, I’ll die,” Sofia declares 

with a desperate passion intrinsic to 18-year-olds the 

world over, yet the intensity of her identity crisis—so 

finely observed by El-Bouhati, whose directorial flair 

and empathy for her protagonist are as palpable as the 

Moroccan sun—ensure that this particular “French girl” 

won’t allow geography or family to define her destiny. 

César Award–winning actress Hafsia Herzi, who made 

a strong impression in Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret 

of the Grain (SFIFF 2008), imbues Sofia with a winning 

resilience; she is at once a turbulent cultural renegade and 

a wise-beyond-her-years seeker of self who recognizes in 

the lines of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage” a poetic 

means of both escape and homecoming. 

—Steven Jenkins 

SOUaD El-BOUhaTi 

Born in Morocco in 1962, and only two weeks old when her 

family moved to France, Souad El-Bouhati spent ten years as 

a social worker before studying cinema at the Sorbonne. She 

earned recognition for her 1999 debut short, Salam, in which an 

immigrant worker decides to return to his birthplace. El-Bouhati 

further develops the themes of immigration and identity in 

French Girl, her first feature. 

SUN maY 3 5:45 KaBUKI FREN03K 

TUE maY 5 6:00 KaBUKI FREN05K 

WED maY 6 9:30 KaBUKI FREN06K

GaSOlinE 

gaSOlINa 


GUaTEmala/SPain/USa 

2008 

75 min 

DiR Julio Hernández Cordón 

PROD Donald K. Ranvaud, Silvio Sardi, Julio 

Hernández Cordón 

SCR Julio Hernández Cordón 

Cam María Secco 

ED Aina Calleja 

mUS Fráncis Dávila 

CaST Francisco Jácome, Carlos Dardón, Gabriel 

Armas, Daneri Gudiel, Patricia Orantes 

PRinT SOURCE Ondamax Films, 1360 Monad 

Terrace #1, Miami Beach, FL 33139. FAX: 305- 

535-3577. EMAIL: ariane@ondamaxfilms.com 



Three middle-class teenage boys go for a joyride in 

their parents’ car, siphoning their neighbors’ gas to get 

around. If this sounds like the first mile along the highway 

to hell, you’re right. Gerardo, Nano and Raymundo are 

in the throes of a hormonal explosion that is sure to 

end badly. They steal, play video games, provoke a fight 

with a security cop, try to meet girls and sneak off to 

masturbate in a nightlong orgy of suicidal provocations 

and mean-spirited pranks lacking meaning or direction. 

Fitfully throughout the night, the bravado melts away and 

they show the vulnerability and insecurity that inevitably 

underlay youthful posturing. Intimate moments, as they try 

to find some rhyme or reason to the lives they will soon 

be leading as adults, give a complex undertone to what 

seem to be random acts of rebellion. It would be naïve to 

think that such behavior would be without consequences, 

and indeed repercussions of their antisocial acts bring out 

conflicts between the boys and put their friendship to the 

test. Gasoline is the fuel that makes their nighttime junket 

possible. And their blast of misguided youthful energy is 

what enables the reflection that ensues, perhaps their 

first acts as adults. Gasoline won the Horizons Award 

for best Latin American feature at the San Sebastian 

International Film Festival in 2008. With this powerful tale 

of adolescent angst, told with a sophisticated visual style, 

Julio Hernández Cordón has become an important young 

director in Latin America. 

—Miguel Pendás 

JUliO hERnánDEz CORDón 

Born in 1975 in Guatemala, Julio Hernández Cordón studied 

film directing at the Center for Cinematic Studies in Mexico 

City. Before Gasoline, his first feature, he directed the shorts 

Si hubo genocidio, Kilómetro 31 and De mi corazón un 

pedacito tú tienes. He is now in production with the feature 

Polvo, the story of a group of indigenous women in the village of 

San Juan Comalapa, in western Guatemala, widowed as a result 

of the war the country experienced from 1960 to 1996. 

ThU apR 30 7:00 KaBUKI gaSO30K 

SaT maY 2 9:45 ClaY gaSO02Y 

TUE maY 5 4:45 KaBUKI gaSO05K 

95 

New Directors

New Directors 

96 

hOmE 


SwiTzERlanD/fRanCE/BElGiUm 

2008 

97 min 

DiR Ursula Meier 

PROD Elena Tatti 

SCR Ursula Meier, Antoine Jaccoud, Raphaëlle 

Valbrune, Gilles Taurand, Olivier Lorelle 

Cam Agnès Godard 

ED Susana Rossberg 

CaST Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, 

Adélaïde Leroux, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet 

Klein 

PRinT SOURCE Memento Films International, 

6 cité Paradis, 75010 Paris, France. FAX: 

33.1.42.47.11.24. EMAIL: marion@mementofilms.com. 

CaUSES Family Issues, Women’s Issues 


In French with English subtitles. 

Presented with support from the Consulate 

General of Switzerland, San Francisco and 

Swiss Films. 

As upbeat, jazzy music sets the mood for fun, a happy 

family in roller skates finishes the match point of a hockey 

game played out on a strip of nondescript tarmac. Thus 

begins Swiss-French filmmaker Ursula Meier’s debut 

feature, Home—in stark contrast to what lies ahead. 

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert), Michel (Olivier Gourmet) 

and their three children live a peaceful existence in a 

remote house that borders a long-unused stretch of 

highway. When the route one day suddenly opens to 

commuters, this bohemian clan’s daily routine is thrown 

into disarray: Ever-sunbathing Judith must endure the 

catcall honking that overpowers her portable stereo, 

while it quickly becomes impossible for the younger 

children, Julien and Marion, to safely “cross the street” to 

catch their school bus. What begins as annoyance and 

inconvenience, however, soon crosses over into paranoia, 

as the incessant traffic noise leads to sleep deprivation 

and fears concerning prolonged exposure to exhaust loom 

large. Refusing to relocate, and in an obstinate yet futile 

attempt to maintain some semblance of the normality 

they once enjoyed, Marthe and Michel increasingly resort 

to isolationism and a literal blockade. Alternately tense, 

touching, absurd and frightening, Home is an invasion 

movie of another sort—where the space crafts are vehicles 

and the aliens are ordinary motorists. With its unique style, 

dark humor and tragic-hopeful denouement, Meier’s film is 

sure to be one of the most discussed of the Festival. 

—Jeremy Quist 

URSUla mEiER 

Born in Besançon, France in 1971, Ursula Meier now holds dual 

citizenship in France and Switzerland. From 1990 to 1994, she 

studied film and television at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion 

in Belgium. In addition to serving as second assistant director 

on Alain Tanner’s Fourbi (1995) and Jonas et Lila, à demain 

(1999), Meier has written and directed several short films as well 

as the television feature Strong Shoulders (2002). Home is 

her first feature film. 

FRI maY 1 6:00 pFa hOmE01p 

SUN maY 3 3:15 ClaY hOmE03Y 

mON maY 4 6:00 KaBUKI hOmE04K

hOOkED 

pESCUIT SpORTIv 

ROmania/fRanCE 

2008 

80 min 

DiR Adrian Sitaru 

PROD Adrian Sitaru, Marie-Pierre Macia, Juliette 

Lepoutre 

SCR Adrian Sitaru 

Cam Adrian Silisteanu 

ED Adrian Sitaru 

mUS Cornel Ilie 

CaST Adrian Titieni, Ioana Flora, Maria 

Dinulescu 

PRinT SOURCE Rezo Films, 29 rue du Faubourg 

Poissonnière, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1- 

42-46-40-82. EMAIL: festival@rezofilms.com. 

First-time director Adrian Sitaru has, you might say, an 

accidental hit on his hands: A slightly exasperated Sweetie 

(Ioana Flora, the Romanian Rachel Weisz) and her cranky 

beau Mihai (Adrian Titieni), an overworked teacher, are 

off for a picnic in the country. They hope some time away 

from the daily grind of Bucharest will be just the thing 

to jumpstart their relationship before it stalls out. But 

then, well outside the city, Mihai runs over a prostitute 

named Ana (Maria Dinulescu, California Dreamin’), who 

happens to be lying in the road. Thinking she’s a goner, he 

and Sweetie decide to bury her in the woods. When Ana 

miraculously revives, they can only feign relief and concern. 

Suddenly their picnic has a pest, only this one flaunts her 

cleavage and has an uncanny way of ingratiating herself 

with the picnickers. What begins as a walk in the park 

plays out like a nightmare of nature unloosed, as Ana 

cajoles and caresses her unwitting hosts. No babe in the 

woods, the impish Ana undoes the couple as she unearths 

jealousies and insecurities that push their relationship 

beyond the point of no return. In addition to winningly 

naturalistic performances and shrewd dialogue, Hooked 

uses hand-held camera and character POV to anxious, 

antsy effect, giving its exploration of conscience and 

commitment an immediacy both fresh and involving. The 

distracted glance, the curious detail and claustrophobic 

intimacy are all unsettling elements in this country idyll 

gone very wrong. 

—Steve Seid 

aDRian SiTaRU 

Romanian filmmaker Adrian Sitaru, born in 1971, began as a 

director of short films, the best known being 2007’s Waves, 

which garnered awards at Locarno, Thessaloniki and other 

festivals. He has also made short features for Romanian 

television. Sitaru, awarded a Cinéfondation Residence from 

Cannes, completed his first feature Hooked in 2008 and is now 

at work on For Love with Best Intentions. 

SaT apR 25 3:30 KaBUKI hOOK25K 

mON apR 27 4:00 KaBUKI hOOK27K 

FRI maY 1 9:30 KaBUKI hOOK01K 

97 

New Directors

New Directors 

98 

in ThE lOOP 


EnGlanD 

2009 

109 min 

DiR Armando Iannucci 

PROD Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy 

SCR Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, 

Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche 

Cam Jamie Cairney 

ED Billy Sneddon, Ant Boys 

mUS Adem Ilhan with the Elysian Quartet 

CaST James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, Peter 

Capaldi, Mimi Kennedy, Anna Chlumsky, Chris 

Addison, Steve Coogan, Gina McKee 

PRinT SOURCE IFC Films, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th 

floor, New York, NY10001. FAX: 646 273 

7250. EMAIL: infoifcfilms@ifcfilms.com. 

CaUSES Politics & Government Reform 

Several years ago during the “secret” buildup to the current 

conflict in Iraq, a nonessential British government minister 

mumbled in an interview that “war is unforeseeable”— 

which is not quite the right note the UK wanted to play 

on that particular day. Enter a gaggle of frantic, spinmaddened 

bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic, 

jockeying for position and delivering blistering putdowns, 

mostly to subordinates. Their mission: Save my career. The 

offending M.P. is Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a skittish 

bumbler perhaps too guileless to have reached this level, 

and director/cowriter Armando Iannucci reprises at least 

one character from his hit BBC-TV comedy, The Thick 

of It—the Prime Minister’s caustic Scots communications 

director, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, in nonstop 

froth). But as Iannucci’s madcap satirical farce plays out, 

we meet seemingly hundreds of loathsome people in 

the bowels of power, notably a Pentagon brass monkey 

(James Gandolfini), a State Department warhawk (David 

Rasche), a bewildered rookie political fixer (Chris Addison) 

and at least two Lady-Macbeths-in-waiting, one Brit (Gina 

McKee) and one Yank (Mimi Kennedy)—plus too many 

bootlickers to accurately count. Of course, the unseen 

ghosts of George W. Bush and Tony Blair make their 

presence felt in every gesture and nervous laugh. People 

are going to die because of what these toadies are doing. 

The thrillingly nasty dialogue is maybe too much of a good 

thing. But we deserve it. Think of it as the beginning of war 

reparations. 

—Kelly Vance 

aRmanDO iannUCCi 

British television move-over Armando Iannucci made a name 

for himself on BBC with funnyman Alan Partridge, then later 

hit his stride as deviser/writer for the hit political comedy 

show In the Thick of It (2005–08), where his talent for quick, 

hostile repartee flourished. The Glasgow native (Scots mother, 

father from Naples) has also tried his hand as a newspaper 

correspondent, with columns for the U.K. Guardian on the 

Sundance Film Festival, among other topics. In the Loop is his 

first project for the big screen. 

TUE apR 28 9:30 KaBUKI INTh28K 

SaT maY 2 9:30 KaBUKI INTh02K

kaBUli kiD 

fRanCE/afGhaniSTan 

2008 

94 min 

DiR Barmak Akram 

PROD Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier 

SCR Barmak Akram 

Cam Laurent Fleutot 

ED Hervé De Luze, Pierre Haberer, Elise Fievet 

mUS Barmak Akram 

CaST Hadji Gul, Valery Shatz, Amélie Glenn, 

Mohammad Chafi Sahel 

PRinT SOURCE Wild Bunch, 99 rue de la 

Verrerie, Paris 75004. FAX: 33-1-53-01-50-49. 

EMAIL: edevos@wildbunch.eu. 

CaUSES Social Justice, World Culture, Youth 


In Farsi with English subtitles. 

Set in the sun-soaked streets of modern day Kabul, 

Kabuli Kid displays a marvelous sense of comic restraint 

in the unfolding of its neorealist fable, offering a detailed 

glimpse into Afghanistan by lovingly presenting life as it 

is lived. Wry but ultimately optimistic Khaled spends his 

days driving a taxi through Kabul’s chaotic and war-torn 

terrain, griping about his city’s shortcomings to his 

clients. Throughout it all, he struggles to provide for his 

rather large family (comprised only of daughters, much 

to his shame). Shortly after espousing this very point to 

his latest fare, an anonymous woman in full burka, he 

discovers her infant son in the back of his cab. Refusing 

to believe that any mother could simply abandon a child, 

Khaled reluctantly engages in a fruitless search to return 

the baby that no one seems to want. With a well-honed 

survival instinct at odds with his kind-hearted nature, 

Khaled attempts to alleviate himself of his burden while 

increasingly assuming responsibility for the care of the 

child. In the midst of this high-stakes premise spanning 

36 hours, first-time fiction filmmaker Barmak Akram 

wisely chooses to focus on the simple yet delicate details 

of daily life, gently grounding the film in a sense of local 

authenticity. Deftly capturing elements of screwball 

scenario through a naturalistic lens, Kabuli Kid crafts a 

richly human portrait of a complex city. 

—Landon Zakheim 

BaRmak akRam 

Barmak Akram, a native of Kabul, Afghanistan, was educated in 

France at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image 

et du Son. He has created several documentaries for television 

which include Ralentir école, Mon retour à Kaboul, 21 ans 

après, Les clowns à Kaboul and Voyage dans les archives 

de la télévision afghane. Kabuli Kid marks his narrative 

feature film debut. 

ThU apR 30 9:00 KaBUKI KaBU30K 

FRI maY 1 6:15 KaBUKI KaBU01K 

SUN maY 3 3:45 pFa KaBU03p 

99 

New Directors

New Directors 

100 

kiSSES 

iRElanD/SwEDEn 

2008 

76 min 

DiR Lance Daly 

PROD Macdara Kelleher 

SCR Lance Daly 

Cam Lance Daly 

ED J. Patrick Duffner 

mUS Go Blimps Go 

CaST Kelly O’Neill, Shane Curry, Stephen Rea, 

Neilí Conroy, Paul Roe 

PRinT SOURCE Oscilloscope Pictures, 511 

Canal Street, #5E, New York, NY 10013. FAX: 

212-219-9538. EMAIL: info@oscilloscope.net. 

CaUSES Economic Justice, Family Issues, Youth 

Children have it tough in this bitter, bright and winning film 

from Ireland. Young teens Dylan and his neighbor Kylie 

live for the day they can make a break from their abusive 

families and bleak suburban housing estate. That day 

comes sooner, and more violently, than expected, and they 

head for the lights and perils of inner-city Dublin in search 

of Dylan’s brother, who escaped the parental kip two 

years earlier. The journey begins poetically—an immigrant 

barge driver offers them “Shelter from the Storm,” both 

the song and the succor—and continues magically, with 

Dublin’s nighttime neon offering an innocently psychedelic 

funhouse of possibility. Friendly buskers share their 

change, a prostitute her advice (“When you kiss, you either 

give or you take”). But as the night progresses, the “sack 

man,” the bogeyman of their imaginations, makes himself 

all too real. Dylan (Shane Curry), wary of risk and joy, is 

the gullible one—he won’t understand that his brother has 

disappeared in the quicksand of drugs and its attendant 

criminal network. Kylie (Kelly O’Neill), intrepid and nononsense, 

takes the emotional risks as well. O’Neill is an 

actress to watch for her unerring gift of dialogue and her 

defiant intelligence. Though the children are returned to 

the grim black-and-white universe of their parents, the kiss 

Kylie blows Dylan says that, given time, she’ll will the world 

to come around to her. 

—Judy Bloch 

lanCE Daly 

Lance Daly describes his film Kisses as a story about “how to 

escape if you can’t escape.” The Dublin-born writer/director 

worked as an actor, musician, photographer and editor before 

directing his first film, Last Days in Dublin, in 2001. The Halo 

Effect (2004) featured Stephen Rea, who also appears briefly 

in Kisses. 

mON apR 27 9:00 KaBUKI KISS27K 

TUE apR 28 6:30 KaBUKI KISS28K 

ThU apR 30 9:15 KaBUKI KISS30K

lakE TahOE 

mExiCO 

2008 

80 min 

DiR Fernando Eimbcke 

PROD Christian Valdelièvre 

SCR Fernando Eimbcke, Paula Markovitch 

Cam Alexis Zabé 

ED Mariana Rodríguez 

CaST Diego Cataño, Héctor Herrera, Daniela 

Valentine, Juan Carlos Lara, Yemil Sefami 

PRinT SOURCE Film Movement, 109 West 27th 

Street, Suite 9B, New York, NY 10001. FAX: 

212-941-7812. EMAIL: rebeca@filmmovement. 

com. 



General of Mexico, San Francisco. 

It’s morning in a small seaside town on Mexico’s Yucatan 

peninsula, and teenager Juan (Diego Cataño) has just 

driven the family’s tomato-red Toyota into a light pole on 

an empty street. As he sets off on foot to seek help, the 

immobilized car becomes a vehicle for delivering Juan 

into the hands of a cast of local characters and their small 

but significant routines. No one, including Juan, seems 

to be in much of a hurry. His interactions with a paranoid 

old mechanic (Hector Herrera) devoted to his almosthuman 

pet dog, a young mother (Daniela Valentine) with 

dreams of punk rock stardom and a teenage mechanic 

obsessed with kung fu (Juan Carlos Lara) glow with a 

droll observational humor reminiscent of director Fernando 

Eimbcke’s much-lauded first feature, Duck Season 

(SFIFF 2005). As Juan is drawn into their lives and we 

learn more about a loss at the center of his family, the 

film’s emotional undercurrent deepens considerably. 

Cinematographer Alexis Zabé’s minimal camera setups 

and eloquently held shots create a rich field for exploring 

the characters’ interior states, and the film’s insistence 

on the here-and-now ground its meditation on escape, 

hope and connection. The cast’s natural interplay is utterly 

convincing, the film’s quiet humor earned and its sweet, 

compassionate humanity is deeply moving. 

—Steve Mockus 

fERnanDO EimBCkE 

Writer/director Fernando Eimbcke was born in 1970 in Mexico 

City and studied at the Centro Universitario de Estudios 

Cinematográficos of the National University of Mexico. His first 

feature, Temporada de patos (Duck Season, SFIFF 2005), 

cowritten with Paula Markovitch, was selected for Cannes’ 

Critics’ Week in 2004 and won a record seven major awards 

at the Guadalajara Film Festival. Lake Tahoe received the 

Alfred Bauer Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2008 Berlin 

International Film Festival. Eimbcke’s work also includes several 

short films and music videos. 

FRI apR 24 9:15 KaBUKI laKE24K 

SaT apR 25 5:45 KaBUKI laKE25K 

TUE apR 28 6:30 pFa laKE28p 

101 

New Directors

New Directors 

102 

miD-aUGUST lUnCh 

pRaNZO DI FERRagOSTO 


iTaly 

2008 

75 min 

DiR Gianni di Gregorio 

PROD Matteo Garrone 

SCR Gianni di Gregorio 

Cam Gian Enrico Bianchi 

ED Marco Spoletini 

mUS Ratchev & Carratello 

CaST Gianni di Gregorio, Valeria de Franciscis, 

Marina Cacciotti, Maria Cali, Grazia Cesarini 

Sforza 

PRinT SOURCE Fandango Portobello, 12 

Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR, UK. 

EMAIL: raffaella.digiulio@fandango.it. 

CaUSES Family Issues, Women’s Issues 


Presented with support from Fred Phillips. 

Middle-aged and impecunious Gianni lives with his 

aged mother in her large Rome apartment. The morning 

before the mid-August Pranzo di Ferragosto (Feast 

of the Assumption), when most Romans flee the hot 

city, the building manager tells Gianni that some of the 

apartment owners plan to sue him. But, if Gianni takes in 

the manager’s mother for the night, he will handle most 

of Gianni’s overdue bills. It turns out the manager’s aunt 

also needs lodging. Che fai? It’s an emergency, so Gianni 

and his mother agree. A doctor friend then calls on the 

stressed Gianni, only to ask that in lieu of payment he 

take in his own mama until the next day. In Italy, caught 

between tradition and the modern world, caring for the 

aged is an especially complicated problem. But four 

mamas! Financially cornered, Gianni (played by director 

di Gregorio with wry resignation) musters all his charm 

to manage the needs and determined personalities of 

his guests. The contrasts here between brightly lit but 

distant exteriors and the deeply shadowed but up-close 

confines of the apartment—reinforced by a score blending 

Argentine tango with traditional Italian and Balkan music— 

captures the muted vibrancy, warm humor and, equally, the 

social isolation of Gianni’s ladies. Pranzo di Ferragosto, 

however, brings a table bathed in sunlight and a toast 

by four happy new friends. A deal’s a deal, though, and 

the several sons will soon return—unless these mamas 

manage to swing a deal of their own. 

—Sidney J. P. Hollister 

Gianni Di GREGORiO 

Born in Rome in 1949, Gianni di Gregorio recently achieved 

international acclaim as coscreenwriter on Matteo Garrone’s 

Gomorrah. After graduating in directing and acting from 

Rome’s Academia di Arte Sceniche, di Gregorio first worked in 

film as a scriptwriter, then for Garrone as an assistant director. 

Growing up as a single child with his widowed, strong-minded 

mother gave him a particular sensitivity to the strengths and 

vulnerabilities of the old and to their importance as living links to 

a society’s history. His first feature, Pranzo di Ferragosto, took 

the award for best debut film at the Venice Film Festival. 

SaT maY 2 1:00 KaBUKI mIDa02K 

mON maY 4 6:45 KaBUKI mIDa04K 

ThU maY 7 6:30 pFa mIDa07p

mOhanDaS 


inDia 

2008 

117 min 

DiR Mazhar Kamran 

PROD Abha Sonakia 

SCR Uday Prakash 

Cam Mazhar Kamran 

ED Suresh Pai 

mUS Vivek Priyadarshan, Narayan Parasuram 

CaST Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid, Sharbani 

Mukherjee, Sushant Singh 

PRinT SOURCE Vertika Films, A-304 Morya 

House, Off Link Road, Andheri West, 400053 

Mumbai, India. EMAIL: mazkamran@gmail.com. 

CaUSES Social Justice, World Culture 

In Hindi with English subtitles. 

Prompted by the receipt of an amateur video showing an 

altercation at a mining company, a bright-eyed New Delhi 

TV reporter investigates the case of Mohan Das in Madhya 

Pradesh, in central India. She discovers an educated 

villager who has been offered a job at the Oriental Coal 

Mines only to find that after several months of waiting 

his job has been filled by an imposter who has assumed 

his name. Das tells her of the corruption and conspiracy 

that have cheated him out of a better life. Legal recourse, 

despite the help of a strong social advocate lawyer and a 

favorable judgement, does nothing to resolve his problem, 

and Das finds himself in limbo. Kamran’s first film is a 

striking Kafkaesque tale of identity theft and sanctioned 

sleight of hand. Above all, it is a searing indictment of a 

class system in India that subjects the poor to exploitation 

by darker, unseen forces even when the media and law are 

on their side. How Mohan Das is stripped of his identity 

and dignity is reminiscent of the dehumanization of the 

title character in Ramgopal Varma’s Satya (1998), which 

marked Kamran’s debut as a cinematographer. Bhopal is 

the capital of Madhya Pradesh, and it is no stretch to see 

the conspiratorial silencing of Mohan Das as an intimation 

of what it must have been like to unravel the Bhopal gas 

disaster of 1984. 


mazhaR kamRan 

Mazhar Kamran is a graduate of the Indian Institute of 

Technology Madras and the Film and Television Institute at 

Pune, the leading film school in India. He began his career as 

a cinematographer on Satya (Ramgopal Varma, 1998), giving 

this gangster film a new, gritty look. His other work includes 

Kaun (Ramgopal Varma, 1999), the thriller Tarkieb (Esmayeel 

Shroff, 2000) and the hit comedy Masti (Inder Kumar, 2004). 

Mohandas is his first film as director. 

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New Directors 

104 

mOOn 


EnGlanD 

2008 

97 min 

DiR Duncan Jones 

PROD Stuart Fenegan, Trudie Styler 

SCR Nathan Parker 

Cam Gary Shaw 

ED Nicolas Gastor 

mUS Clint Mansell 

CaST Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique 

McElligott, Benedict Wong 

PRinT SOURCE Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. 

EMAIL: info@spe.sony.com. 

For three lonely years astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) 

has toiled on the moon, overseeing the Helium-3 mining 

operation that fills earth’s energy needs with only Gerty, 

his space station’s talkative computer, and delayed video 

transmissions from his wife and young daughter for 

company. Just weeks away from going home, he has an 

accident and regains consciousness to discover he is 

no longer alone. Plagued by hallucinations even before 

the mishap, can he trust that this surly stranger is even 

real? The encounter shakes Sam’s sense of self to the 

core, even as it calls into question the exact nature of 

his isolated mission. Director Duncan Jones shot his first 

feature on the same sound stage where Ridley Scott shot 

1979’s Alien, and there are echoes of that sci-fi classic, as 

well as of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running. 

But the story Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker spin 

is unique, thrilling, paranoid, funny and ultimately poignant, 

as Sam comes to terms with his situation. Jones surrounds 

Sam with a visually stunning universe that captures the 

moon’s austere beauty against the vastness of space, in 

contrast to the intimacy of the space station—where Sam’s 

many plants and miniature village of carved wood establish 

a homey feeling that the stranger undermines. For all of 

its genre trappings, Moon is essentially a character drama 

limning the astronaut’s identity crisis. Rockwell, a 2007 

SFIFF Midnight Award recipient, delivers a tour de force 

performance in a complex, challenging role. 

—Pam Grady 

DUnCan JOnES 

Duncan Jones has worked as a wild-cam operator for Tony 

Scott, made low-budget music videos and worked in advertising. 

His commercial “Blade Jogger” received a top prize in the United 

Kingdom’s Kodak Student Commercial competition. In 2006, 

his commercial for the French Connection clothing line erupted 

into controversy for its depiction of two women fighting before 

surrendering to a kiss. The ad later became a finalist at the 

2006 Cannes Lion Awards. In 2005, Jones and producer Stuart 

Fenegan founded Liberty Films. Moon is the company’s first 

feature. 

SUN maY 3 9:00 CaSTRO mOON03C

OUR BElOvED mOnTh Of aUGUST 

aqUElE qUERIDO mêS DE agOSTO 


PORTUGal/fRanCE 

2008 

150 min 

DiR Miguel Gomes 

PROD Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar 

SCR Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo, Telmo 

Churro 

Cam Rui Poças 

ED Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes 

mUS Mariana Ricardo 

CaST Sónia Bandeira, Fábio Oliveira, Joaquim 

Carvalho 

PRinT SOURCE O Som E A Furia, Farmaceutica, 

40–3 Esq, 1150-340 Lisbon, Portugal. FAX: 

351-213-582-520. EMAIL: sales.furia@ 

netcabo.pt. 

CaUSES The Arts, World Culture 

When neophyte director Miguel Gomes found himself 

with neither cast nor financing for his hefty screenplay, 

he stared impending failure in the face and, giving in to 

mad artistic impulse, strode headlong towards his location 

anyways with crew and camera in tow. Set on a quixotic 

mission to find their film in the midst of the August music 

festivals that permeate the heart of rural Portugal, Gomes 

and company shot everything and everyone possible, 

leaving no stone unturned in their quest for art and story. 

What emerged is a lengthy and deliberately chaotic hybrid 

of documentary and fiction which delicately captures the 

vibrancy of the local community while simultaneously 

allowing a reworked meta-narrative—centering on the 

strange relationship between a father, daughter and 

nephew in a traveling pop band—to quietly creep in to 

the proceedings. The camera drifts endlessly through 

picturesque vistas, capturing unrestrained merriment, 

rural ritual, colorful anecdotes and vivacious characters 

awash in the vérité spell of his melodious travelogue-cumjoyride. 

The proceedings are occasionally interrupted by 

the appearance of the filmmakers, their plight a central 

fixture of the increasingly bewildering story. People who 

have once appeared begin to return as fictional characters 

indicating that Gomes has stumbled upon his cast along 

the way, their “real” selves having become lost in the 

current. Inventively risky in execution, Our Beloved Month 

of August whisks the viewer into a whirlwind, playfully 

challenging audience expectation and the possibilities 

inherent in cinematic storytelling, all while gliding along to 

the provincial Portuguese pop music. 

—Landon Zakheim 

miGUEl GOmES 

Miguel Gomes was born in Lisbon in 1972. He attended the 

Lisbon Film and Theatre School and worked as a film critic for 

the Portuguese press from 1996–2001. His short films have 

won awards at festivals such as: Oberhausen, Vila do Conde, 

Belfort and Cinema Texas and have been shown at Locarno, 

Rotterdam, the Viennale and Buenos Aires, among others. He 

made his feature film debut in 2004 with A Cara Que Mereces 

(The Face You Deserve). Our Beloved Month of August is 

his second film. 

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105 

New Directors

New Directors 

106 

ThE PaRanOiDS 

lOS paRaNOICOS 

U.S. pREmIERE 

aRGEnTina/SPain 

2008 

105 min 

DiR Gabriel Medina 

PROD Sebastian Aloi 

SCR Gabriel Medina 

Cam Lucio Bonelli 

ED Nicolas Goldbart 

mUS Guillermo Guareschi 

CaST Daniel Hendler, Jazmin Stuart, Walter 

Jakob, Martin Feldman, Miguel Dedovich 

PRinT SOURCE Visit Films, 89 Fifth Ave, Suite 

1002, New York, NY 10003. EMAIL: al@ 

visitfilms.com. 

CaUSES The Arts, World Culture 


First-time feature director Gabriel Medina’s wry comedy 

of errors is emblematic of the inventive and stylistically 

dexterous cinema emerging from Argentina. Luciano is an 

aimless loner who works children’s birthday parties for a 

living. When not pretending to advance his screenplay, he 

partakes in illicit substances, lives in fear of contracting 

STDs and is terrified of his doorman. He’s a coward 

afraid to face the realities of life, and he knows it. He 

depends on his boyhood friend Manuel for the use of his 

apartment and occasional screenwriting gigs. Manuel, a 

well-connected TV producer who travels the world closing 

television deals and making money, is the polar opposite 

of Luciano. When Manuel returns to Buenos Aires with 

his beautiful girlfriend Sofía in tow, Luciano’s ineptness 

is in full bloom. Despite a series of hilarious mishaps, 

Manuel offers Luciano a lucrative job writing an episode 

of the successful Spanish television show for which he 

is developing an Argentine version. When Manuel leaves 

town on business, Sofía stays behind in the apartment. In a 

satisfying ironic twist, she gradually begins to warm up to 

Luciano’s idiosyncrasies. From Luciano’s point of view, this 

is the worst thing that could happen—or perhaps the best. 

Playing Luciano in an outstanding performance is the king 

of understated Latin American slacker comedy, Daniel 

Hendler (25 Watts, Whisky, Queens). 


GaBRiEl mEDina 

Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Gabriel Medina has directed the 

short Brisa fresca en el infierno (1995) and has worked as 

an assistant director on Ana Katz’s Merengue (1995), Pablo 

Trapero’s El Bonaerense (2002), The Bottom of the Sea 

(2003) and More Than the World (2004). The Paranoids is 

his first feature. 

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RUDO y CURSi 


mExiCO 

2008 

103 min 

DiR Carlos Cuarón 

PROD Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 

Guillermo del Toro, Frida Torresblanco, Tita 

Lombardo 

SCR Carlos Cuarón 

Cam Adam Kimmel 

ED Alex Rodríguez 

mUS Leoncio Lara 

CaST Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Guillermo 

Fracella 

PRinT SOURCE Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. EMAIL: 

info@spe.sony.com. 

Longtime friends and Y Tu Mamá También costars 

Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna suit up for this 

much-anticipated Mexican soccer comedy from the Cha 

Cha Cha Films producing dream-team of Guillermo del 

Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth; Hellboy), Alejandro González 

Iñárritu (Amores Perros; Babel) and Alfonso Cuarón 

(Y Tu Mamá También). Bernal and Luna are two unruly 

hick stepbrothers in rural Mexico, united by a mother with 

questionable taste in men and their shared love for beer, 

fútbol and outdoing one another. When a fast-talking 

agent discovers their talents on the soccer field, but 

insists he can only make one of them a star, a new path 

for their rivalry suddenly emerges, taking them from their 

dusty banana plantation to the big stadiums—and bigger 

temptations—of Mexico City. Surprisingly, it’s the quieter, 

more artistic Tato (Bernal) who’s chosen to be the star, 

but that won’t stop the aggressive, hot-tempered Beto 

(Luna) from succeeding too (even if he has to become 

a goalie to do it). Soon it’s not life on the field that’s the 

problem, but the nights off it: If they survive the gambling, 

floozies, drugs and gangsters, they’ve still got to survive 

one another. Assisted by a sly script from director 

Carlos Cuarón (who wrote Y Tu Mamá También and is 

Alfonso’s brother) and by the polished Hollywood/Mexico 

talents of the Cha Cha Cha group, the charismatic Bernal 

and Luna turn this made-in-Mexico concoction of love, 

brotherhood and fútbol into a rousing comedy of truly 

universal appeal. 

CaRlOS CUaRón 

Born in Mexico City in 1966, Carlos Cuarón is a screenwriter, 

editor, producer and director best known for his Academy 

Award–nominated script for Y Tu Mamá También (directed 

by brother Alfonso). His other screenplays include Sólo con 

tu pareja (1991), which earned him an Ariel Award (Mexico’s 

Oscar), Quién diablos es Juliette? (1997) and Noche de 

bodas (2000). 

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New Directors

New Directors 

108 

Small CRimE 

mIKRO EgKlIma 

GREECE/CyPRUS/GERmany 

2008 

85 min 

DiR Christos Georgiou 

PROD Thanassis Karathanos, Kostantinos 

Moriatis, Christos Georgiou 

SCR Christos Georgiou 

Cam Yiorgos Giannelis 

ED Isabel Meier 

mUS Thanassis Papakostantinou, Kostantis 

Papakostantinou 

CaST Aris Servetalis, Viky Papadopoulou, 

Antonis Katsaris, Rania Oikonomidou 

PRinT SOURCE Greek Film Centre, 7 Dionysiou 

Areopagitou Str., 11742 Athens, Greece. FAX: 

30 210 3614436. EMAIL: iliana.zakopoulou@ 

gfc.gr, hellasfilm@gfc.gr. 

In this surprising romantic comedy, young Leonidas, a 

recent graduate of the police academy, is frustrated by his 

assignment to a remote island in the Aegean. Despite a 

stunning landscape, he yearns to solve important crimes 

in the big city. Instead, his energy is wasted on traffic 

stops and nude tourists. The biggest event of his day, like 

everyone else, is watching the morning TV show hosted 

by the beautiful Angeliki, the island’s most famous former 

inhabitant. When local drunk Zacharias is found dead at 

the bottom of the cliff, Leonidas seizes the opportunity. 

His chief assumes Zacharias was drunk, as usual, and 

fell, but Leonidas mounts an investigation. With fine visual 

comedy, our vigilant young cop putters about on a tiny 

scooter looking for clues. His investigation leads him to 

Angeliki, who has mysteriously returned. As the earnest 

rookie interviews the islanders, each character—in a nod 

to Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry—has a different 

version of Zacharias’s demise. Meanwhile, Leonidas falls 

in love. He becomes part of the island and, by doing so, 

solves the mystery of Zacharias’s death. Small Crime 

grew directly from filmmaker Christos Georgiou’s love of 

the Greek islands, their rugged landscape and microcommunities, 

and he developed the story with anecdotes, 

events and characters from his own visits. Shot entirely 

on Thirrassia, its local people, livestock, food and customs, 

just as they are, make their way into the film. The result is 

a charming story with an undeniable authenticity. 

—Kathleen Denny 

ChRiSTOS GEORGiOU 

Christos Georgiou was born in London of Cypriot parents and 

worked in television and production in England, Cyprus and 

Greece. His short films Grandmother’s Hands, Jan Uthna, 

Tomasz and The Baptism were broadcast on Channel Four in 

Britain. His first feature film, Under the Stars (2001), won the 

Prix de Montréal for Best First Feature. He wrote and directed 

Small Crime, his second feature film, which won support from 

the Balkan Script Fund at the Thessaloniki International Film 

Festival in 2003. 

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SnOw 

SNIjEg 


BOSnia anD hERzEGOvina/GERmany/fRanCE/ 

iRan 

2008 

99 min 

DiR Aida Begic 

PROD Elma Tataragic, Benny Drechsel, Karsten 

Stoeter, François d’Artemare 

SCR Aida Begic, Elma Tataragic 

Cam Erol Zubcevic 

ED Miralem S. Zubcevic 

mUS Igor Camo 

CaST Zana Marjanovic, Jasna Ornela Bery, Sadzida 

Setic, Vesna Masic, Emir Hadzihafizbegovic 

PRinT SOURCE Pyramide International, 5, rue de 

Chevalier de Saint-George, Paris 75008, France. 

FAX: 33-1-40-20-05-51. EMAIL:pricher@ 

pyramidefilms.com. 

CaUSES Family Issues; War, Conflict & Reconciliation 


In Bosnian with English subtitles. 

A remote Bosnian village of widows and orphans 

provides the atmospheric setting of Aida Begic’s 

magical debut feature, which earned the prestigious 

Grand Prix in Cannes’ Critic’s Week sidebar. Two years 

after the Dayton Accord ended Yugoslavia’s brutal 

ethnic wars, there is still no closure in the mountaintop 

town of Sladno; its women and orphaned children 

are simultaneously there, and not there. Physically 

they work themselves into the ground, harvesting fruit, 

making jams and weaving carpets, but mentally and 

emotionally they are trapped in time, still wondering 

about the fate of their husbands, fathers and sons, 

nearly all of whom disappeared in the war. Into this 

town of widows and shadows saunter two wellmanicured, 

Euro’d-up Serbs, offering to buy out the 

remaining villagers for some unexplained business 

venture—a cleansing by economic, rather than military 

means. Their offer may promise a better future, but 

it demands a break with the past; as the first snow 

begins to fall, new decisions must be made and 

previous ones finally revealed. Her camera lingering on 

hands darting over looms or fingers covered in jams 

and dirt, Begic has a keen eye for the sheer physicality 

of women’s work, but tempers the film’s remarkable 

feel for environment with the echo of something more 

metaphysical and poetic, like a boy whose hair grows 

long overnight, or the fields and barely lit rooms where 

ghosts and memories dwell. 


aiDa BEGiC 

Aida Begic was born in Sarajevo in 1976. A graduate in directing 

from the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts in 2000, she 

now teaches at the Academy. Her graduation film, First Death 

Experience, premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival 

and has won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide. In 

2004 she formed the production company MamaFilm with her 

colleague Elma Tataragic. Snow is her debut feature. 

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109 

New Directors

New Directors 

110 

SOn Of a liOn 


aUSTRalia/PakiSTan 

2007 

92 min 

DiR Benjamin Gilmour 

PROD Carolyn Johnson 

SCR Benjamin Gilmour 

Cam Haroon John, Benjamin Gilmour 

ED Alison McSkimming Croft 

mUS Amanda Brown 

CaST Sher Alem Miskeen Ustad, Niaz Khun 

Shinwari, Baktiyar Ahmed Afridi, Anousha Vasif 

Shinwari, Fazal Bibi, Khaista Mir 

PRinT SOURCE Fortissimo Film Sales, Van 

Diemenstraat 100, 1013 CN Amsterdam, 

Netherlands. FAX: 31-20-626-1155. EMAIL: 

frederique@fortissimo.nl. 

CaUSES Education; War, Conflict & 

Reconciliation; World Culture; Youth 

In Pashto with English subtitles. 

Eleven-year-old Niaz is the only child of a widowed 

Pashtun veteran of the resistance to the Soviet invasion of 

Afghanistan of the 1980s, one of those soldiers lionized 

in the West as enlightened freedom fighters. That is, until 

September 11, when the West vilified the same people 

as cave-dwelling, Kalashnikov-toting Taliban. The father, 

a strict Muslim, insists that his reluctant son help him 

in the family business of making and testing firearms, 

a common and humble occupation in their region. Niaz 

would rather listen to music and go to school. When 

he’s not being tormented by bullies, Niaz is inspired by a 

kite-flying poet in a refugee camp who encourages him 

in his pursuit of learning—after all, the Prophet said, “If 

gaining knowledge requires you to travel as far as China, 

then simply go.” Niaz’s uncle, who accidentally shot a 

playmate and was banished to Peshawar, tries to persuade 

his brother to sign the school application. But Niaz loses 

patience and strikes out on his own. This sensitive and 

beautifully shot directorial debut, made by Australian 

Benjamin Gilmour in collaboration with Pashtuns from the 

area, follows its appealing nonprofessional cast through 

the harsh, lovely terrain of the remote northwest of 

Pakistan, where the sound of gunfire echoes in the hills. 

The men’s conversations in barbershops, teahouses and 

classrooms, as well as a worrisome visit to the dentist, 

offer a rare glimpse into a community easily demonized by 

Islamophobia. 

—Frako Loden 

BEnJamin GilmOUR 

This is Australian paramedic and U.K. filming-unit nurse 

Benjamin Gilmour’s debut film. Fascinated by the town of Darra 

Adam Khel, Pakistan, on a side trip from India he managed to 

barter his nonexistent film production expertise for assistance 

in filming on location, which is off-limits to foreigners. During 

the guerrilla-style filming, he tried to disguise himself as a local 

to fend off the Taliban and other authorities. His book, Warrior 

Poets, recounts his Pakistan travels and the making of this film. 

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TUlPan 

kazakhSTan/SwiTzERlanD/GERmany/RUSSia/ 

POlanD 

2008 

100 min 

DiR Sergey Dvortsevoy 

PROD Karl Baumgartner 

SCR Sergey Dvortsevoy, Gennady Ostrovskiy 

Cam Jola Dylewska 

ED Isabel Meier, Petar Markovic 

CaST Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Bereke Turganbayev, 

Ondasyn Besikbasov, Samal Yeslyamova, Tulepbergen 

Baisakalov, Amangeldi Nurzhanbayev, Esentai 

Tulendiev 

PRinT SOURCE Zeitgeist Films, 247 Centre Street, 2nd 

Floor, New York, NY 10013. FAX: 212-274-1644. 

EMAIL: nadja@zeitgeistfilms.com. 

In Kazakh and Russian with English subtitles. 

Honorably discharged from the Russian navy, Asa 

returns home to the Hunger Steppe of southern 

Kazakhstan and sets about fulfilling his life goals 

of getting married, building his own yurt and 

becoming a successful shepherd. At first his odds 

seem good—he boasts the distinction of having 

been a top marksman in the navy, can spout worldly 

knowledge on the horrors of octopi and the wonder 

of solar panels and is bucking the trend of most 

rural Kazakh youth, who increasingly forgo farm life 

in favor of urban opportunity. Asa’s carefully laid 

plans begin to unravel when he visits the barren 

region’s only eligible maiden to ask for her hand: the 

mysteriously wordless Tulpan (whose eponymous 

name means tulip). She refuses via her parents, 

who claim she takes issue with Asa’s large ears. 

The blow is considerable—not only are his romantic 

advances rebuffed but his boss refuses to grant him 

a promised herd of sheep until he weds. Further 

complicating things is the painful discovery that 

he lacks any innate talent for animal husbandry, a 

fact his brother-in-law (patriarch of his host family) 

is never shy to bring up. Throughout, Asa retains a 

dogged determination to see his dreams through, 

but it remains unclear whether good intentions alone 

will suffice to survive as a nomadic herder. Director 

Sergey Dvortsevoy’s light touch and decided 

penchant for naturalism results in a stunningly 

filmed, organic tale that easily tilts from humor to 

melancholy, while constantly reveling in the simple 

poetry of the everyday. Winner of the Un Certain 

Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. 

—Ilya Tovbis 

SERGEy DvORTSEvOy 

A native of Kazakhstan, Sergey Dvortsevoy worked as a 

radio engineer for the Russian airliner Aeroflot for nine years. 

Becoming bored with this work, he sought a career change 

and began studying film in Moscow in the early 1990s. He 

was immediately attracted to the personal and observational 

possibilities afforded by documentary work and released four 

critically acclaimed nonfiction shorts: Paradise, Bread Day, 

Highway and In the Dark. Building upon the naturalistic 

documentary techniques employed in these films, he crafted his 

first narrative feature, Tulpan, which was awarded at Cannes’s 

Un Certain Regard. 

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111 

New Directors

New Directors 

112 

vERSaillES 


fRanCE 

2008 

113 min 

DiR Pierre Schoeller 

PROD Géraldine Michelot 

SCR Pierre Schoeller 

Cam Julien Hirsch 

ED Mathilde Muyard 

mUS Philippe Schoeller 

CaST Guillaume Depardieu, Max Baissette de 

Malglaive, Judith Chemla, Patrick Descamps, 

Aure Atika 

PRinT SOURCE Les Films du Losange, 22 av 

Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75116 Paris, France. 

FAX: 33-1-49-52-06-40. EMAIL: l.zipci@ 

filmsdulosange.fr. 

CaUSES Economic Justice, Family Issues 

Nina (Judith Chemla) loves her five-year-old son Enzo, 

but it’s not easy raising a boy while living on the streets. 

France’s welfare system intrudes occasionally, but 

Nina, like many social outcasts (the French call them 

“les marginaux”), prefers not to rely on bureaucracyladen 

government assistance for fear of losing Enzo. 

Still, Nina is desperate to give Enzo a better life, and a 

chance encounter with a homeless man named Damien 

(Guillaume Depardieu) during a walk with Enzo in the 

woods near Versailles leads her to make a shocking 

decision. After only one night with the rugged, brooding 

Damien, Nina entrusts her son to him and disappears, 

leaving the solitary woods-dweller with the fate of a young 

boy suddenly thrust upon him. Director Pierre Schoeller 

refuses to milk the relationship that develops between 

Damien and Enzo for obvious sentiment, and concentrates 

instead on how the brutal physical hardships of extreme 

poverty influence their relationship. It is in battling cold 

and hunger that the two gradually form a bond as strong 

as blood. Max Baissette de Malglaive’s astoundingly 

naturalistic performance as the young Enzo is a perfect 

blend of innocence and stoicism. Guillaume Depardieu, 

in one of his final performances (he died tragically of 

pneumonia last October), brings a heart-piercing intensity 

to his role as Damien. It’s a magnificent performance 

that not only makes both Nina’s decision acceptable and 

Enzo’s devotion understandable, but also gives the film its 

power to uplift us even as it follows its relentless course 

in depicting the misery of the physically and spiritually 

impoverished. 

—Beverly Berning 

PiERRE SChOEllER 

About his first feature film as both director and screenwriter, 

Pierre Schoeller has said, “The problem was tackling the theme 

of poverty while avoiding gloom and powering the film with a 

fine energy. I wanted to move towards sensitivity and emotion, 

to be a listener, to display empathy.” Schoeller has worked as a 

scriptwriter and dialogue writer since 1993, mostly for French 

television. His screen credits include Hotel Harabati (2006), 

Zero Defect (2003) and As a Man (2001). 

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a wEEk alOnE 

UNa SEmaNa SOlOS 


aRGEnTina 

2008 

110 min 

DiR Celina Murga 

PROD Juan Villegas 

SCR Celina Murga, Juan Villegas 

Cam Marcelo Lavintman 

ED Elaine Katz 

mUS Inés Gamarci, Martín Salas, Marcelo Perez 

CaST Magdalena Capobianco, Eleonora 

Capobianco, Ignacio Giménez, Gastón Luparo, 

Lucas del Bo, Ramiro Saludas, Federico Peña, 

Natalia Gómez Alarcón, Manuel Aparicio, Mateo 

Braun 

PRinT SOURCE Tresmilmundos Cine, Argentina. 

EMAIL: juanmaville@gmail.com. 

CaUSES Youth 

Celina Murga’s second feature A Week Alone is a subtle 

examination of a group of rich Argentine children living 

in an exclusive gated community located a comfortable 

distance from Buenos Aires. With their parents temporarily 

away on a trip, and the only adult around an unintrusive 

maid, the group of siblings and cousins are left to govern 

themselves and live as they please. They begin cautiously 

testing boundaries, staying up late, watching normally 

forbidden television shows, breaking into an uninhabited 

nearby house and generally exploring the possibilities of 

freedom as if in a contemporary, though certainly less 

urgent version of Lord of the Flies. Events progress 

slowly and without artifice, and eventually you realize you 

have entered a very private, nuanced world within a world, 

where secret motivations surface and unwritten social 

rules are quietly tested and enforced. Tensions heighten 

with the arrival of the maid’s brother, Juan, a young teen 

from a poorer rural area. Class distinctions come to 

the fore in the reactions of the children to Juan, Juan’s 

perception of the wealth of the gated community and 

both the maid’s and the security force’s inability to really 

monitor or discipline the children despite their increasingly 

delinquent behavior—a fact the children intuitively grasp 

from the beginning. Despite seemingly opposite styles, 

Martin Scorsese was so impressed by Murga’s work, and 

her “very sensitive, very unique” perspective, that he chose 

her for his mentorship program, and pronounced A Week 

Alone, “a film that I can learn from.” 


CElina mURGa 

Born in Parana, Argentina in 1973, Celina Murga studied film at 

the Fundación Universidad del Cine. She codirected two films, 

Interior-Noche (1999) and Una Tarde-Feliz (2002) before 

writing and directing her first feature, Ana and the Others 

(SFIFF 2004). Both her most recent film, A Week Alone, and 

Ana and the Others have won several awards at international 

film festivals, including the Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Best 

Director Award and Best Film at the Bogota Film Festival. 

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113 

New Directors

WORLD CINEMA 

ACCLAIMED INtERNAtIONAL DIRECtORs WIth UNIqUE VIsIONs 

116 Adoration 

117 Le Amiche 

118 The Beast Stalker 

119 Bluebeard 

120 Bullet in the Head 

121 Delta 

122 Easy Virtue 

123 Go Go 70s 

124 Good Cats 

125 The Good Life 

126 Heaven’s Heart 

127 It’s Not Me, I Swear! 

128 Khamsa 

129 Laila’s Birthday 

130 Mesrine: A Film in Two Parts 

131 Once upon a Time in the West 

132 The Other One 

133 River People 

134 Still Walking 

135 Summer Hours 

136 35 Shots of Rum 

137 The Tiger’s Tail 

138 Troubled Water 

139 Wild Field 

140 The Window 

141 A Woman Under the Influence 

115

World Cinema 

116 

adOraTiOn 

Canada/FranCe 

2008 

100 min 

dir Atom Egoyan 

PrOd Atom Egoyan, Simone Urdl, Jennifer 

Weiss 

SCr Atom Egoyan 

Cam Paul Sarossy 

ed Susan Shipton 

mUS Mychael Danna 

CaST Arsinée Khanjian, Scott Speedman, 

Rachel Blanchard, Noam Jenkins, Devon Bostick 

PrinT SOUrCe Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison Ave, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. 


CaUSeS Family Issues, Youth 

An ancient news story takes on new viral life after a 

teenager transforms a simple translation exercise into a 

riveting narrative about his own dead parents, imagining 

his father as a terrorist who places a bomb in his pregnant 

girlfriend’s handbag. When their teacher, Sabine (Arsinée 

Khanjian), has Simon (Devon Bostick) read the story in 

class, his classmates receive it as truth and turn it into 

an Internet sensation, the tale growing ever larger over 

a series of chats, eventually pulling in participants of 

the actual incident. But Sabine is not through, further 

roiling the waters by provocatively confronting Tom 

(Scott Speedman), Simon’s unhappy uncle. For his 12th 

feature, Atom Egoyan once more explores the way the 

past impacts the present and how grief manifests and 

sometimes curdles over the years. The drama marks a 

return to the elliptical style he pioneered with such films 

as Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991), the 

fractured narrative turning the story into a kind of mystery, 

inviting the viewer to tease out not just the truth of 

Simon’s family but also the murky motives behind Sabine’s 

actions. To the shifting points of view and fascination with 

technology that have long characterized his work, Egoyan 

adds the specter of terrorism, using a 20-year-old news 

story as a prism for our 21st century, post-9/11 fears. The 

drama is cerebral, but hardly bloodless. Instead, as Simon, 

Tom and Sabine struggle with the past, what emerges 

is a poignant and haunting drama of family fissure and 

reconciliation. 

—Pam Grady 

aTOm egOyan 

Born in Cairo in 1960 and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, 

Atom Egoyan began making films while studying international 

relations and classical guitar at the University of Toronto. 

Beginning with his 1984 feature debut, Next of Kin, ten of 

his first 11 features received nominations for Genie Awards, 

Canada’s equivalent of the Oscars, with three—Exotica (1994), 

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Ararat (2002)—taking home 

Best Picture. Egoyan has twice won for directing and three 

times for his screenplays. Egoyan’s art installations have been 

displayed in Canada and Europe, and in 1998 his original opera, 

Elsewhereless, premiered in Toronto. 

sAt APR 25 6:15 KABUKI ADOR25K 

MON APR 27 6:30 PFA ADOR27P

le amiChe 

iTaly 

1955 

104 min 

dir Michelangelo Antonioni 

PrOd Giovanni Addessi 

SCr Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi 

d’Amico, Alba de Cespedes 

Cam Gianni di Venanzo 

ed Eraldo da Roma 

mUS Giovanni Fusco 

CaST Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, 

Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Yvonne 

Furneaux, Madeleine Fischer, Anna Maria 

Pancani 

PrinT SOUrCe Cineteca di Bologna, Via Riva di 

Reno, 72, Bologna 40122 Italy. FAX: 39-051- 

219-4821. 

CaUSeS Women’s Issues 

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine 

Ritrovata with funding provided by Gucci and 

The Film Foundation. Presented by The Film 

Foundation and Gucci. 

Presented with support from the Italian Cultural 

Institute, San Francisco. 

The international breakthrough of Michelangelo Antonioni 

in the 1960s, which made him the world’s most notorious 

cult filmmaker, also largely overshadowed his earlier 

films, including this gem, which has rarely been shown 

in this country. Yet in this tale of desperate upper-class 

Italian housewives are to be found all of the great artist’s 

concerns embodied in his later, better known works. 

Antonioni explores the inner lives of female characters 

with a story that centers around Clelia (Eleonora Rossi 

Drago), who comes from a working-class background 

but now holds an important position in a fashion salon. 

While Clelia is on a business trip to Turin, a young woman 

attempts suicide in the hotel room next door. Clelia 

befriends her, thus becoming introduced to the circle 

of her socialite girlfriends, including the cynical Momina 

(Yvonne Furneaux) and the more sympathetic Nene 

(Valentina Cortese), with their serial affairs and charming 

but distanced take on life. Nowhere in Antonioni’s films 

has an ensemble of characters woven a more complex 

web of relationships. Antonioni’s genius for visual 

storytelling is in evidence here too, especially in the 

famous scene involving all the characters at the seashore, 

their complex relationships echoed in the camera 

movements, composition and positioning of the actors, the 

techniques that have set Antonioni apart as a peerless 

cinematic craftsman. The Cineteca di Bologna has made 

a new digitally restored print from the original black-andwhite 

35mm camera negatives, creating the best possible 

circumstances for rediscovering this underappreciated 

classic. 

miChelangelO anTOniOni 

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) has had a profound 

impact on the history of cinema. Once misunderstood even by 

the leading authorities of film criticism, he has become one 

of cinema’s most respected and imitated figures, receiving a 

lifetime achievement Oscar in 1995. He was nominated for 

best director and best original screenplay in 1967 for Blow-Up. 

Antonioni burst onto the international scene with L’Avventura 

(SFIFF 1968), the first of a tetralogy completed by L’Eclisse, La 

Notte and Red Desert (SFIFF 1990). Le Amiche first screened 

at SFIFF in 1995. 

sUN APR 26 3:00 CAstRO LEAM26C 

tUE APR 28 8:15 PFA LEAM28P 

117 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

118 

The BeaST STalKer 

ChINg yAN 

U.s. PREMIERE 

hOng KOng 

2008 

110 min 

dir Dante Lam 

PrOd Albert Lee, Chung Hong-tat, Candy 

Leung 

SCr Jack Ng 

Cam Cheung Man-po, Tse Chung-to 

ed Chan Ki-hop 

mUS Henry Lai 

CaST Nicholas Tse, Nick Cheung, Zhang 

Jingchu 

PrinT SOUrCe Emperor Motion Pictures, 28/F 

Emperor Group Centre, 288 Hennessy Rd, 

Wanchai, Hong Kong. FAX: 852-2893-4309. 

EMAIL: catchau@emp.hk. 

In Cantonese with English subtitles. 

When a stakeout goes wrong, hotheaded, tough-talking 

police sergeant Tong (Nicholas Tse) dresses down 

his plainclothes crew. Catching sight of the fugitive, 

Tong picks up the trail again in a harrowing car chase 

(orchestrated by Hong Kong cinema’s greatest car stunt 

director Bruce Law) that ends tragically for lawyer Ann 

Gao (Zhang Jingchu), an innocent driver caught in the 

ensuing pileup. Haunted by the consequences of his 

rashness, and suspended from duty, Tong again crosses 

paths with Ann when a hit man named Hung (Nick 

Cheung) kidnaps her daughter. Tong, who learns that Ann 

is prosecuting a mob boss and resisting pressure to fix 

the trial, sets out to redeem himself by hunting down the 

kidnapper and saving Ann’s daughter. But can he control 

his impulsive temper? Will the police colleagues he once 

abused now help him? Director Dante Lam’s careful 

plotting and clear direction elevate this tight thriller into a 

high stakes cat-and-mouse game fleshed out with solid 

characters. Whether cop or robber, everyone in this movie 

has their motive, and as the film progresses, Lam peels 

back their stories and intersecting fates. The film hinges 

on the duel between Tong and Hung, but the women 

provide their own dialectics—the animated Ann versus 

Hung’s paralyzed wife; the absence and presence of Ann’s 

two daughters. Each opposition is but one part of a unified 

whole, and Lam masterfully blends all into one of Hong 

Kong cinema’s most satisfying films in recent years. 


danTe lam 

In the late 1980s, Dante Lam served as assistant director for 

Gordon Chan on films with major stars Stephen Chow, Jackie 

Chan and Andy Lau. He codirected Beast Cops with Gordon 

Chan, which won Best Film and Director at the Hong Kong Film 

Awards in 1999. Since then Lam has directed a dozen films in 

the action and thriller genres including the critically acclaimed 

The Triad Zone (2000), the blockbuster The Twins Effect 

(2003) and the forthcoming Sniper (which also features a hottempered 

cop). 

FRI APR 24 8:45 KABUKI BEAs24K 

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WED APR 29 12:30 KABUKI BEAs29K

BlUeBeard 

BARBE BLEUE 

NORth AMERICAN PREMIERE 

FranCe 

2009 

78 min 

dir Catherine Breillat 

PrOd Jean-François Lepetit, Sylvette Frydman 

SCr Catherine Breillat 

Cam Vilko Filac 

ed Pascale Chavance 

CaST Dominique Thomas, Lola Creton, Daphné 

Baïwir, Marilou Lopes-Benites 

PrinT SOUrCe Pyramide International, 5, rue 

de Chevalier de Saint-George, Paris 75008, 

France. FAX: 33-1-40-20-05-51. EMAIL: 

pricher@pyramidefilms.com. 


Following last year’s Opening Night sensation The Last 

Mistress, France’s masterful Catherine Breillat returns 

to the Festival with this playful, intoxicating and highly 

personal rumination on Charles Perrault’s 17th-century 

fairytale about a gloomy nobleman with a penchant for 

murdering his wives. In a safe bourgeois home, sometime 

in the 1950s, two young sisters withdraw to the attic for 

repeated readings of the titillating tale. The younger of the 

two, Catherine, reads aloud to frighten both herself and her 

more timid sibling with the evocative power of Perrault’s 

brisk pages. The story’s ogre (a lugubriously corporeal yet 

canny Dominique Thomas) appears a veritable mountain 

beside his slender virgin bride (the sparkling, effortlessly 

voluptuous Lola Creton), whose name, Marie-Catherine, 

echoes that of our young reader as well as the filmmaker 

herself. This young but gritty beauty will undo the 

strangely attractive monster with the sheer frank force of 

her nature. Meanwhile, just like the child trembling with 

undimmed excitement at her hundredth reading of the 

tale, we still revel in presentiments and foreshadowing: 

our heroine, for example, watching a cook leave a 

headless goose twitching in its death throes, its neck a 

bloody phallic stump (come and get it!). Breillat brings 

forward and mingles in a deliberately jarring fashion the 

palpable sensuousness of two worlds—the fairytale and 

childhood—to capture provocatively, and with more than a 

little silent laughter, a seminal moment at work in the terror 

of children’s stories: enough for a lifetime of fantasies; a 

lifetime to murder and create. 


CaTherine BreillaT 

Since her first film, A Real Young Girl (1976), Catherine Breillat 

has explored issues of female sexuality, sibling relations and the 

development of self with a characteristic frankness, imagination 

and intelligence. Other celebrated films include Romance 

(1999), Fat Girl (2001), Brief Crossing (SFIFF 2002), Sex 

Is Comedy (SFIFF 2003) and Anatomy of Hell (2004, based 

on her novel Pornocratie). Last year, Breillat was in town to 

address the audience at the Festival’s opening night screening 

of her film, The Last Mistress (2007). 

FRI APR 24 7:15 KABUKI BLUE24K 

sAt APR 25 9:30 KABUKI BLUE25K 

WED APR 29 4:15 KABUKI BLUE29K 

119 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

120 

BUlleT in The head 

tIRO EN LA CABEzA 

WEst COAst PREMIERE 

SPain/FranCe 

2008 

84 min 

dir Jaime Rosales 

PrOd Jaime Rosales, José Ma Morales, Jérôme 

Dopffer 

SCr Jaime Rosales 

Cam Oscar Durán 

ed Nino Martínez Sosa 

CaST Ion Arretxe, Iñigo Royo, Jaione Otxoa, Ana 

Vila, Asun Arretxe, Nerea Cobreros, José Angel 

Lopetegi 

PrinT SOUrCe The Match Factory, 

Balthasarstrasse 79-81, Cologne 50670, 

Germany. FAX: 49-221-539-709-10. 

EMAIL: festivals@matchfactory.de. 

CaUSeS Minority Rights; Social Justice; War, 

Conflict & Reconciliation 

The banality of evil: It’s all part of a day’s work. The 

title of Jaime Rosales’s latest film surely will have you 

anticipating a violent and dramatic event. And it will come. 

But as in his previous film, Solitary Fragments (SFIFF 

2008), it comes when you least expect it. Contradicting 

the conventional wisdom that shocking surprises aren’t 

as effective cinematic techniques as carefully prepared 

suspense, Rosales has created a signature approach 

to cinematic narrative that makes him one of the most 

unique filmmakers working today. The everyday life of 

an unidentified man is revealed at a pace that feels as 

banal as reality itself. The story unfolds in northern Spain’s 

Basque country. The man eats, drinks, goes to a party, 

meets a woman and goes home with her. He meets with 

friends—or perhaps they’re just acquaintances. He is 

always seen through windows, curtains or from a distance. 

Never is a word of dialogue spoken loudly or clearly 

enough to be understood. We are puzzled but entranced 

voyeurs. One day the man crosses the border into France 

with an acquaintance to have breakfast. And then, all 

at once: a spasm of spontaneous, senseless violence, 

preceded by a single word that seems to provide an 

explanation for everything that has come before. Based on 

a true incident, Bullet in the Head will leave you stunned 

and gasping for breath. 


Jaime rOSaleS 

With just three previous films under his belt, Rosales has 

become one of Spain’s most prominent directors, having won 

Goyas in 2007 for Best Film and Best Director with Solitary 

Fragments (SFIFF 2008). He was born in Barcelona in 1970, 

and his first feature, The Hours of the Day (2003), was invited 

to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes “for its subtle use of 

cinematographic expression in the observation of a mediocre 

man’s behavior, whose only specificity is killing.” Hours was 

nominated for two Goyas: Best New Director and Best Original 

Screenplay. 

sUN APR 26 7:30 KABUKI BULL26K 

tUE APR 28 9:00 KABUKI BULL28K 

FRI MAy 1 2:00 KABUKI BULL01K

delTa 

hUngary/germany 

2008 

92 min 

dir Kornél Mundruczó 

PrOd Viktória Petrányi, Susanne Marian, 

Philippe Bober 

SCr Yvette Bíró, Kornél Mundruczó 

Cam Mátyás Erdély 

ed Dávid Jancsó 

mUS Félix Lajkó 

CaST Félix Lajkó, Orsi Tóth, Lili Monori, Sándor 

Gáspár 

PrinT SOUrCe The Coproduction Office, 24 rue 

Lamartine, Paris 75009, France. FAX: 33-1-56- 

02-60-01. EMAIL: festivals@coproductionoffice. 

eu. 

Shot in Romania’s breathtaking Danube delta, Kornél 

Mundruczó’s provocative film details the ramifications of 

a taboo relationship. The story involves a reticent young 

man (Félix Lajkó) who returns to his birthplace after a 

long absence and is startled to discover a sister he has 

never met and didn’t know he had. In an effort to protect 

her from their stepfather’s (Sándor Gáspár) abuse and 

ferocity, he brings the girl to live with him in his home by 

the sea. This gesture of goodwill does not bode well, as 

there are strong suggestions, advanced by gossip and 

innuendo, that the two are sexually entangled. Hungarian 

director Kornél Mundruczó omits specific details about 

their bond, focusing more on naturalistic details and 

the behavior patterns of insular communities. When the 

outraged villagers, having drawn their own conclusions, 

force the pair into a state of complete alienation, the stage 

is prepared for a fated and tragic outcome. Adapting a 

minimalist approach, Mundruczó tells a highly charged 

story in a remarkably stripped-down way. Maintaining 

a steady and careful pace while employing very little 

dialogue, he is attuned to the serenity of the landscape, 

a sensibility that is expanded by Mátyás Erdély’s striking 

cinematography and Lajkó’s resonant violin score. 

Preoccupied with the natural world in its visual motifs 

(water, overgrown vegetation, and an intermittent turtle), 

Delta reveals a relationship that is perhaps all too 

unnatural. 

—Rachel Langus 

KOrnél mUndrUCzó 

Born in Hungary in 1975, Kornél Mundruczó directed his first 

short film Afta soon after graduating from the Hungarian Film 

Institute. The film earned him several international awards. 

In 2002 his first feature, Pleasant Days, received the Silver 

Leopard prize in Locarno. He entered the Cannes Residence 

program in 2003 and embarked on his second feature-length 

effort, Johanna, an operatic re-imagining of the Joan of Arc tale. 

sAt APR 25 1:00 KABUKI DELt25K 

MON APR 27 6:45 KABUKI DELt27K 

121 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

122 

eaSy VirTUe 

england/USa 

2008 

93 min 

dir Stephan Elliot 

PrOd Barnaby Thompson, Joe Abrams, James 

D. Stern 

SCr Stephan Elliott, Sheridan Jobbins 

Cam Martin Kenzie 

ed Sue Blainey 

mUS Marius De Vries 

CaST Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott 

Thomas, Ben Barnes, Kimberly Nixon, Katherine 

Parkinson 

PrinT SOUrCe Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY 

10022. EMAIL: info@spe.sony.com. 

The director of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of 

the Desert returns after a nine-year absence with this 

randy update of the classic Noel Coward Jazz-Age play, 

giving it a jaunty 21st-century swing while retaining all its 

original barbs and charms. It’s the mid-1920s in stuffy old 

England, and the snobbish family of wealthy trophy-boy 

John Whittaker wouldn’t mind if time stood still forever. 

Imagine their consternation, then, when John brings home 

impromptu new bride Larita (Jessica Biel), who’s not only a 

modern woman with modern charms (and legs), but is also 

a successful auto racer (gasp!) and an American (even 

bigger gasp!). While John’s lackadaisical father (Colin 

Firth, perpetually perched between slumber and scruff) 

doesn’t seem to mind Larita’s presence, his overbearing 

mother (an icily regal Kristin Scott Thomas) certainly 

does, and soon a battle of wits and wills rattles through 

the family’s crumbling estate, as two strong women—one 

of the past, the other of the present—battle for the future. 

Director Stephan Elliot infuses the play’s already toxic 

social commentary with some unexpectedly modern 

fashions and pop hits (“Sex Bomb,” “Carwash,” etc.), but 

his wisest decision is to just let his cast loose on Coward’s 

notoriously cutting dialogue. All barbed-wire niceties and 

ice-water kisses, Thomas embodies a social scion of a 

very certain class, while Firth counters her chill with a 

disheveled warmth all his own. It’s Jessica Biel, however, 

who delivers the truly astonishing performance, her 

bohemian beauty polished by a spirited, razor-sharp wit. 

STePhan elliOT 

Born in Sydney, Australia, Stephan Elliot worked as an assistant 

director and screenwriter before debuting as a director with 

Frauds (1993). His The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of 

the Desert (SFIFF 1994) turned him into one of world cinema’s 

most acclaimed directors. A near-fatal skiing accident, however, 

forced him to retreat from filmmaking for over nine years. Easy 

Virtue is his first film since his return to directing. 

WED MAy 6 6:00 KABUKI EAsy06K 

thU MAy 7 3:00 KABUKI EAsy07K

gO gO 70S 

gOsO ChILshIP 


SOUTh KOrea 

2008 

118 min 

dir Choi Ho 

PrOd Shim Bo-Kyoung, Yi Jong-Ho, Park 

Jae-Hyun 

SCr Choi Ho 

Cam Kim Byoung-Seo 

ed Kim Sang-Bum, Kim Jae-Beom 

mUS Bang Jun-Suk 

CaST Cho Seung-Woo, Shim Mina, Cha Seung- 

Woo 

PrinT SOUrCe Finecut, 4F, Incline Bldg, 891- 

37 Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South 

Korea. FAX: 822-569-9466. EMAIL: cineinfo@ 

finecut.co.kr. 

CaUSeS The Arts, Social Justice, Civil Liberties, 

Youth 

Based on the story of real-life ’70s rock group the Devils, 

Go Go 70s is a worthy addition to the recent canon of 

Korean films that re-evaluate the country’s history from 

authoritarian rule to civilian democracy in the late 20th 

century. Artistically frustrated by playing U.S. military 

bars, singer Sang-gyu and guitarist Man-Shik (real-life 

rocker Cho Seung-Woo) form a rock group called the 

Devils to enter a contest in Seoul and take a shot at the 

big time. Their signature sound is soul—contrary to the 

overblown rock that prevails—and shows the influence of 

their contact with African Americans in the military. Initially 

dispirited by the lukewarm response they receive at the 

contest, they are surprised to win an award. Joined by sexy 

go-go dancer Mimi they become a hit at the underground 

Nirvana club, ground zero for pop culture in Seoul. But 

Park Chung-Hee’s repressive government cracks down on 

youth culture, closing clubs and jailing dissidents. Deprived 

of venues, and wrought by internal tension, the Devils 

dissolve. A cross between The Commitments and The 

Blues Brothers, Choi Ho’s film pulses with energy—the 

band’s winning number “We Are Devils” is a blast—that 

not only captures Korea’s go-go music zeitgeist but also 

the role of pop culture in dissent. As the film progresses, 

the band sings less in English and more in Korean, a sign 

of local rock culture taking root. But the influences of 

American soul remain, from the Ronettes-inspired dancing 

of Mimi and her girls to the Devil’s rousing rendition of a 

Creedence Clearwater Revival hit sung in Korean! 


ChOi hO 

Choi Ho, born in 1967, studied film at Chung-Ang University and 

earned a degree in film at Paris 8 University. His feature debut 

Bye June (1998) was a portrait of Korean youth. He followed 

this with the contemporary romance Who R U (2000) and 

Bloody Tie (2006), a gritty exploration of the drug trade in the 

port city of Pusan. 

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124 

gOOd CaTS 

hAO MAO 


China 

2008 

103 min 

dir Ying Liang 

PrOd Peng Shan 

SCr Ying Liang, Peng Shan 

Cam Li Rongsheng, Ying Liang 

ed Ying Liang 

mUS Lamb’s Funeral 

CaST Luo Liang, Peng Deming, Liu Xiaopei, 

Wang Qian, Zhu Jing, Lin Min 

PrinT SOUrCe 90 Minutes Film Studio, Room 

201, No. 200 Tianmu Mid-street, Shanghai 

200071, China. FAX: 86-21-6324-1821. 

EMAIL: yingliang2046@hotmail.com 

CaUSeS Politics & Government Reform, World 

Culture 

In Mandarin with English subtitles. 

Luo Liang, a young man trying to meet the expectations of 

family and work, has come to town looking for something 

better but is unsure of his lot in life. His snobbish wife 

nags him to get a proper job and learn some skills. He 

responds by romancing a prostitute. His role as a driver for 

ruthless property developer Boss Peng soon is ratcheted 

up to enforcer, as Peng’s ambitions expand. His former 

mentor, meanwhile, sees his fortunes sink and heads for a 

tragic end. Following Taking Father Home (SKYY Prize, 

SFIFF 2006), and The Other Half (SFIFF 2008), Ying 

Liang continues to document the effects of fraud, greed 

and corruption—capitalism —in his home town of Zigong, 

charting how economic changes have altered the lives 

of many Chinese today. Ying’s invocation of the three 

destinies of modern Chinese man—as wanderer, corrupt 

boss or tragic loser—is enriched through sly wit, excellent 

work with nonprofessional actors and his insertion of 

Chinese rock group Lamb’s Funeral into scenes where 

the band functions as a kind of Greek chorus to the 

proceedings. As a putative master of the bleak comedy, 

Ying finds irony in Deng Xiaoping’s ends-justify-means 

dictum that a cat’s color is irrelevant: It’s good as long as 

it catches the rat. But just look how the cats unleashed by 

Deng have turned out. 


ying liang 

Ying Liang (born in 1977), a graduate of the Chongqing 

Film Academy and Beijing Normal University, made several 

successful short films that showed in Hong Kong and New York 

before making his first feature, Taking Father Home (2005), 

which won several festival prizes, including in Tokyo, Hong Kong 

and at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it 

received the SKYY Prize in 2006. His next feature, The Other 

Half (SFIFF 2007), was also widely acclaimed. Good Cats is his 

third feature. 

sUN APR 26 6:15 KABUKI gOOC26K 

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WED APR 29 9:15 KABUKI gOOC29K 

FRI MAy 1 3:15 KABUKI gOOC01K

The gOOd liFe 

LA BUENA VIDA 


Chile/SPain/argenTina/england/FranCe 

2008 

108 min 

dir Andrés Wood 

PrOd Andrés Wood, Mamoun Hassan, Gerardo 

Herrero, Diego Dubcovsky 

SCr Mamoun Hassan 

Cam Miguel Littin 

ed Andrea Chignoli 

mUS José Miguel Miranda, José Miguel Tobar 

CaST Aline Kuppenheim, Eduardo Paxeco, 

Roberto Farías 

PrinT SOUrCe Latido Films, Veneras 9, 6º 

28013 Madrid, Spain. FAX: 34-915-488-878. 

EMAIL: oalonso@latidofilms.com 

CaUSeS Economic Justice, Social Justice, 

Women’s Issues, World Culture 

In taking on the ensemble narrative form, respected 

Chilean filmmaker Andrés Wood has created a complex 

and affectionate patchwork of stories about ordinary 

people struggling to follow their dreams in a dispiriting 

world. A social worker teaches prostitutes about safe sex; 

ironically, her troubled teenage daughter (in a brilliant, 

brooding performance by Manuela Martelli) becomes 

pregnant and can’t confide in her own mother. The 

daughter has dreams of her own: She is secretly writing 

a novel. A hairdresser applies for auto financing from a 

lonely loan officer, who quietly pines for him. He is lonely 

too, but family obligations stand in the way, leading to a 

bitter unraveling of their budding romance. An ambitious 

young clarinetist auditions for a hallowed philharmonic 

orchestra. Frustrated in his aspiration, he must settle for 

joining the army and a job with the military band. Home 

alone, he plays Puccini to fill the void. These small stories 

of perseverance and frustration are presented with such 

penetrating empathy that together they rise to the level of 

a human comedy of everyday life in the Chilean metropolis. 

Though the stories are told in parallel fashion and in only a 

few small instances intersect, they coalesce on a different 

plane. Driven by dissatisfaction and reacting against 

circumstance, everyone at some point is driven to commit 

thoughtless acts that had once seemed unthinkable. They 

struggle to make their lives work in an unaccommodating 

world where mere survival is chalked up as success. 


andréS WOOd 

The Good Life is Andrés Wood’s fifth feature. His first, Soccer 

Stories (1997) was a box office success in his native Chile. 

Loco Fever (2001) gained international acclaim in numerous 

film festival appearances. This was furthered by his best known 

film internationally, Machuca (SFIFF 2005). Born in Chile in 

1965 of Irish and Scottish descent, Wood was educated at 

a private English school in Santiago. After graduating as an 

economist from the Catholic University of Chile in 1988, he 

studied film at New York University. 

WED APR 29 8:45 PFA gOOL29P 

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125 

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World Cinema 

126 

heaVen’S hearT 

hIMLENs hjäRtA 

U.s. PREMIERE 

SWeden 

2008 

92 min 

dir Simon Staho 

PrOd Jonas Frederiksen 

SCr Peter Asmussen, Simon Staho 

Cam Anders Bohman 

ed Janus Billeskov Jansen 

mUS Stefan Nilsson 

CaST Mikael Persbrandt, Lena Endre, Jakob 

Eklund, Maria Lundqvist 

PrinT SOUrCe IFC Films, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th 

floor, New York, 10001. EMAIL: infoifcfilms@ 

ifcfilms.com. 

CaUSeS Family Issues 

“What happens when a perfectly ordinary couple, who 

have based their entire lives on marriage, are afflicted 

by infidelity?” asks director Simon Staho on the subject 

of his provocative drama, which features an all-star cast 

dramatically interrogating themselves—and the audience— 

on what makes marriages work or fail. Beginning at a 

divorce hearing, the film flashes back to an innocent dinner 

party organized by the successful, seemingly content Lars 

(Mikael Persbrandt) and Susanna (Lena Endre) with their 

friends Ulf (Jakob Eklund) and Ann (Maria Lundqvist). 

As the dinner is prepared, the two men discuss their sex 

lives. Neither has been unfaithful to their wives—Lars even 

denies that he has ever even thought of it. Unbeknownst 

to them, the two women are having a similar conversation 

in the room next door, where Ann proclaims that she has 

lost her desire for her husband. A discussion follows of 

a friend’s infidelity and subsequent divorce, launching 

the foursome into a night of conversation, doubt and 

panic—and a future where adultery will impact each of 

them profoundly and irrevocably. Staho tunes his quartet 

of actors like a miniature symphony, using tight closeups 

of their faces as they directly address the camera. 

“Infidelity is often treated very lightly in films,” says Staho. 

“But I wanted to show what happens when infidelity really 

means something. When infidelity hurts and affects both 

marriages and friendships.” 

SimOn STahO 

Born in Copenhagen in 1972, Simon Staho is one of the rising 

stars of Scandinavian cinema. His films include Wildside (1998), 

Day and Night (2004), Daisy Diamond (2007) and Heaven’s 

Heart (2008), which was featured in the 2009 Berlin Film 

Festival. 

sAt MAy 2 2:00 KABUKI hEAV02K 

sUN MAy 3 3:00 KABUKI hEAV03K 

WED MAy 6 9:45 KABUKI hEAV06K

iT’S nOT me, i SWear! 

C’Est PAs MOI, jE LE jURE! 

Canada 

2008 

110 min 

dir Philippe Falardeau 

PrOd Luc Déry, Kim McCraw 

SCr Philippe Falardeau 

Cam André Turpin 

ed Frédérique Broos 

mUS Patrick Watson 

CaST Antoine L’Écuyer, Suzanne Clément, 

Daniel Brière, Catherine Faucher 

PrinT SOUrCe Films Distribution, 34, rue du 

Louvre, Paris 75001, France. FAX: 33 1 53 10 

33 98. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution.com. 

CaUSeS Family Issues, Youth 


Wave to ten-year-old Léon Doré and he’d as soon flip 

you the bird as wave back. Léon’s idea of fun is “sleeping 

in the pool,” one of several attempted-suicide ploys, and 

when he visits the neighbors, it’s what we’d call breaking 

and entering. Even in 1968, that cultural watershed, this 

behavior goes unappreciated in the Montreal suburb where 

Léon lives with his artist mother, human rights attorney 

father and hapless brother, who wants nothing more than 

a normal family. Not a chance. His mother, in fact, acts as 

Léon’s enabler (“It’s bad to lie, but it’s worse to lie badly”), 

until she abruptly departs for Greece to find freedom (in 

a dictatorship). When you are the identified problem in a 

dysfunctional family you should make the most of it, and 

this Léon (a marvelous performance by Antoine L’Écuyer) 

does in increasingly risky acts performed with a studied 

intelligence masking the fact that he’s dangerously out 

of control. When he pairs up with a neighbor, Lea, the 

only friend who will have him (and we soon find out why), 

what is billed as a comedy admits that it is a poignant 

exploration of abandonment. (Did we mention that Léon 

is obsessed with tunnels, starting with the birth canal?) 

In adapting two popular books by Bruno Hébert, Philippe 

Falardeau has re-created the late ’60s milieu with an 

obsession bordering on the neurotic to inquire, as a child 

of those uncertain times, just what there is to be nostalgic 

for. 

—Judy Bloch 

PhiliPPe FalardeaU 

Director of the acclaimed Congorama (SFIFF 2007), another 

wry cultural comedy, Philippe Falardeau was already well known 

in Canada for his popular first feature, The Left-Hand Side of 

the Fridge (2000). He has worked widely in documentary—very 

widely: As a contestant on the popular TV series La course 

destination monde in 1993, a competition whose participants 

tour the world making films, he made 20, winning the race and 

the prize. 

FRI APR 24 5:45 KABUKI ItsN24K 

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tUE APR 28 1:00 KABUKI ItsN28K 

127 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

128 

KhamSa 


FranCe 

2008 

110 min 

dir Karim Dridi 

PrOd Karina Grandjean, Karim Dridi 

SCr Karim Dridi 

Cam Antoine Monod 

ed Lise Beaulieu 

CaST Marc Cortes, Raymond Adam, Tony 

Fourmann, Mehdi Laribi, Simon Abkarian 

PrinT SOUrCe Rezo. 29 rue du Faubourg 

Poissonnière, 70059, France. FAX: 33-1-42- 

46-40-82. EMAIL: festival@rezofilms.com. 

CaUSeS Immigration, Minority Rights, World 

Culture, Youth 

In a Roma community on the outskirts of Marseille, 

13-year-old Marco shows up after fleeing foster care. 

The changes he finds in the camp are not for the better: 

His beloved grandmother is dying, his father is leading a 

dissolute existence with a new girlfriend, his best friend 

Coyote has started on a path to delinquency and is 

determined to take him along. Between boyish dives into 

the familiar sea, their petty crimes become more and more 

bold. Tunisian-born French director Karim Dridi immersed 

himself in the Roma camp for a year and a half before 

shooting Khamsa; he hung out with the kids, met their 

families. Only then did he select his nonprofessional actors 

and begin improvising a script based on their experiences. 

The result is a vivid picture of Roma life and unvarnished 

youth. Relishing the gorgeous light that is unique to 

Marseille, Dridi employs an epic CinemaScope format to 

take in the breadth and chaos of the world these boys 

navigate—not just to make their story real, but to make it 

matter. Young Marc Cortes wondrously, almost wordlessly 

conveys the soul of his character: Marco’s strength and 

his bitterness, his desire for love and ultimately for order, 

his sweetness and his long-suppressed rage. But for all its 

focus on adolescence, and for all the pity it evokes in us, 

Khamsa is far from being a “coming-of-age” film. Marco 

hasn’t a prayer of an arc or a hero’s journey. He’s going 

down. 

—Judy Bloch 

Karim dridi 

Karim Dridi, born in Tunisia, has depicted the vibrancy and edgy 

violence of France’s minority communities in films that include 

Pigalle (2004) and Bye-Bye (SFIFF 1996). “We live in a 

multiracial, multiethnic society and we deny the wealth of that. 

We make a handicap out of it,” the director says. “That injustice 

that minorities are subjected to is the driving force behind all my 

films, because it’s really the essence of who I am—a person of 

mixed ethnicity.” 

sAt APR 25 8:15 KABUKI KhAM25K 

sUN APR 26 12:45 KABUKI KhAM26K 

WED APR 29 6:30 PFA KhAM29P

laila’S BirThday 

EID MILAD LAILA 


PaleSTine/TUniSia/neTherlandS 

2008 

72 min 

dir Rashid Masharawi 

PrOd Mohamed Habib Attia, Peter van 

Vogelpoel, Rashid Masharawi 

SCr Rashid Masharawi 

Cam Tarek Ben Abdallah, Nestor Sanz 

ed Pascal Chavance 

mUS Kais Sellami 

CaST Mohamed Bakri, Areen Omari, Nour Zoubi 

PrinT SOUrCe Kino International, 333 W 39th 

Street, Suite 503, New York, NY 10018. FAX: 

212-714-0871. EMAIL: gpalmucci@kino.com. 

CaUSeS Family Issues; Social Justice; War, 

Conflict & Reconciliation; World Culture 

In Arabic with English subtitles. 

Gaza-born director Rashid Masharawi captures the 

absurdity of the Palestinian situation in this comically 

deadpan, stop-and-start “road trip” through the land of 

checkpoints and barriers. A former judge who still retains 

his regal bearing, Abu Laila (stone-faced Mohamed Bakri, 

a Palestinian Buster Keaton) now drives a taxi to make 

ends meet. His customers are a motley cross-section of 

Ramallah’s citizens: a young Romeo who hires the taxi 

to have a place “alone” with his lover; a housewife who’ll 

stop anywhere there’s a free-food giveaway (“Is this 

Fatah? Hamas? Who knows? I just saw a line and got 

in”), armed militia members (to whom Abu Laila points out 

the “NO SMOKING” and “NO AK-47s” signs) and, in one 

dramatically complicated case, an ex-convict who leaves 

his cell phone in the cab. Our harried hero is also trying to 

regain his former position (his frequent trips to the Ministry 

of Justice are both comical and heart-breaking) and, today 

at least, needs a birthday cake for his daughter. Using Abu 

Laila’s travails as a window into contemporary Palestine, 

Masharawi reveals a situation both more complicated than 

one could image and one that is universally human. Most 

of all, he captures the surprising beauty of Ramallah (“I 

wanted the city to be a character and different from the 

way others have depicted it before,” he notes) and the 

unshakable spirit of its people. “Through [Abu Laila] we 

can face ourselves as Palestinians,” says Masharawi, “and 

where we are going in all this.” 

raShid maSharaWi 

Director of several award-winning features and documentaries, 

Rashid Masharawi was born and raised in the Shati refugee 

camp in the Gaza Strip. A painter and installation artist as well 

as director, he made his feature debut with 1993’s Curfew, 

which won the UNESCO Award at Cannes. His credits include 

Haifa (1996), Ticket to Jerusalem (2002), and Waiting 

(SFIFF 2006), as well as documentaries Long Days in Gaza 

(1991) and Live from Palestine (2003). In 1996 he founded 

the Cinema Production and Distribution Center, which offers 

workshops to Palestinian youth and sponsors the Mobile Cinema 

Project, bringing film screenings to refugee camps. 

sAt APR 25 6:30 KABUKI LAIL25K 

MON APR 27 3:30 KABUKI LAIL27K 

tUE APR 28 7:00 KABUKI LAIL28K 

129 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

130 

meSrine: a Film in TWO ParTS 

L’INstINCt DE MORt 

FranCe/Canada/USa/SPain/england/ 

algeria 

2008 

ParT One: 113 min 

ParT TWO: 132 min 

dir Jean-François Richet 

PrOd Thomas Langmann 

SCr Abdel Raouf Dafri 

Cam Robert Gantz, Eric Catelan 

ed Hervé Schneid, Bill Panko 

mUS Marco Beltrami 

CaST Vincent Cassel, Cécile de France, Gérard 

Depardieu, Roy Dupuis, Ludivine Sagnier, Elena 

Anaya, Mathieu Amalric, Gérard Lanvin, Samuel 

le Bihan, Olivier Gourmet 

PrinT SOUrCe Senator Distribution, 9000 

Sunset Blvd., 16th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 

90069. EMAIL: general@senatorent.com. 

This two-fisted, two-part epic charts the remarkable 

20-year crime spree of Jacques Mesrine, France’s public 

enemy number one. With Vincent Cassel’s magnetic 

performance as its anchor, Jean-François Richet’s starstudded 

film rockets through Mesrine’s life with abandon— 

it’s biopic meets white-knuckle thriller. Each of the two 

parts is an autonomous, fully realized film; they are equally 

impressive experienced in order or reversed, as a set or as 

a singular cinematic experience. 

Part One begins during Mesrine’s military stint in Algeria, 

where the rush of power sends him home for more of 

the same. Falling in with the local crime boss (Gérard 

Depardieu), Mesrine takes to the role of gangster like he 

was born to it. Handsome, bold and quick-witted, he is 

soon kidnapping millionaires and robbing banks two at a 

time. His larkish exploits become brutally serious, however, 

once he flees to Canada and lands in the savage, “escapeproof” 

St. Vincent de Paul prison. Mesrine, of course, 

escapes in spectacular fashion, hungrier and more radical 

than ever. 

In Part Two, Mesrine’s celebrity only increases as a 

gangster, would-be revolutionary and megalomaniacal 

media hound of the 1970s. Mesrine is by now so proudly 

notorious that he becomes enraged when Pinochet’s coup 

pushes him below the fold of the newspapers’ front pages. 

Meanwhile, his gleefully elaborate and heedless ideas 

alarm even his partners, as Paris police form a special 

anti-Mesrine unit to finally bring him down. Both exciting 

and historically meticulous, Mesrine is a fitting tribute for 

this celebrity criminal. 

—Tod Booth 

Jean-FrançOiS riCheT 

Jean-François Richet grew up in a public housing project in 

the Parisian suburb of Meaux. He worked for several years in a 

factory, an episode of his life that has inspired his films. His first 

feature, Inner City (1995), a compassionate take on the trials 

and tribulations of the working class, was nominated as one of 

the best debuts of the year at the 1996 César awards. Previous 

to Mesrine, Richet directed his first American film—a remake of 

John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Richet won a César 

for best director this year for Mesrine. 

sUN MAy 3 6:15 CLAy MEs103y (PARt 1) 

MON MAy 4 6:15 CLAy MEs104y (PARt 1) 

MON MAy 4 9:15 CLAy MEs204y (PARt 2) 

WED MAy 6 9:00 CLAy MEs206y (PARt 2)

OnCe UPOn a Time in The WeST 

C’ERA UNA VOLtA IL WEst 

iTaly/USa 

1968 

165 min 

dir Sergio Leone 

PrOd Fulvio Morsella 

SCr Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati 

Cam Tonino Delli Colli 

ed Nino Baragli 

mUS Ennio Morricone 

CaST Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles 

Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Gabriele Ferzetti 

PrinT SOUrCe Paramount Pictures, 5555 

Melrose Ave., Marathon Building, Room 2118, 

Los Angeles, CA 90038 

This restoration was made possible with 

support by The Film Foundation and the Rome 

Film Festival in association with Sergio Leone 

Productions and Paramount Pictures. 

Presented by The Film Foundation and 

American Express. 

Presented with support from the Italian Cultural 

Institute, San Francisco. 

Sergio Leone reinvigorated the American Western with 

the unique vision of a brilliantly observant outsider. Unlike 

the well-groomed characters depicted in traditional 

studio Westerns, the inhabitants of Leone’s frontier are 

dusty, sweaty and grimy. Frame-filling closeups linger on 

nuances of facial expression, communicating more with 

a look than with pages of dialogue. In his masterpiece, 

Once upon a Time in the West, Leone casts icon of 

gallantry Henry Fonda radically against type as the darkest 

of villains, and brings European stylistic reinterpretations 

perfected in his low-budget spaghetti Westerns to the 

quintessential cowboy movie location—John Ford’s favorite, 

Monument Valley. While this film employs and references 

the archetypal characters and themes of the Western, it 

goes far beyond a reiteration of cinematic clichés; instead, 

it is a riveting and emotional exploration of the genre’s 

mythologies. Once upon a Time in the West was shot in 

the Techniscope format, which has not been in use since 

the early 1970s. A photochemical restoration has been 

made using the original negative so as to preserve the 

beauty of the photography and director Leone’s original 

vision, and the color was retimed to capture the rich earth 

tones of the original photography. The audio was restored 

from magnetic master tracks. 

SergiO leOne 

The son of silent film director Vincenzo Leone, Sergio Leone was 

born in 1929 in Rome and begin working in the film industry at 

the age of 18. He came into his own as a director in 1964 with 

the release of A Fistful of Dollars, an adaptation of a Kurosawa 

samurai film starring an unknown television actor named Clint 

Eastwood. More spaghetti Western films followed, all marked 

by a signature style infused with sophisticated editing in 

combination with iconic scores and vast, inscrutable landscapes. 

Once upon a Time in the West is widely considered to be his 

masterpiece. Leone died in 1989. 

sUN MAy 3 12:30 CAstRO ONCE03C 

131 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

132 

The OTher One 

L’AUtRE 


FranCe 

2008 

97 min 

dir Pierre Trividic, Patrick Mario Bernard 

PrOd Patrick Sobelman 

SCr Pierre Trividic, Patrick Mario Bernard 

Cam Pierric Gantelmi d’Ille 

ed Yann Dedet 

mUS Rep Müzak 

CaST Dominique Blanc, Cyril Gueï, Peter Bonke 

PrinT SOUrCe Films Distribution, 34, rue du 

Louvre, 75001 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-53- 

10-33-98. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution.com. 


Forty-seven-year-old social worker Anne-Marie 

(Dominique Blanc, Special Delivery, Queen Margot) 

amicably breaks up with her young lover (Cyril Gueï), 

urging him to find someone more suitable for the longterm 

relationship he desires. When he does, the new 

girlfriend turns out to be another professional woman 

Anne-Marie’s age, rather than the younger model she was 

expecting. What begins as a spike of jealousy blossoms 

into a stalker’s obsession that spirals into a full-blown 

identity crisis. While Anne-Marie struggles to maintain 

a sense of normalcy, monitoring an alcoholic client 

and supporting a sick friend, her sense of self is under 

constant attack, fueled by envy of her rival, the onslaught 

of the media treatment of aging as a shameful disability to 

be conquered and a home surveillance system that serves 

to ramp up her paranoia. Adapting Annie Ernaux’s novel 

L’Occupation, filmmakers Patrick-Mario Bernard and 

Pierre Trividic could have taken a page from Repulsion 

and emphasized the horror of Anne-Marie’s collapsing 

personality or fashioned a slick, Fatal Attraction–like 

thriller. Instead, they deliver a hypnotic character drama, 

underlining Anne-Marie’s human frailty, placing her amid 

the dreary urban landscape that envelops her, while an 

ominous ambient soundtrack acts as counterpoint to 

her mounting self-loathing. Anne-Marie’s horrid behavior 

marks her as someone contemptible, but Blanc—who won 

the Volpi Cup for her performance at the 2008 Venice 

Film Festival—is astonishing as she reveals the pain, 

loneliness, vulnerability and touch of madness that inspire 

the character’s outrageous acts. 

—Pam Grady 

Pierre TriVidiC PaTriCK mariO Bernard 

A native of Quimper, France, Pierre Trividic (b. 1957) studied film 

at Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinemagraphiques in Paris before 

embarking on a career as a video director and screenwriter. 

In addition to his work with Bernard, Trividic collaborated on 

the screenplays for Coming to Terms with the Dead (1994, 

Pascale Ferran), Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train 

(1998, Patrice Chereau), Lady Chatterley (2006, Pascale 

Ferran), and La Clef (2007, Guillaume Nicloux). 

Born in 1961 in Thionville, France, Patrick Mario Bernard 

attended the Metz Beaux-arts and worked as an illustrator, 

graphic artist, stage designer and theater director before making 

his film directing debut in collaboration with Pierre Trividic in 

1998 with the experimental, made-for-television documentary 

Le cas Lovecraft. With Trividic, he directed two more films for 

television, This Is a Pipe (2000) and Une famille parfaite 

(2005). In 2003, Bernard collaborated with Trividic once more as 

writer, codirector, and costar of their debut feature Dancing. 

FRI MAy 1 4:15 CLAy OthE01y 

sUN MAy 3 9:30 CLAy OthE03y 

WED MAy 6 6:00 CLAy OthE06y

iVer PeOPle 

shUI shANg REN jIA 


China 

2008 

88 min 

dir He Jianjun 

PrOd Shan Dongbing 

SCr He Jianjun 

Cam Guo Zhirong 

ed Qi Ziyi 

mUS Zhang Yi 

CaST Shan Haoshan, Baowa, Laba 

PrinT SOUrCe Beijing Jingle Culture 

Development Company Ltd., Room 516, Bldg. 2, 

20 Xindejie, Xichengqu, 100088 Beijing, China. 

FAX: 86-10-62272341. EMAIL: johnshan@vip. 

sina.com. 

CaUSeS Economic Justice 

In Chinese with English subtitles. 

An extended family in Shanxi province follows a rhythmic 

cycle, established over generations. They live on boats 

and fish in the river until it ices over, then set up on land 

and run a restaurant during the long winter. Teenager 

Laba and his cousin Baowa would much rather bait lines 

and collect fish than study for school, yet Baowa worries 

over the intimations of a future as bleak as the river is 

muddy. He gravitates toward the trains he can hear in the 

distance but which he’s never had an opportunity to ride 

toward what he imagines must be better work in the city, 

but Baowa’s father has seen what life outside portends for 

his family and forbids his son to leave. Director He Jianjun, 

like his peers in the Sixth Generation such as Zhang Yuan 

and Jia Zhangke, shares an abiding interest in combining 

(or blurring) fiction and reality. He films the family—who 

seem to be playing approximations of themselves—in an 

observational style that reveals rather than structures the 

characters. He imbues the humble settings with a feeling 

of comfort and familiarity, but beyond the dark interiors 

of the boats that the fisherfolk call home is a creeping 

sense of foreboding. Equally threatening to the cultural 

lineage of the family is the encroachment of modernity, 

symbolized by the unceasing drone of DVD action movies 

and motorbikes. 


he JianJUn 

He Jianjun, born in China in 1960 and a graduate of the Beijing 

Film Academy, has worked with Chen Kaige (King of Children, 

SFIFF 1989) and as assistant director to Zhang Yimou (Raise 

the Red Lantern) and Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite). He 

attracted international attention with his first feature, Red Beads 

(SFIFF 1994). Regarded as one of the leading filmmakers of the 

Sixth Generation, he has also made documentaries and other 

works for television. 

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thU MAy 7 5:30 KABUKI RIVE07K 

133 

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World Cinema 

134 

STill WalKing 

ARUItEMO, ARUItEMO 

JaPan 

2008 

114 min 

dir Hirokazu Kore-eda 

PrOd Yoshihiro Kato, Hijiri Taguchi 

SCr Hirokazu Kore-eda 

Cam Yutaka Yamazaki 

ed Hirokazu Kore-eda 

mUS Gontiti 

CaST Hiroshi Abe, Yui Natsukara, You, Kazuya 

Takahashi, Shohei Tanaka 


floor, New York, NY 10001. FAX: 646-273- 


CaUSeS Family Issues, World Culture 

The arrival of a new film by Hirokazu Kore-eda is an 

eagerly anticipated event among cinephiles for whom 

this remarkably nuanced chronicler of Japanese life, loss 

and longing is now firmly established as a contemporary 

master of cinema at its most lyrical and emotionally 

satisfying. In the lovely multigenerational portrait Still 

Walking, Kore-eda draws on the childhood drama of 

Nobody Knows, the elegiac understatement of Distance 

(SFIFF 2002) and After Life (SFIFF 1998) and the earthy 

humor of his samurai adventure Hana (SFIFF 2007) to 

depict with subtle grace the interplay of affection and 

resentment among an extended, uniquely dysfunctional 

family. Over the course of a languorous summer afternoon, 

elderly parents host their two children—boisterous spouses 

and offspring in tow—for a commemoration of beloved son 

and sibling Junpei’s tragic death 15 years earlier. They 

cope with grief by sharing memories, jokes and recipes, 

interacting with a blend of tenderness and impatience 

as only relatives can. Throughout, Junpei’s ghost haunts 

the day’s quotidian incidents and petty squabbles just as 

the benevolent specter of Yasujiro Ozu, Japan’s great 

chronicler of family dynamics, hovers over Kore-eda’s 

domestic reverie. With its perfect performances and 

quiet build-up of fleeting pleasures—the flight of a yellow 

butterfly, the sizzle of frying tempura—Still Walking 

resonates long after twilight descends upon the Yokoyama 

clan, whom viewers will love—and begrudge—as their own. 


hirOKazU KOre-eda 

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Hirokazu Kore-eda studied literature 

and worked for an independent television production company, 

where he helmed numerous documentaries, before embarking 

on his feature narrative directorial career with Maborosi (SFIFF 

1996). Subsequent award-winning films, including After Life 

(SFIFF 1998), Distance (SFIFF 1998), Nobody Knows (2004) 

and Hana (SFIFF 2007), have confirmed his reputation as one 

of contemporary cinema’s most significant figures. 

sUN MAy 3 8:45 KABUKI stIL03K 

tUE MAy 5 6:30 KABUKI stIL05K

SUmmer hOUrS 

L’hEURE D’été 

FranCe 

2008 

102 min 

dir Olivier Assayas 

PrOd Marin Karmitz, Nathanaël Karmitz, Charles 

Gillibert 

SCr Olivier Assayas 

Cam Eric Gautier 

ed Luc Barnier 

CaST Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie 

Renier, Edith Scob 


floor, New York, NY 10001. FAX: 646 273 


CaUSeS The Arts, Family Issues 

Olivier Assayas’s richly meditative new film opens with a 

burst of activity in bright summer sunlight as the pinging 

energy of a French family gathering fills the spacious 

country estate of Hélène (Edith Scob) on the occasion of 

her 75th birthday. Her adult children, Adrienne (Juliette 

Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) have come in from 

New York and Beijing, respectively, joining sibling Frédéric 

(Charles Berling) and his family, in from Paris. Hélène’s 

preoccupations have turned increasingly to the disposition 

of the house and its contents—inherited from a close uncle 

and noted artist—once she passes away. Recognizing that 

her family has literally moved on and that her caretaking 

of her uncle’s legacy is likely a last chapter, she takes 

Frédéric aside to discuss the eventual sale of the house 

and the donation of its artwork to a museum. A heavy 

soul who has remained physically close to his mother and 

the house, Frédéric has invested the estate with his own 

deeply emotional nostalgia, and it’s he more than Hélène 

who struggles with the idea that it won’t remain in the 

family. Working from a commission by the Musée d’Orsay, 

Assayas and cinematographer Eric Gautier masterfully use 

space, light and motion to explore the meaning, passions 

and memories we invest in objects and our surroundings— 

and how such relationships change over time and across 

generations. Compelling performances by an exceptional 

cast bring home the film’s intelligent balance of realism 

and poetry. 

—Steve Mockus 

OliVier aSSayaS 

Writer-director Olivier Assayas was born in Paris in 1955, 

the son of French writer/director Jacques Remy. He studied 

painting and literature and contributed prominently to Cahiers 

du Cinema in the early 1980s before making his feature 

directorial debut, Desordre, which won the International Critics’ 

Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1986. His films include Paris 

s’éveille (1991), Irma Vep (SFIFF 1997), Late August, Early 

September (SFIFF 1999), Demonlover (2002), Clean (2004), 

Boarding Gate (2007) and a documentary on Taiwanese 

director, friend and kindred spirit Hou Hsiao-hsien. 

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WED MAy 6 4:15 KABUKI sUMM06K 

135 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

136 

35 ShOTS OF rUm 

35 RhUMs 


FranCe 

2007 

100 min 

dir Claire Denis 

PrOd Bruno Pesery 

SCr Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau 

Cam Agnès Godard 

ed Guy Lecorne 

mUS Tindersticks 

CaST Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Grégoire Colin, 

Nicole Dogué 

PrinT SOUrCe Elle Driver, 66 rue de 

Miromesnil, Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-45-41-46- 

08. EMAIL: Julie@elledriver.eu. 

CaUSeS Family Issues 

Claire Denis has created a sensual and contemplative 

body of films over the years, but nothing in her work 

prepares us for this deeply emotional yet light-of-touch 

story set among a small circle of Parisians and their 

friends. In fact, Denis evokes nothing so much as Eric 

Rohmer in his “seasons” quartet as she follows the various 

characters in a roundelay of relationships that touches 

on almost every kind of love there is: father-daughter, 

old lovers, old colleagues, absent mother, lost sister, 

unrequited, one-night, budding, brooding . . . Lionel (Alex 

Descas), a train engineer, shares an apartment with his 

daughter Jo (Mati Diop), a university student. In the same 

building live taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and a 

young man who comes and goes, Noe (the intense and 

always mysterious Grégoire Colin, like Descas a Denis 

regular). Together, they are a kind of family. We figure out 

their roles and relationships only gradually as Denis leaves 

crumbs along her narrative path for us to follow—it’s one 

of the great pleasures of this extraordinarily pleasurable 

film made up of small moments, of looks and silences, 

of magical touches of physicality and pensiveness. 

Agnés Godard’s cinematography richly limns an interior 

architecture in which objects take on an Ozu-like delicacy 

and immediacy, and uses train tracks (and cars and 

motorbikes and vans) to propel the story into the out of 

doors and eventually, the future, as father and daughter 

face the inevitable: her independence. 

—Judy Bloch 

Claire deniS 

Born in Paris and raised in French West Africa, Claire Denis 

continues to probe the experience of outsiders in French 

society—gays, blacks, immigrants, dispossessed youth—not so 

much for their otherness as for their centrality. Her films include 

Chocolat (1988), I Can’t Sleep (1994), Nenette and Boni 

(1996), Beau Travail (1999) and The Intruder (2004), among 

others. Her stock company includes the writer Jean-Pol Fargeau 

and cinematographer Agnès Godard. 

FRI MAy 1 7:00 CLAy shOt01y 

sUN MAy 3 1:30 PFA shOt03P 

WED MAy 6 9:15 KABUKI shOt06K

The Tiger’S Tail 


ireland 

2006 

107 min 

dir John Boorman 

PrOd John Boorman, John Buchanan, Kieran 

Corrigan, John McDonnell 

SCr John Boorman 

Cam Seamus Deasy 

ed Ron Davis 

mUS Stephen McKeon 

CaST Brendan Gleeson, Kim Cattrall, Ciarán 

Hinds, Sinéad Cusack, Sean McGinley 

PrinT SOUrCe Outsider Pictures, 1127 9th 

Street, #104, Santa Monica, CA 90403. EMAIL: 

paul@outsiderpictures.us. 

“What ever happened to good old-fashioned, honest 

corruption?” snarls nouveau riche developer Liam O’Leary, 

stuck in Dublin’s maddening downtown gridlock as he 

discovers that his latest grand real estate deal has just 

fallen apart. The boom times for turn-of-the-millennium 

Ireland are coming to an ominous end in this timely 

new thriller from veteran writer-director John Boorman. 

O’Leary’s mounting business debts are only the beginning 

of his troubles: it seems that he is being stalked by 

an elusive doppelganger who has designs not only on 

O’Leary’s bank account, but also on his mansion in the 

suburbs, his alluring wife and indeed his very existence. 

Award-winning actor Brendan Gleeson, a longtime 

Boorman collaborator, brings a brooding pathos to the 

riven O’Leary, whose unsettling story is at once a study of 

a newly stratified society and the long-ago stratified life 

of a man. Initially, O’Leary’s family and friends attribute his 

increasingly manic behavior to the demands of his highflying 

work, but soon he is accused of being an imposter 

in his own home, and finds himself descending into the 

carnival of poverty and menace that is the underside 

of contemporary Dublin. Boorman, whose five decades 

of filmmaking include the chilling backwoods classic 

Deliverance (1972) and the semi-autobiographical World 

War II epic Hope and Glory, makes use of a shadowy 

palette and the contours of classic melodrama. He works 

up a jittery morality tale that, strangely enough, seems both 

throwback and very much of its time. 

—Mark Follman 

JOhn BOOrman 

English writer and director John Boorman has practiced the art 

of filmmaking for five decades. His acclaimed works include 

the semi–autobiographical World War II epic Hope and Glory 

(1987) and the crime drama The General, for which Boorman 

won Best Director at Cannes in 1999. With The Tiger’s Tail, 

Boorman explores a classic trope of duality, but he is equally 

preoccupied with the excesses of his current home: “For the last 

ten years Ireland has been on the greatest binge spending spree 

of all time,” he says. “Sooner or later, we will have to sober up 

and endure a horrendous hangover.” 

FRI APR 24 4:30 KABUKI tIgE24K 

sUN APR 26 12:00 CAstRO tIgE26C 

137 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

138 

TrOUBled WaTer 

DEUsyNLIgE 


nOrWay 

2008 

115 min 

dir Erik Poppe 

PrOd Finn Gjerdrum, Stein B. Kvae 

SCr Harald Rosenløw Eeg 

Cam John Christian Rosenlund 

ed Einar Egeland 

mUS Johan Söderquist 

CaST Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, Trine Dyrholm, 

Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Trond Espen Seim 

PrinT SOUrCe Norwegian Film Institute, PO 

Box 482 Sentrum, 0105 Oslo, Norway. FAX: 

47-22-47-45-99. EMAIL: pal.haberg@nfi.no. 

CaUSeS Family Issues, Religion & Spirituality, 

World Culture 

Presented with support from the Royal Norwegian 

Consulate General, San Francisco. 

Released from prison after serving an eight-year sentence 

for the murder of a young child, Thomas returns to Oslo 

to arrange the scattered pieces of his life and pursue 

a quiet redemption. He finds employment as a church 

organist, settles into a small apartment and even manages 

an awkward but genuine courtship of Anna, the church 

pastor. Honest about his lack of religious faith, Thomas 

is nonetheless affected by the music he plays, letting the 

hymns wash over him with an effect at once caustic and 

purifying. He infuses bits of pop melody into these sacred 

works, the most telling refrain belonging to Simon and 

Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” a reference to 

the mysterious circumstances of the waterlogged murder 

about which he maintains his innocence. As Thomas 

grows closer to Anna, the event’s magnitude expands too, 

as her young son—eerily reminiscent of the boy killed all 

those years earlier—accompanies her ever more frequently. 

The tension mounts steadily, nearly overflowing when a 

schoolteacher recognizes the organist as the convicted 

murderer of her child—suddenly the painful intersection 

of their two lives can no longer be shuttered away in the 

deep recesses of memory. Director Erik Poppe’s narrative 

is the final installment of his much lauded Oslo Trilogy. 

While exploring vastly different terrain, each tale concerns 

the possibilities for forgiveness and atonement in a world 

colored by cruel chance and irreparable acts. Troubled 

Water offers Poppe’s most assured vision yet, and its 

harrowing climax promises nothing short of hard-earned 

revelation. 


eriK POPPe 

Erik Poppe is an established filmmaker of commercials, music 

videos, short subjects and documentaries whose debut narrative 

Schpaaa (1998) was the first part of his Oslo Trilogy. The 

second installment was Hawaii, Oslo (SFIFF 2005), which 

was Norway’s entry for the foreign language Oscar in 2004. 

Troubled Water is the third and final part. Before taking on the 

trilogy, Poppe was Scandinavia’s Director of the Year in 1994 

and worked as director of photography on Bent Hamer’s Eggs 

(1995). 

MON MAy 4 1:15 CLAy tROU04y 

WED MAy 6 6:45 KABUKI tROU06K 

thU MAy 7 8:00 KABUKI tROU07K

Wild Field 

DIKOE POLE 


rUSSia 

2008 

104 min 

dir Mikhail Kalatozishvili 

PrOd Mikhail Kalatozishvili, Sergey Snezkin, 

Andrey Bondarenko 

SCr Piotr Lutsik, Alexey Samoriadov 

Cam Piotr Dukhovskoy 

ed Mikhail Kalatozishvili 

mUS Alexey Aigui 

CaST Oleg Dolin, Daniela Stoyanovich, Yuri 

Stepanov, Roman Madianov 

PrinT SOUrCe Intercinema, 15 

Druzhinnikovskaya St, of. 305, 123242 Moscow, 

Russia. FAX: 7-499-255-9053. EMAIL: post@ 

intercin.ru. 

CaUSeS Health, World Culture 

On a remote medical outpost amid the mysterious and 

sublime beauty of the Kazakh steppes, a young doctor 

struggles to treat whatever bizarre wounds the wild 

winds blow in. Working alone, and with far less than 

the minimum of medical instruments and supplies, the 

detached and resourceful Mitya gracefully responds to a 

series of increasingly odd medical emergencies. Although 

the ranch-like clinic, vast empty landscapes and casually 

intense characters give Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s film a 

hint of the American Western, Wild Field is decisively 

Russian at heart, dark and existential, penetrating yet 

distant and hilarious and tragic simultaneously. Gorgeously 

filmed and well acted, Wild Field has a Waiting for 

Godot–like quality, as Mitya and his damaged patients 

battle the harsh natural elements arising from the deeply 

mysterious silence of the steppes—a struggle that forces 

them to confront the absurdity of their circumstance 

and the folly of their human dramas. Throughout, Mitya 

maintains his cool and honors his medical mission, 

whether administering to a sick cow that ate a tablecloth, 

undertaking emergency surgery with only a rock for a 

surface or being forced to fall back on local herbs en 

lieu of modern medicines the government is unwilling or 

unable to provide. Wild Field is a powerful reminder that, 

however distracted modern life can get, we cannot divorce 

ourselves from some essential truths of our existence. Life 

is still raw, wild and uncertain, alternately terrifying and 

enigmatically beautiful. 


miKhail KalaTOziShVili 

Born in Tblilisi, Georgia in 1959, Moscow-based Mikhail 

Kalatozishvili graduated from the directing department of the 

All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in 1981. He 

has worked on several films as a screenwriter, producer and 

director. Following his debut feature The Mechanic (1981), he 

became art director for Gruzia-Film and Lenfilm Studios. He also 

directed The Beloved (1992) and Mysteries (2000). In 2000, 

he founded the nonprofit Mikhail Kalatoz Fund to support and 

develop Russian cinema. 

sAt APR 25 8:20 PFA WILD25P 

tUE APR 28 6:15 KABUKI WILD28K 

139 

World Cinema

World Cinema 

140 

The WindOW 

LA VENtANA 

argenTina/SPain 

2008 

85 min 

dir Carlos Sorín 

PrOd José María Morales 

SCr Carlos Sorín, Pedro Maizal 

Cam Julián Apezteguia 

ed Mohamed Rajid 

mUS Nicolas Sorín 

CaST Antonio Larreta, María del Carmen 

Giménez, Emilse Roldán, Roberto Rovira, Alberto 

Ledesma 

PrinT SOUrCe Film Movement, 109 West 27th 

St, Suite 9B, New York, NY, 10001. FAX: 212- 

941-7812. EMAIL: rebeca@filmmovement.com. 

CaUSeS Family Issues, World Culture 

“I try to hold on to it, for fear of losing it forever,” reflects 

80-year-old Antonio, recalling the image of a babysitter 

from his childhood that came to him in a dream. From the 

very beginning of Argentine filmmaker Carlos Sorín’s The 

Window, we are acutely aware of the ever-forward motion 

of time—the inescapable, progressive path that consistently 

delivers the present to the past. The significance of this is 

not lost on the bedridden Antonio, determined to prepare 

a perfect homecoming for his long-estranged son, who left 

the old Patagonian hacienda for Europe many years earlier 

in pursuit of a career as a concert pianist. As he waits for 

his son’s visit, confined to his room by doctor’s orders, a 

look out the window stirs within him the desire for one last 

walk through his fields, the need to relish the loveliness 

of the landscape and once again experience the vibrancy 

of life. What results is not simply a moving meditation on 

aging and death, but an elegantly lyrical and humanistic 

film. Sorín tells one of his “minimal” stories here, as he did 

with his earlier masterpiece, Historias Mínimas, in which 

a series of seemingly inconsequential moments and details 

ultimately come together in a synthesis of life-affirming 

beauty. Indeed, The Window demonstrates the capacity of 

cinema to reveal hidden truths imperceptible to the naked 

eye yet perceived by our hearts. 

—Jeremy Quist 

CarlOS SOrín 

From the moment he received a hand-crank projector at the 

age of six, Carlos Sorín knew that the cinema would play an 

important role in his life. Having received official training at the 

film university Escuela de Cine de la Universidad de La Plata, 

he began his career as a camera assistant and then director of 

photography. After directing television commercials for ten years, 

Sorin started making motion pictures. His previous films, such as 

Historias Mínimas (SFIFF 2003); Bombon, el Perro (2004); 

and The Road to San Diego (SFIFF 2007), have won a great 

number of international awards. 

sUN MAy 3 8:40 PFA WIND03P 

tUE MAy 5 6:45 CLAy WIND05y 

thU MAy 7 6:00 KABUKI WIND07K

a WOman Under The inFlUenCe 

USa 

1974 

147 min 

dir John Cassavetes 

PrOd Sam Shaw 

SCr John Cassavetes 

Cam Mitchell Breit 

ed David Armstrong, Sheila Viseltear 

mUS Bo Harwood 

CaST Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Katherine 

Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands, Fred Draper 

PrinT SOUrCe UCLA Film & Television Archive, 

302 East Meinitz Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095. 

EMAIL: archive@ucla.edu. 

CaUSeS Family Issues, Women’s Issues 

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive 

with funding provided by Gucci and The Film 

Foundation. 

Presented by The Film Foundation and Gucci. 

Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) and her husband, 

Nick (Peter Falk), love each other but are very different 

people. Nick is a loud and outgoing construction crew 

chief who doesn’t think twice about bringing the whole 

gang home unexpectedly for a spaghetti dinner. Mabel 

is a shy, insecure woman who tries hard to please her 

husband. In fact, her identity as an individual seems to 

have disappeared behind the roles she plays as wife 

and mother. But when others are around, her little 

eccentricities and nervous ticks become more pronounced. 

She talks too much and laughs too much and makes 

people very uncomfortable. Eventually, friends and family 

begin to question her mental health. Nick’s mother 

pressures him to have Mabel committed to an institution, 

and he reluctantly agrees. When she returns six months 

later, she has clearly changed. The strange mannerisms 

are gone, but so is the woman Nick knew and loved. 

Cassavetes’ penetrating look at a woman beset by mental 

illness echoes feminist accusations that many women 

were trapped in lives of claustrophobic domesticity. Long 

takes and closeups heighten the emotional impact of 

Mabel’s increasingly bizarre behavior and its effect on 

her marriage and family. A key movie of the early 1970s, 

the film stands today as one of the foremost examples of 

Cassavetes’ unsparing realism. The seeds of today’s family 

dramas, and indeed, of the contemporary independent 

film movement, can be found here. The UCLA Film & 

Television Archive carried out a painstaking restoration 

process to create this not-to-be-missed new print. 

JOhn CaSSaVeTeS 

For many years known only as a TV actor, Cassavetes turned to 

directing with Shadows (SFIFF 1960), becoming a pioneer of 

American cinema verité, and in recent decades something akin 

to the patron saint of American indie film. His other films, usually 

starring his wife Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and 

Seymour Cassel, have become an indispensable part of the 

American canon. They include Faces (SFIFF 1968), Husbands 

(SFIFF 1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), The Killing of a 

Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977, SFIFF 1984) 

and Gloria (1980, SFIFF 1984). 

sUN APR 26 5:45 CAstRO AWOM26C 

141 

World Cinema

DOCUMENTARIES 

INTERNATIONAl NONfICTION fEATURES 

AbOUT PEOPlE, PlACES, ISSUES AND IDEAS 

IN COMPETITION fOR 

GOlDEN GATE AwARDS 

144 The Age of Stupid 

146 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed 

Country 

147 California Company Town 

148 City of Borders 

149 Crude 

150 D tour 

153 Kimjongilia 

155 My Neighbor, My Killer 

156 New Muslim Cool 

157 Nomad’s Land 

159 The Reckoning 

164 Speaking in Tongues 

166 Z32 

OUT Of COMPETITION 

145 Art & Copy 

151 Every Little Step 

152 For the Love of Movies: The 

Story of American Film Criticism 

154 Modern Life 

158 Oblivion 

160 Rembrandt’s J’Accuse 

161 Sacred Places 

162 A Sea Change 

163 Soul Power 

165 Unmistaken Child 

143

Documentaries 

144 

The Age of STupid 

NORTh AMERICAN PREMIERE 

englAnd 

2008 

89 min 

diR Franny Armstrong 

pRod Lizzie Gillett 

CAm Franny Armstrong 

ed David G. Hill 

muS Chris Brierley 

WiTh Pete Postlethwaite 

pRinT SouRCe Spanner Films Ltd, 9 Delancey 

Street, London NW1 7NL, UK. FAX: 44-870- 

751-092. EMAIL: lizzie@ageofstupid.net. 

CAuSeS Environment, Politics & Government 

Reform, Science & Technology 

ggA doCumenTARy feATuRe ConTendeR 

Cartoonist Walt Kelly first used the phrase, “We have 

met the enemy and he is us,” on a poster for Earth Day 

1970. Eighty-five years later, a survivor on our dying 

planet echoes that refrain, but with less irony and far more 

urgency. In the year 2055, a man called the Archivist 

(Pete Postlethwaite) pores through a limitless digital video 

library in a storage tower high above the stinking brown 

desolation, wondering why humankind failed to respond 

to the myriad signs of climate change. He hones in on the 

late ’00s—as in, right friggin’ now—when records show a 

rapidly approaching tipping point that will spell doom for 

our short-sighted species. The footage unearthed by the 

Archivist turns out to be real-life interviews conducted 

by filmmaker Franny Armstrong (Drowned Out, SFIFF 

2003). Blending these verité stories with cutting-edge 

graphics and a pinch of gallows humor, Armstrong delivers 

a cautionary, pre-apocalyptic documentary that succeeds 

in piercing our complacency to a degree matched only, 

perhaps, by An Inconvenient Truth. In an earlier time, we 

would have rooted for Mumbai entrepreneur Jeh Wadia, 

launching a discount airline he hopes will lift the masses 

out of overcrowded trains. But it’s hard not to think of jet 

emissions as we watch French mountain guide Fernand 

Pareau gaze mournfully down on the glacier that has 

shrunk 150 meters in his lifetime. Meanwhile, British wind 

farm developer Piers Guy faces the nebulous yet powerful 

forces of property values and inertia. The Age of Stupid is 

a potent testament that we are all in this together, and it’s 

time to hurry up and get smart. 

—Michael Fox 


animation in all its forms 

fRAnny ARmSTRong 

Franny Armstrong played drums in the British bands the 

Playthings and the Band of Holy Joy before taking up 

filmmaking. Her first documentary, McLibel (1997), recounted 

the notorious marathon libel trial of a pair of ordinary, 

uncompromising Brits sued by McDonald’s. Drowned Out 

(SFIFF 2003) portrayed the plight of an Indian family threatened 

by the construction of the Narmada Dam. SFIFF’s Golden 

Gate Awards documentary jury singled it out for special 

acknowledgment as “a film of enormous heart, grit and insight 

that is both taut political essay and enormously moving plea.” 

The Age of Stupid is her third feature-length work. 

SUN MAY 3 6:30 KAbUKI AGE03K 

MON MAY 4 3:00 KAbUKI AGE04K 

TUE MAY 5 6:15 KAbUKI AGE05K

ART & Copy 

wEST COAST PREMIERE 

uSA 

2009 

86 min 

diR Doug Pray 

pRod Michael Nadeau, Jimmy Greenway 

CAm Peter Nelson 

ed Philip Owens 

muS Jeff Martin 

pRinT SouRCe Arthouse Films, 80 Greene 

Street c/o Hastens, New York, NY 10012. 

FAX: 212-940-1687. EMAIL: erin@ 

arthousefilmsonline.com. 

CAuSeS The Arts 



At their best, great ad campaigns are magic. They 

somehow transcend grubby, ingratiating mercantilism 

to open new ways of thinking, seeing, being. TV spots 

such as “1984” for Apple and Budweiser’s “True” are 

like great hit singles, while print campaigns featuring 

artist-designed Absolut bottles or the myriad “Got Milk?” 

variations have become endlessly inventive old friends. 

The “Just Do It” campaign for Nike is so powerful it’s 

practically a movement, a provocation for everything 

from personal fitness to political action. Art & Copy, the 

newest film by Doug Pray (Scratch, Surfwise, Hype!), 

reveals the personal and professional stories behind 

some of the most influential advertising campaigns of our 

time. Commissioned by the industry’s One Club, the film 

focuses on several Advertising Hall of Fame visionaries, 

a good number of them based in San Francisco, to 

capture the intelligence, passion and—I know you may 

be skeptical of this—the high-minded idealism that goes 

into the billion-dollar business of tarting up and selling 

products. It might be too much to suggest that advertising 

is liberating, inasmuch as its sole reason for being is 

to put us in thrall to widgets, but its creative energy is 

undeniably exhilarating. Over the course of the film, it 

becomes clear many of the great advertising campaigns 

were crafted despite their clients, almost independently of 

their products. If there is such a thing as soul in a slogan, 

you will find it here, in the words, images and ideas of the 

finest Mad Men in the business. 

—Graham Leggat 

doug pRAy 

Doug Pray is best known for his critically acclaimed documentary 

films about American subcultures. His work includes Surfwise, 

the amazing odyssey of the Paskowitz surfing family; Big Rig, 

a film about long-haul truck drivers; Infamy, a portrait of six 

notorious graffiti writers; Scratch, about hip-hop DJs; and 

Hype!, about the early ’90s Seattle music scene. He has a B.A. 

in sociology from Colorado College and an MFA from UCLA’s 

School of Theater, Film and Television. 

fRI APR 24 6:30 KAbUKI ART24K 

SUN APR 26 12:15 KAbUKI ART26K 

TUE APR 28 4:00 KAbUKI ART28K 

145 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

146 

BuRmA VJ: RepoRTing fRom A CloSed CounTRy 


denmARk/SWeden 

2008 

84 min 

diR Anders Østergaard 

pRod Lise Lense-Møller 

SCR Anders Østergaard, Jan Krogsgaard 

CAm Simon Plum, various undercover Burmese 

journalists 

ed Janus Billeskov-Jansen, Thomas Papapetros 

muS Conny Malmqvist 

pRinT SouRCe Danish Film Institute, 

Gothersgade 55, Copenhagen K, Denmark. FAX: 

45-3374-3401. EMAIL: anne-marie@dfi.dk. 

CAuSeS Free Speech; Human Rights; Social 

Justice; War, Conflict & Reconciliation 


English and Burmese with English subtitles. 

Presented with support from Margaret and 

William Hearst III. 

If there’s a gutsier group of journalists anywhere on the 

globe than the network of youthful correspondents that 

calls itself the Democratic Voice of Burma, we haven’t 

heard of them. Just as democracy depends on a free 

press to keep the powerful in check, tyranny demands 

the suppression of information to preserve power. The 

military dictatorship that’s controlled Myanmar for decades 

utilizes a combination of force and fear rarely glimpsed by 

outsiders. But the eyes of the entire world were riveted 

in September 2007, when hundreds of monks marched 

in silent protest through the streets of Rangoon. They 

were joined by thousands of chanting citizens thirsting for 

change. The predictable government reaction of shutting 

out foreign news teams, unplugging the already restricted 

Internet and spreading propaganda was thwarted by the 

DVB’s export of camcorder footage to TV stations in 

Europe and the U.S. A cadre of reporters risked arrest and 

torture to stealthily record the marches and the military 

response, while their bureau chief, “Joshua,” coordinated 

from a safe house in Thailand. Danish filmmaker Anders 

Ostergaard artfully merges breathless sequences from 

the smuggled tapes with recreations of Joshua’s cell 

phone conversations, crafting a harrowing narrative that 

thrusts us into the protestors’ giddy celebrations and the 

terrifying aftermath. Burma VJ demonstrates the potential 

of consumer technology to divert power to the people, 

but above all salutes the heroes who pressed “record” 

within eyeshot of the secret police. To paraphrase George 

Seldes, journalists still need to show the truth and run. 

—Michael Fox 

AndeRS ØSTeRgAARd 

Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Anders Østergaard trained at 

Central Television in London and graduated from the Danish 

School of Journalism. He’s directed social-issue docs about 

pesticides in Africa and malaria, portraits of the Swedish jazz 

pianist Jan Johannson and the Danish rock band Gasolin and 

Tintin and I, a “posthumous autobiography” of the Belgian 

cartoonist Hergé that aired in 2006 as part of PBS’s POV 

series. Burma VJ won the Joris Ivens and the Movies That 

Matter awards at the Amsterdam International Documentary 

Film Festival. Ostergaard’s latest film pays homage to the iconic 

Copenhagen author and poet Dan Turell. 

fRI MAY 1 6:30 KAbUKI bURM01K 

SAT MAY 2 9:15 KAbUKI bURM02K 

wED MAY 6 8:45 PfA bURM06P

CAlifoRniA CompAny ToWn 

uSA 

2008 

76 min 

diR Lee Anne Schmitt 

pRod Lee Anne Schmitt 

CAm Lee Anne Schmitt 

ed Lee Anne Schmitt 

pRinT SouRCe California Company Town, 2658 

Cunard Street, Los Angeles, CA 90065. EMAIL: 

leeanneschmitt@gmail.com. 

CAuSeS Economic Justice 


Filmed over a five-year period from 2003 to 2008, 

Lee Anne Schmitt’s visually ravishing document of the 

devastation and desolation of California’s abandoned 

industrial towns is a wholly unique meditation on 

natural and man-made environs, at once languid and 

heartbreaking. Set against California’s beautifully diverse 

yet unforgiving terrain, California Company Town 

unearths the blight of industry and the failure of utopian 

naiveté among landscapes that appear ominously 

disinterested in human triumphs and tragedies, desires 

and needs. From the fogs of Scotia, a company lumber 

town behind northern California’s “redwood curtain,” to 

the parched horizons of the Salton Sea and the blandness 

of Silicon Valley, Schmitt—and viewers—witness bleak 

worlds rarely seen by Bay Area denizens or the urbanites 

of L.A. Images of sweeping horizons and vacant factories 

are interspersed with poignant commentary, sparsely 

accompanied by archival sound recordings and footage. 

The voices of Ronald Reagan and César Chávez provide 

alternately ironic and poignant commentary on images 

of giant toppling redwoods and the stoic faces of Italian 

workers, striking laborers, captains of industry and 

Japanese Americans interred at Manzanar. Schmitt’s 

carefully assembled juxtapositions reveal forgotten towns 

anew, their current states of desolation and decrepitude 

now haunted by the past and haunting in their silence. 

In this young and fragile experiment called America, 

plunderers of nature and culture stand condemned of 

far-reaching abuses of the once-authentic promise of 

progress. 

—Sean F. Diggins 

lee Anne SChmiTT 

Lee Anne Schmitt is on the faculty of the film and video program 

at the California Institute of the Arts. Her films have screened 

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vancouver 

International Film Festival and the Pacific Film Archive in 

Berkeley. She is particularly drawn to making essay films that 

“explore the juncture between fiction and documentary.” 

ThU APR 30 8:35 PfA CAlI30P 

SAT MAY 2 6:45 KAbUKI CAlI02K 

MON MAY 4 3:30 KAbUKI CAlI04K 

147 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

148 

CiTy of BoRdeRS 


uSA/iSRAel/pAleSTine 

2009 

66 min 

diR Yun Suh 

pRod Yun Suh 

SCR Yun Suh 

CAm Karin Thayer, Robin McKenna 

ed Jean Kawahara 

muS Shranny, Musa Hanhan, Jonathan Zalben, 

Ronen Landa 

WiTh Sa’ar Netanel, Boody, Samira Saraya, Ravit 

Geva, Adam Russo 

pRinT SouRCe Yun Suh, 2319 Howe Street, 

Berkeley, CA 94705. EMAIL: playbigger@gmail. 

com. 

CAuSeS LGBT Issues; Social Justice; War, 

Conflict & Reconciliation 


In English, Hebrew and Arabic with English 

subtitles. 

The Israel-Palestine conflict is seen anew through a 

rainbow of sexual identity in this heartfelt documentary 

centered on the diverse denizens of Jerusalem’s lone gay 

bar, a haven of unity amid the region’s seemingly eternal 

clash of cultures and religious strife. Presided over by 

tenacious proprietor Sa’ar, who serves as the film’s political 

conscience and is also the first openly gay man elected to 

public office in the Holy City, Shushan is a colorful nexus 

of community engagement, hands-in-the-air dancing 

and late-night flirting, and a safe space for queers of all 

backgrounds to congregate. “It was like finding fresh water 

in the middle of the desert,” a bar regular marvels. Among 

Shushan’s patrons are Jewish Israeli doctor Ravit, whose 

relationship with Palestinian-Israeli nurse Samira earns 

a double “oy vey” from her mother; and Boody, a devout 

Muslim Palestinian who receives death threats in his West 

Bank hometown of Ramallah, where his flamboyant drag 

queen persona, Miss Haifa, isn’t welcome, and whose 

no-nonsense mother prays daily for her son not to be 

gay (before her own closeted identity is revealed). Firsttime 

feature director Yun Suh deftly balances the many 

dichotomies with which her remarkably candid subjects 

must contend as they bravely shun societal mandates and 

cut through barbed wire fences in pursuit of self. 

TOngzHI In LOVe 

In this visually stunning short, a candid trio of alternately 

serious and campy young men discuss the difficulties and 

covert thrills of gay life in modern-day China, where family 

ties and cultural traditions challenge formations of sexual 

identity. (Ruby Yang, USA 2008, 30 min) 


yun Suh 

Born in South Korea, Yun Suh immigrated to Connecticut at age 

eight and learned English by watching movies and television, 

from which she also formed an appreciation for cultural studies 

and visual storytelling. Suh earned a degree in biology from UC 

Berkeley but eschewed science in favor of radio and broadcast 

TV jobs, producing documentary shorts in her spare time. While 

on assignment as a journalist in Israel, the West Bank and the 

Gaza Strip, she discovered Shushan and decided to base her 

first feature film around the bar’s owner and patrons. Suh is now 

based in the Bay Area. 

SUN APR 26 2:00 PfA CITY26P 

ThU APR 30 9:30 KAbUKI CITY30K 

MON MAY 4 9:15 KAbUKI CITY04K 

wED MAY 6 12:15 KAbUKI CITY06K

CRude 


uSA/eCuAdoR/englAnd 

2008 

101 min 

diR Joe Berlinger 

pRod Michael Bonfiglio, Joe Berlinger, J.R. 

Deleon, Richard Stratton 

CAm Juan Diego Pérez, Pocho Álvarez, Joe 

Berlinger, Michael Bonfiglio 

ed Alyse Ardell Spiegel 

muS Wendy Blackstone 

WiTh Pablo Fajardo, Luis Yanza, Germán Yáñez, 

Adolfo Callejas, Diego Larrea, Emergildo Criollo, 

Steven Donziger, Rafael Correa 

pRinT SouRCe @radical.media, 435 Hudson 

Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014. FAX: 

212-462-1600. EMAIL: bonfiglio@radicalmedia. 

com. 

CAuSeS Environment, Health, Social Justice 


In English, Spanish, A’ingae and Secoya with 

English subtitles. 

Lawyers from both sides of the class action lawsuit 

Aguinda v. Chevron have descended upon the office 

of an Ecuadorean judge, resulting in a verbal battle 

that continues into the building’s corridors as attorneys 

grandstand and news cameras roll. By the company’s own 

estimates, it spilled nearly 17 million gallons of oil into 

soils and waterways—a staggering figure that is nearly 

double the notorious Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of 

Alaska in 1989. Lead attorney for the plaintiffs Pablo 

Fajardo and Chevron lawyer Adolfo Callejas litigate on 

location at the contaminated rain forest sites for which 

the plaintiffs—30,000 Ecuadoreans—maintain that current 

owner Chevron is responsible. Adding to the drama of 

the showdown, Fajardo, who began his working life in 

the oil fields at 14, and activist Luis Yanza have been 

awarded the Goldman Prize, environmentalism’s equivalent 

of a Nobel. Filmmaker Joe Berlinger spent three years 

documenting the unfolding court case, interviewing 

lawyers on both sides and following the story from 

Chevron stockholder meetings to the jungles of Ecuador. 

The result is a gripping David and Goliath story of activists 

pitted against a corporate giant, graphically illustrating the 

impact of corporate energy exploitation on the indigenous 

people of the Amazon, who face rising cancer rates, 

birth defects and other health problems as they struggle 

to survive in a poisoned landscape. Berlinger allows 

Chevron to make its case, too, which makes this story 

more nuanced than you might expect. Alternately inspiring, 

funny, disturbing and infuriating, Crude offers a thoughtful 

and complex look at the issues surrounding human rights 

and corporate behavior in Latin America. 

—Pamela Troy 

Joe BeRlingeR 

Joe Berlinger is best known for his work on documentary films 

Brother’s Keeper, Emmy Award–winning Paradise Lost: The 

Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and the Emmy-nominated 

Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, all in collaboration with Bruce 

Sinofsky. He also works as a nonfiction television director and 

producer for ABC News, PBS Frontline and HBO. Future 

projects include a music documentary on B.B. King and two 

narrative features, education of a Felon, about prison novelist 

Edward Bunker, and Facing the Wind, based on Julie Salamon’s 

nonfiction book about multiple murderer Robert Rowe. 

TUE APR 28 1:45 KAbUKI CRUD28K 

wED APR 29 6:30 KAbUKI CRUD29K 

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149 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

150 

d TouR 


uSA 

2008 

99 min 

diR Jim Granato 

pRod Jim Granato 

CAm Jim Granato 

ed Richard Levien, Jim Granato 

muS Pat Spurgeon, Zach Rogue 

WiTh Evan Farrell, Benjamin Gibbard, Daniel 

Handler, Jill Nielsen-Farrell, Ryan Miller, 

Nada Surf, Rogue Wave, Zach Rogue, Patrick 

Spurgeon, John Vanderslice, Graham Le Bron 

pRinT SouRCe Autonomy 16 Film & Video 

Productions, 125 Dolores Street #2, San 

Francisco, CA 94103. FAX: 415-503-0253. 

EMAIL: autonomy16@hotmail.com. 

CAuSeS The Arts, Health, Local Bay Area 

Community 


Pat Spurgeon is the drummer, the foundation and, with 

his cartoonish afro, the most recognizable member of the 

San Francisco–based indie rock band Rogue Wave. A 

musician to the core, he’s charismatic, funny, big-hearted 

and has only one kidney, which is failing. Pat’s search 

for a new organ (he’s on a six-year waiting list) and his 

inspiring ability to balance health and work form the center 

of Jim Granato’s remarkable documentary. Pat’s been 

battling kidney issues his whole life. As the film begins, 

he has a tube inserted in his stomach for twice-daily 

dialysis, a process that simulates kidney function. Dialysis 

now can be done just about anywhere, provided there’s a 

sterile environment—not exactly a guarantee for a touring 

musician. Nonetheless, Pat wants to gig—it’s all he’s ever 

wanted—and the band hits the road on what they dub their 

D(ialysis) Tour. Interweaving interviews with Pat’s band and 

family members as well as footage from a benefit concert 

with Rogue Wave, Nada Surf, John Vanderslice and 

Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, the film is a unique 

travelogue, raising issues of friendship, self-preservation, 

identity, health care, indie rock and, most notably, organ 

donation. Throughout, Pat’s coping ability is a thing to 

behold. Granato subtitles his documentary, “a rock ‘n’ roll 

film about life, death and bodily functions,” which, while 

true, doesn’t quite capture the urgency, desperation and 

raw emotion running throughout. 

—Benjamin Friedland 

Jim gRAnATo 

Jim Granato, a member of San Francisco’s independent 

filmmaking community, has directed and produced several short 

films and music videos. His documentary short, Vivid Dreams 

(2007), has played at numerous festivals throughout the world. 

In various roles, including cinematographer and sound recordist, 

he’s worked on Revolution Summer (SFIFF 2007), The Real 

Dirt on Farmer John (SFIFF 2005) and Audience of One 

(SFIFF 2007), among many others. He also collaborated with 

local punk rock band the Bobbyteens on their cult documentary, 

Rock-n-Roll Show. D tour is his first feature film. 

fRI MAY 1 9:00 KAbUKI DTOU01K 

MON MAY 4 3:15 KAbUKI DTOU04K 

ThU MAY 7 5:15 KAbUKI DTOU07K

eVeRy liTTle STep 

uSA 

2008 

96 min 

diR James D. Stern, Adam Del Deo 

pRod James D. Stern, Adam Del Deo 

ed Fernando Villena, Brad Fuller 

muS Marvin Hamlisch, Jane Cornish 

WiTh Charlotte d’Amboise, Jessica Lee Goldyn, 

Yuka Takara, Jason Tam, Chryssie Whitehead 

pRinT SouRCe Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY 

10022. EMAIL: info@spe.sony.com. 


In 1974, choreographer Michael Bennett recorded a 

series of conversations with fellow dancers about their 

lives spent striving for Broadway greatness. The result was 

the 1975 smash hit musical A Chorus Line, directed by 

Bennett and co-choreographed with Bob Avian. Insightful, 

pitch perfect for its era and packed with witty numbers, the 

Tony Award–winning production was celebrated for giving 

voice to the countless young dancers living hand to mouth 

at the edge of the limelight. every Little Step picks up 

three decades later, at auditions for the 2006 Broadway 

revival with directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo 

capturing the exhilarating, agonizing casting process in 

all its nail-biting glory. The filmmakers take full advantage 

of this opportunity—A Chorus Line is about a grueling 

audition, after all—seamlessly interweaving audition scenes 

with vintage footage, interviews and snippets from the 

unearthed 1974 audiotapes. We are privy to the casting 

panel’s brutally difficult task of choosing actors who can 

both embody and refresh well-known roles. The echoes 

between the present-day process and the musical are 

endless, and the filmmakers brilliantly tease out the most 

telling moments. Dancers struggle to show support for 

each other while fighting tooth and nail for the same part; 

an egotistical young man feigns nonchalance yet jumps 

to attention when a casting agent calls his name; a young 

woman, still chasing her big break, philosophizes that 

auditioning is like life: You must face your biggest fears in 

order to stand within grasp of your greatest dream. 

—Laurie Koh 

JAmeS d. STeRn AdAm del deo 

Veteran Hollywood and Broadway producer James D. Stern 

has previously collaborated with codirector and coproducer 

Adam Del Deo on . . . So goes the nation (2006) and The 

Year of the Yao (2004). every Little Step marks their third 

documentary collaboration. Stern is the founder and CEO of 

Endgame Entertainment, through which he has produced a wide 

range of films, including Harold & Kumar go to White Castle 

(2004), Proof (2005) and I’m not There (2007). His stage 

accolades include a 1994 Drama Desk award for Stomp and a 

Tony Award for the 2003 production of Hairspray. 

Adam Del Deo produces and directs films for Endgame 

Entertainment. In addition to his collaborative work on 

documentaries with James D. Stern, Del Deo has produced the 

thriller Solstice (2008) and executive-produced the horror film 

Stay Alive (2006). Prior to joining Endgame, Del Deo served 

as co–executive producer on Stern’s All the Rage (1999) and 

producer on Steven Brill’s Late Last night (1999). 

SUN APR 26 9:30 CASTRO EVER26C 

151 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

152 

foR The loVe of moVieS: 

The SToRy of AmeRiCAn film CRiTiCiSm 


uSA 

2008 

81 min 

diR Gerald Peary 

pRod Amy Geller 

SCR Gerald Peary 

ed Sabrina Zanella-Foresi, Aleksander Lekic 

muS Bobby B. Keyes 

CAST Patricia Clarkson (Narrator), Elvis Mitchell, 

Roger Ebert, Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris, 

Molly Haskell, B. Ruby Rich, Lisa Schwarzbaum, 

Kenneth Turan 

pRinT SouRCe AG Films, PO Box 400336, 

Cambridge MA 02140. EMAIL: amygellerma@ 

earthlink.net. 


For a century, film critics have separated the wheat from 

the chaff and made the case for great films. But who 

will make the case for these bleary-eyed, ink-stained 

devotees? Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary 

sharply evaluates the history of critical-analytical writing 

on moving pictures in this stimulating tour through the 

rise, fall and reorientation of film criticism in the United 

States: Early silent-era plot summarizers give way to 

the daily newspaper reviewers of the ’30s, replaced by 

auteur-theory debaters of the ’60s, succeeded in turn 

by the alt-weekly thinkers of the ’70s who, finally, face 

extinction via the past decade’s upsurge in bloggers. 

Peary’s documentary begins by calling film criticism “a 

profession under siege,” but this is no strident whine 

from a victim class. It’s a smart look at key figures and 

how they’ve changed public consciousness of both the 

movies and criticism itself. Peary prioritizes the wry over 

the dry, even giving Andrew Sarris the opportunity to 

dish on his adversary Pauline Kael, who was not above 

gay-baiting her rival in the early stages. (His retort: “I 

took one look at Pauline, and she was not Katharine 

Hepburn.”) In addition to the iconic Sarris, interviewees 

include The new Republic’s stately Stanley Kauffmann, 

self-starting phenom Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews), 

pop-and-academic theorist B. Ruby Rich, Boston globe 

daily reviewer Wesley Morris, the Los Angeles Times’s 

sometimes embattled Kenneth Turan and breakthrough 

newspaper-to-TV critic Roger Ebert. Few opinions are 

shared, but all stand shoulder-to-shoulder on a broad and 

abiding love of film. 

—Susan Gerhard 

geRAld peARy 

Gerald Peary, a film critic for the Boston Phoenix and 

a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the 

International Film Critics Association (FIPRESCI), has published 

for more than 25 years in a variety of outlets, including the 

Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston globe, Film 

Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound and Positif. He is the 

author of eight books, his latest being John Ford: Interviews. 

Several of his original screenplays have been optioned, and he 

has also worked as a story editor for documentary filmmakers 

Errol Morris and Ron Mann. 

SUN MAY 3 3:45 KAbUKI fORT03K 

MON MAY 4 6:15 KAbUKI fORT04K 

ThU MAY 7 8:40 PfA fORT07P

kimJongiliA 


uSA/SouTh koReA/fRAnCe 

2009 

75 min 

diR N.C. Heikin 

pRod N.C. Heikin, Robert Pépin, Young-Sun 

Cho, David Novack 

CAm Kyle Saylors 

ed Peterson Almeida, Mary Lampson 

muS Michael Gordon 

pRinT SouRCe Visit Films, 89 5th Ave, Suite 

1002, New York, NY, 10003. FAX: 718-362- 

4865. EMAIL: al@visitfilms.com. 

CAuSeS Politics & Government Reform, World 

Culture 


Apart from his status as a charter member of the “Axis 

of Evil,” Kim Jong Il has remained enigmatic to most 

Westerners, who likely know as much about the North 

Korean dictator via Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team 

America: World Police (2004) as they do from the 

evening news. This is by design, of course. Kim presides 

over one of the world’s most isolated nations, where 

he retains power with tactics of fear, misinformation, 

imprisonment and cultivated hero worship. N.C. Heikin’s 

documentary Kimjongilia gives long overdue voice to 

those who’ve suffered under the dictator’s reign. The 

film’s backbone is a series of interviews, in which about a 

dozen refugees tell their thrilling stories of escape from 

horrific conditions: Multiple generations of families are 

sent to prison camps for one person’s perceived crime, 

prisoners are systematically executed in front of their loved 

ones, and famine and sickness plague the countryside. 

Though the film maintains a furious tone, it is far from 

homogenous. Kimjongilia playfully mixes interviews with 

dance performances, North Korean propaganda films, 

reenacted sequences and animation. Heikin’s choice of 

interview subjects is equally varied—from impoverished 

peasants to former military officers and upper class artists. 

The result is a devastating indictment of one of the world’s 

worst dictators and a call for justice; as one interviewee so 

aptly puts it: “If the person who created such a place isn’t a 

criminal, I don’t know who is.” 

—Jonathan L. Knapp 

n.C. heikin 

A veteran of many dance and theater productions, N.C. Heikin 

began working on film and television projects in 1986. She made 

her film directorial debut in 2004 with the award-winning short 

Mañana. Kimjonilia, which received a grant from the Sundance 

Institute Documentary Film Program, is her first documentary. It 

was invited to the Sundance Institute Edit and Story Lab in 2008 

and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. 

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MON MAY 4 6:30 PfA KIMJ04P 

wED MAY 6 3:15 KAbUKI KIMJ06K 

153 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

154 

modeRn life 

lA VIE MODERNE 


fRAnCe 

2008 

90 min 

diR Raymond Depardon 

pRod Claudine Nougaret 

CAm Raymond Depardon 

ed Simon Jaquet 

muS Gabriel Fauré 

pRinT SouRCe Films Distribution, 20 rue Saint 

Augustin, 75002 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1- 

5310-3398. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution. 

com. 

CAuSeS Environment, World Culture 

Raymond Depardon, the preeminent photojournalist turned 

filmmaker, doesn’t approach ethnography in its widely 

understood sense—the attempt to explain (or explain 

away) the Other. Living closely with his subjects in the 

course of filming, his interest is always in individuals. This 

is all the more so in his series on the changing landscape— 

physical, economic, emotional—of rural France, Profils 

Paysans, for Depardon spent his childhood on a farm. In 

Modern Life he returns to the Ardèche and the people 

he knows, both as a type from his youth and as individuals 

who appeared in his earlier films. At the center are the 

octogenarian Privat brothers, well named given their 

lonely, hardscrabble existence as bachelor dairy farmers 

whose way of life is threatened not only by diminishing 

grazing land and flocks, but by the arrival of a young 

nephew and his standoffish wife who have come to take 

over the business. The philosophical Raymond comments 

enigmatically, “The farmer’s lot has improved, but women’s 

lot has improved even more,” while taciturn Marcel 

grumbles, “Farming can’t be a job, it must be a passion.” 

Other subjects bear this out: an old couple still shoveling 

shit, because their children have gone the way of most 

rural youth—away; a farmer mourning the death of a cow 

(“one of his favorites”); a young couple trying, and failing, 

to make a go of raising goats. Of these intimate portraits 

of everyday passion and struggle, captured in a delicate, 

fading light, Depardon says, “I’ll sing out my love for these 

farms and farmers.” 

—Judy Bloch 

RAymond depARdon 

Photojournalist Raymond Depardon cofounded the Gamma 

photo news agency in 1966, and later joined the Magnum 

agency. A director since 1977, he has emerged as one of 

Europe’s most striking filmmakers with, among others, the 

documentaries Faits Divers (SFIFF 1984) and Les années 

déclic (1984), and the fiction films empty Quarter (SFIFF 

1986) and Captive of the Desert (SFIFF 1991), both set in the 

African desert Depardon knew well as a journalist. His Profiles 

Paysans series consists of L’Approche (2000) and Daily Life 

(SFIFF 2005); Modern Life is the third in this series. 

SAT MAY 2 3:45 KAbUKI MODE02K 

MON MAY 4 4:00 ClAY MODE04Y 

wED MAY 6 3:45 ClAY MODE06Y

my neighBoR, my killeR 

KINYARwANA 


uSA/fRAnCe 

2009 

80 min 

diR Anne Aghion 

pRod Anne Aghion 

SCR Anne Aghion 

ed Nadia Ben Rachid 

pRinT SouRCe Gacaca Productions, PO Box 

1528, New York, NY 10276. FAX: 212-254- 

2690. EMAIL: anneaghion@gmail.com. 

CAuSeS Human Rights, Social Justice, War, 

World Culture 


In French and Kinyarwanda with English 

subtitles. 

Anne Aghion has spent over a decade documenting a 

small village in Rwanda where, since 1999, government 

trials called the Gacaca have attempted to move toward 

reconciliation and healing in the wake of the 1994 

Rwandan genocide, where Hutus killed Tutsis on a 

mass scale using machetes and makeshift weapons. 

The Gacaca are open-air trials; perpetrators of the 

genocide are released from jail and move back to the 

neighborhoods where family members of their victims still 

live. Here, citizen judges try their cases and the women 

whose families have been destroyed are asked to find 

forgiveness for the murderers. Aghion punctuates her 

devastating narratives of recrimination and forgiveness 

with audio from local radio broadcasts and shots of the 

beautiful local landscape, which too easily covers over the 

traces of unspeakable crimes. The film’s unflinching eye 

carefully captures the resentment of many of the women, 

skeptical that these trials will lead to real justice and tired 

of hearing the denials of their killers. Nonetheless, when 

in an unbearably moving scene Aghion films a woman 

who commutes the sentence of the man who murdered 

her children and family, we confront evidence of an 

unfathomable capacity for human forgiveness. Aghion 

provides no easy answers, but the strength of this woman 

and that of many of the others interviewed in the film 

provides a glimmer of hope that, 15 years later, Rwanda is 

slowly seeing past the horrors of the genocide. 

—David Gray 

Anne Aghion 

Award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion has made two previous 

films about Rwanda, gacaca, Living Together Again in 

Rwanda? (2002), and In Rwanda We Say . . . The Family 

That Does not Speak Dies (2004). Her film Ice People, 

about a group of scientists working in Antarctica, screened 

at SFIFF in 2008. Aghion worked for years at the new York 

Times and the International Herald Tribune before becoming 

a filmmaker. 

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wED APR 29 9:00 KAbUKI MYNE29K 

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fRI MAY 1 3:45 KAbUKI MYNE01K 

155 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

156 

neW muSlim Cool 

wORlD PREMIERE 

uSA 

2009 

83 min 

diR Jennifer Maytorena Taylor 

pRod Jennifer Maytorena Taylor 

SCR Jennifer Maytorena Taylor 

CAm Davíd Sarasti, Jon Shenk, Mark Knobil 

ed Kenji Yamamoto 

muS Chris Strollo, Herman “Soy Sos” Pearl, 

Sean Jones, Rey Nieves, Junoon, M-Team 

WiTh Hamza Pérez, Suliman Pérez, Rafiah 

Daughtry, Gladys Pérez 

pRinT SouRCe Specific Pictures, 499 Alabama 

Street Studio 116, San Francisco, CA 94110. 

FAX: 415-552-8979. EMAIL: Jennifer@ 

specificpictures.com. 

CAuSeS The Arts, Minority Rights, Religion & 

Spirituality, Social Justice, Youth 


f 

From behind the headlines on inner-city crime, clashing 

civilizations and the War on Terror comes filmmaker 

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s illuminating portrait of Puerto 

Rican Muslim Hamza Pérez, a former gang member and 

drug dealer turned politically outspoken hip-hop artist, 

anti-drug counselor, community activist, family man and 

devout convert to Islam. By following the gentle but 

determined Hamza over the course of three years—during 

which he and a group of roughly 60 American Muslims 

move from Massachusetts to found a religious community 

in Pittsburgh’s crime-ridden North Side—new Muslim 

Cool offers an intimate vantage on a new generation of 

Latino and African American Muslims, youth in many cases 

drawn by the example of Malcolm X as well as the culture 

of hip-hop to weave a communal identity in the interstices 

between differing languages, ethnic backgrounds, religious 

ideals and the racial and class tensions in American 

society post-9/11. Far from a static account, these three 

years hold many changes and an evolving understanding 

for single father Hamza, who enters a new marriage and 

an expanded interracial family, performs and records his 

music—pointed rhymes and exhortations laid over brooding 

beats under the band name Mujahideen Team—and finds 

both his Pittsburgh masjid (Muslim school) and his job as 

a religious speaker in the county jail subject to surveillance 

and challenges by suspicious federal authorities. 

Broaching urgent contemporary themes, new Muslim 

Cool is a story as inherently complex as it is strikingly 

American. 


JennifeR mAyToRenA TAyloR 

San Francisco–based documentary and short film director 

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor has garnered numerous awards, 

including Paulina (Grand Jury Prize Winner for Bay Area 

Documentary, SFIFF 1998), which she made with director and 

fellow Bay Area filmmaker Vicki Funari. Other credits include 

Special Circumstances (PBS), Ramadan Primetime (Link 

TV), Home Front and Immigration Calculations (KQED). 

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SUN APR 26 3:00 KAbUKI NEwM26K 

MON MAY 4 6:30 KAbUKI NEwM04K

nomAd’S lAnd 


SWiTzeRlAnd/TuRkey/iRAn/pAkiSTAn/ 

AfghAniSTAn/ChinA/indiA/SRi lAnkA 

2008 

90 min 

diR Gaël Métroz 

pRod Francine Lusser, Gérard Monier 

CAm Gaël Métroz, Séverine Barde 

ed Jeanetta Ionesco 

muS Julien Pouget 

pRinT SouRCe Films Distribution, 34, rue du 

Louvre, Paris 75001, France. FAX:33 1 53 10 

33 98. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution.com. 

CAuSeS World Culture 


In German and English with English subtitles. 

“One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon 

it is the journey that makes or unmakes you,” Nicolas 

Bouvier (1929–1998) wrote in The Way of the World 

(L’usage du monde). Steeped in the writings of this Swiss 

traveler/philosopher—admittedly, in his thrall—filmmaker 

Gaël Métroz sets out to follow the road Bouvier traveled 

in 1953 in his iconic Fiat Topolino: from Yugoslavia, 

through Turkey, to Iran, then Pakistan and Sri Lanka. 

Whereas Bouvier had Thierry Vernet as a companion, 

Métroz is alone, at once author and observer, subject and 

object of his own journey. But time has marched forward 

(urbanization) and backward (politicized tribal violence, 

Taliban in the streets), and the East is unrecognizable 

as the world Bouvier described. So Métroz leaves the 

Topolino’s path for the hinterlands, trades car for camel, 

wine for opium, inns for yurts, peripatetic freedom for 

wheat gathering in deep valleys and sheep herding in 

mountains locked in snow until spring, philosophical 

musings for the hard work of “starting my life over.” 

Befriended by womenfolk he dare not smile at; living 

alongside the oppressed Kalesh, persecuted for “believing 

in this world, not the next”; lost in the desert and rescued 

by “untouchables”—at each turn Métroz finds, “I’d forgotten 

I wasn’t born here.” So, in spite of himself, he emulates the 

transformations of Nicolas Bouvier, who said, “If one does 

not accord the journey the right to destroy us a little bit, 

one might as well stay at home.” 

—Judy Bloch 

gAël méTRoz 

Gaël Métroz (b. 1978) still lives in the Swiss canton of Valais 

where he was born in 1978. Having earned a master’s degree 

in French, philosophy and art at the University of Lausanne, he 

has taught literature and worked as a journalist in television, 

radio and written media. The recipient of several Swiss prizes for 

literature and journalism, he has been a traveler since 2004. His 

first feature-length documentary, Rimbaud’s Africa, was shot in 

2005 and released on DVD in 2008. 

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ThU APR 30 6:45 KAbUKI NOMA30K 

SAT MAY 2 9:00 KAbUKI NOMA02K 

157 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

158 

oBliVion 

El OlVIDO 


neTheRlAndS 

2008 

93 min 

diR Heddy Honigmann 

pRod Carmen Cobos 

SCR Heddy Honigmann, Judith Vreriks, Sonia 

Goldenberg 

CAm Adri Schover 

ed Danniel Danniel, Jessica de Koning 

pRinT SouRCe Icarus Films. 32 Court Street 

#2107, Brooklyn, NY 11201. EMAIL: lori@ 

icarusfilms.com. 

CAuSeS Politics & Government Reform, Social 

Justice, World Culture 

Veteran documentarian Heddy Honigmann, a citizen of 

the Netherlands, was born in Peru, and there she returns 

for this typically quirky, deeply humanist exploration of 

everyday resilience and resignation. For Honigmann, Lima 

is “the forgotten city,” though its citizens live in the shadow 

of the presidential palace. If presidents and dictators in 

endless parade have forgotten about the citizens of Lima, 

the citizens have not forgotten about them. In fact, if you 

want a concise history of the “scandals, dirty wars and 

towering inflation” of the last few decades, just ask a 

bartender, a waiter, a leather craftsman. All recall to the 

ever-approachable Honigmann how they have created 

their own reality to survive an economy in ruins. What is 

revealed in their faces and their wisdom is, in the words 

of a poet, “a deep, unexpected tenderness: the paradox 

of the beast.” Take note, ye newly depressed Americans, 

this is something as serviceable as the social contract. 

From the youngsters doing backflips in the street for coins 

to the waiter who sagely admits, “I’m a clown,” survival is 

a performance. For all the good it does these average 

Peruvians, having their eyes wide open is a point of pride. 

But if realism is good, magical realism is better—the sort 

that allows you to juggle glass balls in the air in the middle 

of a crowded intersection and call it progress. 

—Judy Bloch 

heddy honigmAnn 

Heddy Honigmann, recipient of the Festival’s 2007 Persistence 

of Vision Award, is the peripatetic director of documentaries and 

fiction films that have variously explored Paris’s Père-Lachaise 

Cemetery (Forever, SFIFF 2007), music and survival in Rwanda 

and Bosnia (Crazy, SFIFF 2000), middle-aged passion in 

Brazil (O Amor natural, SFIFF 1997), and Alzheimer’s (Mind 

Shadows, 2003). Two vital themes weave through her many 

topics and approaches: memory and poetry. John Anderson 

wrote, “Her films are . . . antidepressants. . . . She champions the 

dispossessed without sermonizing.” 

SAT APR 25 4:15 PfA OblI25P 

SUN APR 26 6:30 KAbUKI OblI26K 

TUE APR 28 3:15 KAbUKI OblI28K

The ReCkoning 


uSA/ugAndA/Congo/ColomBiA/ 

neTheRlAndS 

2008 

95 min 

diR Pamela Yates 

pRod Paco de Onís 

SCR Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy, Paco de Onís 

CAm Melle van Essen 

ed Peter Kinoy, Dara Kell 

muS Roger C. Miller 

pRinT SouRCe Skylight Pictures, 330 West 

42nd Street, 24th Floor, New York, NY 

10036. FAX: 212-643-1208. EMAIL: info@ 

skylightpictures.com. 

CAuSeS Human Rights, Politics & Government 

Reform, Social Justice 


In French, Acholi, Swahili, Spanish and Lingala 

with English subtitles. 

Two men walk through long grass on an African plain. One 

pauses and, his face expressionless, points at an object 

on the ground. The other bends to pick it up. He turns it 

over in his hands then holds it out. It is a human skull. “In 

this place,” says an onlooker who has joined them, “killers 

go unpunished.” The opening scene in The Reckoning is 

a deft and deceptively restrained moment that captures 

the rationale behind the International Criminal Court, 

an unprecedented effort to establish a permanent 

international institution for prosecuting crimes against 

humanity. This documentary follows ICC Prosecutor 

Luis Moreno Ocampo, Senior Trial Attorney Christine 

Chung and Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s efforts 

to prosecute the criminals most likely to get away with 

horrific crimes, whether in the Congo, Uganda, Colombia 

or Darfur. The ICC’s targets are not the foot soldiers who 

committed the atrocities, but rather the leaders who issued 

the orders. This is a daunting task for an organization that 

has no police force and must depend on its member states 

to honor arrest warrants. Through accounts offered by 

victims, ICC lawyers and advocates and at least one active 

opponent of the ICC—former Ambassador to the United 

Nations John Bolton is given a moment to weigh in— 

director Pamela Yates has created a fascinating and often 

heartening account of the pursuit of justice and its effect, 

direct and indirect, on murderers who formerly believed 

they could act with impunity. 

—Pamela Troy 

pAmelA yATeS 

Pamela Yates’ first full-length documentary was the Sundance 

Special Jury Prize-winning 1983 film When the Mountains 

Tremble. She is the co-founder of Skylight Pictures Inc, a 

company “committed to producing artistic, challenging and 

socially relevant independent documentary films on issues 

of human rights and the quest for justice.” This passion for 

human rights is reflected in her past films, which include State 

of Fear (2005), about Peru’s own “war on terror;” Presumed 

guilty (2002), a study of San Francisco public defenders; 

Cause for Murder (2002), which deals with the deaths of two 

young Mexican lawyers; and Brotherhood of Hate (1999), an 

examination of white supremacy. 

SUN MAY 3 5:30 KAbUKI RECK03K 

TUE MAY 5 6:00 PfA RECK05P 

wED MAY 6 6:15 KAbUKI RECK06K 

159 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

160 

RemBRAndT’S J’ACCuSe 


englAnd/neTheRlAndS 

2008 

90 min 

diR Peter Greenaway 

pRod Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix 

SCR Peter Greenaway 

CAm Reinier van Brummelen 

ed Elmer Leupen, Irma de Vrie 

muS Marco Robino, Giovanni Sollima 

CAST Peter Greenaway, Martin Freeman, Eva 

Birthistle, Jodhi May, Emily Holmes 

pRinT SouRCe ContentFilm International, 19 

Heddon St., W1B 4BG London, England. FAX: 

44-207-851-6506. EMAIL: Rebecca.Berry@ 

contentfilm.com. 


“Just because you have eyes does not mean you can see,” 

challenges the great director-contrarian Peter Greenaway 

in his new cine-essay, which reveals the mysteries hidden 

in plain sight in one of the most famous paintings of all 

time, Rembrandt’s The night Watch. Where most see 

only a great work of art, Greenaway dissects the Dutch 

masterpiece to uncover an indictment, a conspiracy 

and a murder mystery sweeping across the ruling elites 

of Amsterdam’s Golden Age. Hosting the proceedings 

like a well-mannered 21st-century judge, Greenaway 

“investigates” each of the painting’s 34 characters, their 

poses and costumes, as well as the picture’s setting and 

lighting, to discover clues to Rembrandt’s fascinating take 

on, and indictment of, the power struggles of 17th-century 

Amsterdam. In the process, Greenaway moves far beyond 

narrative and documentary filmmaking (further beyond his 

already out-there early works like Drowning by numbers 

or The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover) to level 

his own j’accuse on contemporary visual illiteracy. With 

actors (including Martin Freeman of British TV’s The 

Office) restaging certain scenes and Greenaway’s clever 

intellectual side-notes and diversions (the development of 

candle-making in relationship to painting aesthetics, for 

instance), Rembrandt’s J’Accuse will change how you 

view art, and the world. 


peTeR gReenAWAy 

Trained as a painter and visual theorist, Peter Greenaway 

(born 1942) began his cinematic career as an experimental 

filmmaker in 1965. His feature debut, 1980’s The Falls, began 

a decade-long ascent into international acclaim and notoriety. 

His work includes The Draughtsman’s Contract (SFIFF 1983); 

Drowning by numbers (1988), the notorious The Cook the 

Thief His Wife & Her Lover (1989), and The Pillow Book 

(SFIFF 1997). His more recent works have embraced even more 

radical cinematic forms, with The Tulse Luper Suitcase series 

(2003–04) being the best known. 

SUN APR 26 6:30 PfA REMb26P 

MON APR 27 9:30 KAbUKI REMb27K 

TUE APR 28 9:15 KAbUKI REMb28K

SACRed plACeS 

lIEUx SAINTS 


CAmeRoon/fRAnCe 

2009 

70 min 

diR Jean-Marie Téno 

pRod Jean-Marie Téno 

CAm Crystel Fournier 

ed Christiane Bangley 

muS Smockey, Alloy Orchestra 

WiTh Nanema Boubacar, Jules Cesar Bamouni, 

Abbo, Idrissa Ouedraogo 

pRinT SouRCe Seagull Films, 526 West 111th 

Street, Suite 2CC, New York, NY 10025. FAX: 

1-646-707-3879. EMAIL: seagullfilms@att.net. 

CAuSeS The Arts, World Culture 


The district of St. Leon in Ouagadougou, capital of the 

West African country of Burkina Faso, sits between the 

cathedral and the mosques. It’s here that, while screening 

his 1999 film Chief! at FESPACO (the long-running 

biennial Pan-African film festival in Ouagadougou), 

Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno shot this 

documentary about the very different film culture in one of 

the last poor neighborhoods not yet plowed under by the 

bulldozers of the city center. Nanema Boubakar, cinephile 

proprietor of Votre Cine Club, inspects and schedules the 

day’s offerings delivered in VHS and DVD format. Among 

the usual Jackie Chan and Wesley Snipes action films is 

the rare Burkinabe film like Yaaba (1989), which Bouba 

is delighted to screen, since native films are practically 

inaccessible to his customers. Téno interviews Yaaba 

director Idrissa Ouedraogo, who confesses that, because 

filmmakers like himself receive French subsidies, he 

neglects the potentially huge market for native African 

films these hundreds of cine clubs represent. Meanwhile, 

Bouba lays out prayer mats—his cine club doubles as a 

Muslim prayer room during the day—and djembe drum 

maker Bamouni strolls the streets announcing show times 

between beats of his drum. Bouba can only yearn to buy a 

flat-screen TV someday, and thus to compete with the bigscreen 

open-air cinema showing the Hindi films preferred 

by the local women. 

HOMAge 

In Jean-Marie Téno’s early short film, various images of 

public life in Cameroon before and after Independence 

appear as an elderly farmer recalls his past. (1987, 13 min) 

—Frako Loden 

JeAn-mARie Téno 

Born in Cameroon in 1954, Jean-Marie Téno lives in Paris. 

In 1985, his short Homage launched his career as an 

internationally recognized filmmaker dealing with the colonial 

and postcolonial history of Africa. Téno has been affiliated with 

the Flaherty Seminar and UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, 

and has lectured at numerous universities. He was a visiting 

artist at Amherst College as a 2007–08 Copeland Fellow. He 

has produced most of his own films, which include Africa, I 

Will Fleece You (SFIFF 1993), Clando (1996), Chief! (SFIFF 

1999), A Trip to the Country (SFIFF 2000) and The Colonial 

Misunderstanding (2004). 

fRI APR 24 8:40 PfA SACR24P 

SUN APR 26 5:00 KAbUKI SACR26K 

wED APR 29 3:30 KAbUKI SACR29K 

161 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

162 

A SeA ChAnge 


uSA 

2009 

84 min 

diR Barbara Ettinger 

pRod Barbara Ettinger, Sven Huseby, Susan 

Cohn 

CAm Claudia Raschke-Robinson 

ed Toby Shimin 

muS Philip Glass 

pRinT SouRCe Niijii Films, 776 Westminster 

Road, Brooklyn, NY 11230. FAX: 718-407- 

0670. EMAIL: angela@aseachange.net. 

CAuSeS Environment, Science & Technology 

Is it too late to save the ocean? Grandfather and 

environmentalist Sven Huseby was stunned to discover 

in a new Yorker article that ocean acidification and 

global warming is threatening life under the sea. Fish had 

always been a part of Huseby’s life. His parents owned a 

fish market in his native Norway; his father worked in an 

Alaskan salmon cannery; and Sven grew up in Seattle 

eating fish nearly every day. Now Huseby wonders, what 

ocean life will remain when his five-year-old grandson 

Elias grows up? Compelled to learn more, Huseby travels 

with award-winning director Barbara Ettinger from 

upstate New York and California to Alaska and Norway to 

interview scientists, professors, fishermen, entrepreneurs, 

journalists and others about the changing chemistry of 

the ocean and what people are doing to reduce carbon 

emissions. Huseby finds himself enamored with pteropods, 

the tiny, beautiful sea butterflies crucial to the ocean’s 

ecosystem. Today pteropods can only survive up to 

48 hours before the water’s acidity eats through their 

translucent shells. A Sea Change features astonishing 

underwater footage as well as stunning scenes of the 

Arctic ice shelf as pieces of it fall into the sea, making 

global warming a stark reality. This eye-opening film 

sounds the alarm about ocean acidification while offering 

hope for the future by highlighting the people working on 

projects to reduce carbon emissions. Huseby’s quest also 

constitutes a letter to his grandson, conveying his love of 

the sea and his sincere desire that Elias will inherit a world 

with oceans teeming with life. 

—Chuleenan Svetvilas 

BARBARA eTTingeR 

With her first documentary Martha and ethel (1994), Barbara 

Ettinger explored the unique relationship between herself and 

coproducer Jyll Johnstone and their childhood nannies. The 

film screened in festivals and was distributed theatrically by 

Sony Pictures Classics and aired on Cinemax. Her second, Two 

Square Miles (2006), which enjoyed festival screenings and 

aired on PBS’s Independent Lens series, focused on a small 

town in upstate New York and the community’s response to a 

proposed $300 million cement plant project. Ettinger received 

an MA in education from Stanford University. She is also the 

cofounder of the Native American Preparatory School in New 

Mexico. 

SAT APR 25 3:45 KAbUKI SEA25K 

MON APR 27 6:15 KAbUKI SEA27K 

ThU APR 30 1:30 KAbUKI SEA30K

Soul poWeR 

uSA 

2008 

93 min 

diR Jeffrey Levy-Hinte 

pRod Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, David Sonenberg, 

Leon Gast 

CAm Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert 

Maysles, Roderick Young 

ed David Smith 

WiTh Muhammad Ali, James Brown, B.B. King, 

Miriam Makeba, Celia Cruz 

pRinT SouRCe Sony Pictures Classics, 550 

Madison, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. 


CAuSeS The Arts, World Culture 

For three nights in 1974, music filled the air of Kinshasa, 

Zaire, during a historic music festival that preceded the 

Muhammad Ali–George Foreman world heavyweight title 

bout, the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle.” Conceived by 

South African musician Hugh Masekela and his partner, 

record producer Stewart Levine, and made reality with the 

help of fight promoter Don King, “Zaire ’74,” as it came to 

be known, was a summit of sorts, a gathering of African 

American rhythm-and-blues royalty and their southern 

African counterparts. Masekela, James Brown, Miriam 

Makeba, The Spinners, Bill Withers and B.B. King are 

among the stellar talents that take the stage in this cinema 

verité documentary capturing not only highlights from the 

concerts but also the complicated preparations, backstage 

machinations, street life in Kinshasa and reactions of the 

American performers to their ancestral homeland. Crafted 

from outtakes of When We Were Kings—the Academy 

Award-winning 1996 documentary that spun the tale of 

the celebrated boxing match—the leftover footage does 

more than document a hitherto lost musical moment as 

significant as Woodstock. It also captures a slice of history 

from the waning days of the Black Power movement. For 

the American musicians involved in the endeavor, the 

shows were not merely a gig but a political statement 

and a vital reconnection to their African roots. Beginning 

with Brown’s exuberant rendition of the titular song, the 

performances themselves are electrifying, every bit as 

thrilling today as they were 35 years ago. 

—Pam Grady 

JeffRey leVy-hinTe 

A native of Santa Monica, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte studied political 

science at Cal State Northridge and the University of Michigan, 

Ann Arbor, before beginning his film career as an editor on 

the TV series Fishing with John (1991) and the documentary 

When We Were Kings (1996). As a producer, his projects have 

included Laurel Canyon (2002), Thirteen (2003), Mysterious 

Skin (2004), The Hawk Is Dying (2006) and Roman Polanski: 

Wanted and Desired (2008). Soul Power marks his directing 

debut. 

SUN APR 26 5:45 KAbUKI SOUl26K 

163 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

164 

SpeAking in TongueS 

wORlD PREMIERE 

uSA 

2009 

60 min 

diR Marcia Jarmel, Ken Schneider 

pRod Marcia Jarmel, Ken Schneider 

CAm Andy Black, Vicente Franco, Dan Krauss 

ed Ken Schneider 

muS B. Quincy Griffin, Jon Jang, Wayne Wallace 

pRinT SouRCe Patchwork Films, 663 7th 

Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118. EMAIL: 

marcia@patchworkfilms.net 

CAuSeS Education, Local Bay Area Community, 

Race Relations, Youth 


In English, Mandarin, Spanish and Cantonese 

with English subtitles. 

The heated debate over bilingual education usually takes 

place in courtrooms, at academic conferences and in 

editorial missives. At its most vitriolic the “English only” 

camp skews toward xenophobia and racism, while the 

opposition at times sounds utopian themes of American 

global economic resurgence with the aid of multilingual 

classrooms. Often neglected in this discourse is the 

firsthand experience of students, an oversight that veteran 

documentarians Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider 

beautifully rectify with their latest effort. Closely following 

four very different local public-schoolers through an 

academic year, they draw on subtle nuances of the kids’ 

stories to illustrate the complex shades and permutations 

of bilingual schooling. Two children are placed in immersion 

programs to retain their native tongues while learning 

English, and the other two are in the reverse situation. Their 

parents list both familiar and surprising reasons for enrolling 

their children, but each remains a strong proponent of the 

programs despite criticism from extended family, friends 

and a loud chorus of English-only activists. Even while 

dismissing common barbs, the families must confront 

unique challenges both humorous and serious. With San 

Francisco becoming the first city to mandate access to 

bilingual opportunities for all public schoolchildren, this 

thought-provoking document could hardly be timelier. 

A DAY LATe In OAKLAnD 

On the morning after reporter Chauncey Bailey’s murder in 

2007, a sordid tale of corruption and abuse stemming from 

Oakland’s once-mighty Your Black Muslim Bakery unraveled 

in the press. That same day, a police raid in the works 

for months stormed the business and found the murder 

weapon. (Zachary Stauffer, USA 2008, 27 min) 


mARCiA JARmel ken SChneideR 

Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider founded Patchworks, a local 

company that produces and distributes documentaries that 

explore contemporary social issues through intimate character 

stories. Jarmel is the director of Born in the USA (2000), 

an investigation of the professional roles women take on in 

the birthing process, and The Return of Sarah’s Daughters 

(1997), a look at secular women who are attracted to Orthodox 

Judaism. 

Ken Schneider is widely regarded as one of the top local 

documentary film editors. His extensive credits include Peabody 

winner Regret to Inform, a haunting personal comparison of the 

human costs on both sides of the Vietnam War, and Freedom 

Machines, an investigation of the role technology has played in 

the disability rights movement. Of his latest film Schneider says, 

“Bilingualism is a metaphor for what could be breaking down 

those barriers between our neighbors and us. We’re talking 

about transformation: personal, cultural and national.” 

SUN APR 26 3:15 KAbUKI SPEA26K 

SAT MAY 2 3:30 KAbUKI SPEA02K 

ThU MAY 7 2:30 KAbUKI SPEA07K

unmiSTAken Child 

hA-GIlGUl 

iSRAel 

2008 

102 min 

diR Nati Baratz 

pRod Ilil Alexander, Arik Bernstein, Nati Baratz 

SCR Nati Baratz 

CAm Yaron Orbach 

ed Ron Goldman 

muS Cyril Morin 

pRinT SouRCe Oscilloscope Pictures, 511 

Canal Street, #5E, New York, NY 10013. 

EMAIL: info@oscilloscope.net. 

CAuSeS Religion & Spirituality 

In English, Tibetan, Hindi and Nepali with 

English subtitles. 

Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz’s visually captivating 

documentary follows Tenzin Zopa, a 28-year-old disciple of 

recently deceased Tibetan Master Geshe Lama Konchog. 

“Geshe La,” as he is affectionately called, leaves behind 

pearl relics upon his cremation that strongly suggest his 

impending reincarnation. Prompted by the Dalai Lama to 

search for his former master in child form, Zopa embarks 

on a quest throughout the stunning Tsum Valley of Nepal 

to find the spiritual patriarch, thought to now be a little boy 

no more than a year old. Shooting over a four-year period, 

Baratz accompanies Zopa on his trek from village to 

village, snooping for clues that may lead him to the young 

reincarnate. He searches out a few cold-ridden, muddyfaced 

children in hopes that the sought-for youngster may 

knowingly react to Geshe La’s rosary beads. The outlook 

appears bleak until Zopa encounters a cherub-faced boy 

with whom he immediately connects. Zopa’s decision to 

bring the child back with him to the monastery solidifies 

his ultimate transformation from humble servant to divine 

master in his own right. The boy, meanwhile, with his 

parents’ somewhat reluctant blessing, goes with Zopa 

to begin his journey (return?) to Tibetan masterhood. An 

intimate, emotionally enthralling and colorful depiction 

of the living Buddhist tradition, Baratz’s documentary 

leaves you curious to know more and just may even turn 

nonbelievers into the most faithful of followers. 

—Rachel Langus 

nATi BARATz 

Nati Baratz was born in Jerusalem and studied film at Tel 

Aviv University. Since graduating in 2000, he has worked as 

a freelance director and producer, screening work at both 

the Berlin and Toronto International Film Festivals. His short 

documentaries include 2001’s Tel-Aviv-Kyrgyzstan and 2004’s 

noches, both of which were broadcast on Israeli television. 

SUN MAY 3 3:15 KAbUKI UNMI03K 

TUE MAY 5 6:45 KAbUKI UNMI05K 

165 

Documentaries

Documentaries 

166 

z32 


iSRAel/fRAnCe 

2008 

81 min 

diR Avi Mograbi 

pRod Serge Lalou, Avi Mograbi 

SCR Avi Mograbi, Noam Enbar 

CAm Philippe Bellaïche 

ed Avi Mograbi 

muS Noam Enbar 

pRinT SouRCe Doc and Film International, 13 

rue Portefoin, Paris 75003, France. FAX: 33- 

1-42-77-56-87. EMAIL: d.elstner@docandfilm. 

com 

CAuSeS The Arts; Social Justice; War, Conflict 

& Reconciliation 


In Hebrew with English subtitles. 


General of Israel, San Francisco. 

Israeli “docu-essayist” Avi Mograbi reveals the deepest 

longings of a nation in conflict in this genre-breaking 

and original work. A young Israeli, while serving in the 

army, participates in a revenge operation following the 

ambush and murder of six Israeli soldiers. His elite unit is 

dispatched and two innocent Palestinian policemen are 

murdered. The film works as a confessional for the young 

man, who faces the camera to speak to his girlfriend 

about his guilt. By partially concealing their faces with 

digitized masks, the anonymous confessor reveals the 

contradictions between a soldier’s adrenaline-driven 

experience of real combat and a civilian’s need for 

forgiveness. The girlfriend, a thoughtful listener, raises the 

moral issues while assimilating the unbearable thought 

that her lover is a murderer. Mograbi effectively inserts 

himself in the narrative like a Greek chorus, singing a 

libretto of his own self-doubt as an artist and political 

activist. His ironic commentary underlines his ambivalence 

toward his subject. His protagonist is so genuinely likeable 

that you forget what he has done. Mograbi’s ingenious 

film, a self described “musical documentary tragedy,” leads 

us through a maze of national duty, admissions of guilt, 

desire for forgiveness and a soldier’s reality that is rarely 

discussed. A challenging film, the title Z32 is taken from 

the case number assigned the testimony by Breaking the 

Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans dedicated to 

collecting testimonies from soldiers who have served in the 

Israeli Defense Forces. 

—Janis Plotkin 

AVi mogRABi 

An internationally celebrated and controversial filmmaker, 

Mograbi employs innovative techniques and seriocomic musings 

to tell stories that he hopes can change the political reality that 

he lives in. Mograbi works as a political filmmaker in Israel and 

is actively involved in Breaking the Silence, an organization of exsoldiers 

dedicated to collecting testimonies about their service. 

His short film, Deportation, launched his career as a filmmaker 

of note in 1989. He followed this with How I Learned to 

Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) and Happy 

Birthday Mr. Mograbi (1999), among others. 

SUN MAY 3 9:15 KAbUKI Z3203K 

MON MAY 4 8:30 PfA Z3204P 

TUE MAY 5 8:30 KAbUKI Z3205K

SHORTS 

MulTiple GenReS, Many GeMS 

172 Foreign Territories 

173 Handle with Care 

174 No Voice Too Small 

175 Parting Shots 

176 A Thousand Pictures 

177 Voices Carry 

178 Youth Bring the Truth 

171

ShortS 

172 

ATLANTIS UNBOUND IMMErSION UTOPIA, PArT 3: THE wOrLD’S LArgEST SHOPPINg MALL 

MEMO wAITINg TO PIC FOr DESKA 

TrAIN: THE TASHIO HIrANO STOrY 

FOrEIgN TErrITOrIES 

Total running time 109 min. 

ANgELS DIE IN THE SOIL 

The daunting challenges of being placed in 

situations outside one’s comfort zone—whether 

physically or in the mind’s eye—are reflected 

in these penetrating presentations of life 

viewed from an outsider’s perspective. In this 

program of narrative and documentary shorts, 

a couple takes a road trip to salvage a broken 

relationship, a young girl in Iraq witnesses the 

shooting of an American soldier and a boy 

growing up in 1960s Japan finds his life altered 

after hearing Elvis Presley and bluegrass music. 

HISTOrY OF SOLITUDE 

ANGELS DIE IN THE SOIL 

The legacy of Iraq’s chemical warfare is revealed in this 

story of a young girl who digs up remains of dead Iraqi 

soldiers and sells their bones. One day she witnesses an 

American soldier being shot by terrorists and attempts to 

save him. (Babak Amini, Iran/Iraq/Germany 2008, 30 min) 

In GGA competition. 

IMMERSION 

Moises, a bright young Mexican immigrant who speaks only 

Spanish struggles to succeed in school. Using untrained 

child actors from public schools in the San Francisco Bay 

Area, Immersion movingly captures a child’s attempt to 

understand his new environment. (Richard Levien, USA 

2008, 14 min) In GGA competition. 

WAITING FOR A TRAIN: THE TOSHIO HIRANO STORY 

With its title taken from the Jimmie Rodgers song, this film 

paints a humorous and engaging tale of how bluegrass 

music changed and inspired the life of a young Japanese 

man. (Oscar Bucher, USA 2008, 21 min) 


UTOPIA, PART 3: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SHOPPING 

MALL 

China’s economic boom is examined through a visual tour 

of a gigantic shopping mall in Southern China. (Sam Green/ 

Carrie Lozano, USA 2008, 12 min) In GGA competition. 

HISTORY OF SOLITUDE 

The ache of a relationship slowly disintegrating is honestly 

and vividly captured in this road movie with no clear 

destination. (Mathew Szymanowski, Poland 2008, 32 min) 


—Audrey Chang 

SaT apR 25 12:15 KaBuKi FORe25K 

Sun May 3 9:00 KaBuKi FORe03K

CHrOMATIC COCKTAIL 

HANDLE wITH CArE 


The seven artist-made films gathered in this 

program vary from a cutout collage, a handprocessed 

film and a puppet and costume 

drama to two films with 3-D imagery. Whether 

a single shot recording 93 candles flickering on 

a birthday cake or an allegorical recounting of a 

near-death experience, these films remind us of 

the fragility of life and the power of the moving 

image medium—as well as the reverse. 

FALSE AgINg ON A PHANTOM LIMB 

CHROMATIC COCkTAIL 

The vibrant, abstract spirals of Kerry Laitala’s experiments 

with chromovision leap off the screen in pulsating 3-D. 

(Kerry Laitala, USA 2008, 9 min) 

ExPERIMENT ON PERIPHERAL VISION, #1 

In the first of a series of experiments, a man and a woman 

note what they see from the corners of their eyes. (Adele 

Horne and Paul VanDeCarr, USA 2008, 3 min) 

THE PARAbLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY 

Charlotte Pryce’s luminous, hand-processed film reaches 

across the centuries to find inspiration in a 17th-century 

Dutch painting. (Charlotte Pryce, USA 2008, 4 min) 

ON A PHANTOM LIMb 

An imaginative allegory draws on ink paintings, live-action 

and puppets to explore a woman who finds herself part bird 

after a life-threatening occurrence. (Nancy Andrews, USA 

2009, 35 min) 

SPEECHLESS 

This beautiful yet uneasy weaving of images of human 

vulvas and landscapes draws on medical 3-D View-Master 

images. (Scott Stark, USA 2008, 13 min) 

FALSE AGING 

Longing and regret are evoked in this haunting collage-film, 

crafted from the detritus of the past. (Lewis Klahr, USA 

2008, 15 min) 

NINETY-THREE 

A succinct, silent portrait of resilience. (Kevin Jerome 

Everson, 3 min) 

—Kathy Geritz and Irina Leimbacher 

Sun apR 26 8:30 pFa HanD26p 

FRi May 1 9:15 KaBuKi HanD01K 

173 

ShortS

ALEX’S HALLOwEEN MADAM PrESIDENT 

ShortS 

174 

ATLANTIS UNBOUND DIArY OF A FLY MUTT MEMO THE TO TrUE PIC STOrY DESK OF THE 3 LITTLE PIgS THE TUrTLE AND THE SHArK 

NO VOICE TOO SMALL 

Total running time 77 min. Recommended for 

ages seven and up. 

Little kids, runty pups, busy bugs, lost toys— 

even the big bad wolf—just want to be noticed 

and understood sometimes, but it can take 

some extra effort (or a little bit of blind luck) 

for the smallest among us to make themselves 

heard or seen. Luckily, audiences of all sizes 

can be easily entertained by this multilingual, 

biodiversifed collection of animated and liveaction 

shorts. 

WAWA 

A lost stuffed animal passes through many hands and goes 

on a circuitous urban journey. Will WAWA ever find his way 

back to his young owner? (Mona Achache, France 2008, 10 

min) In GGA competition. 

GOOD ADVICE 

With a new baby brother on the way, Rasmus has some 

insightful suggestions for how to deal with mom and dad 

that may be more helpful than he realizes. (Andreas Tibblin, 

Sweden 2008, 15 min) In GGA competition. 

DIARY OF A FLY 

Those annoying multi-ocular insects that buzz in our ears 

have interesting lives of their own, you know. (Gene Deitch, 

USA 2008, 9 min) 

THE TURTLE AND THE SHARk 

A Samoan mythical tale comes to life through beautiful 

animation. (Ryan Woodward, USA 2008, 4 min) In GGA 

competition. 

esurance is proud to support 


MADAM PRESIDENT 

Though we didn’t elect our first female president this year, 

one young girl has no trouble imagining what the world 

would be like if she were living in the White House. Hail to 

the Chief! (Pete List, USA 2008, 10 min) 

ALEx’S HALLOWEEN 

If it were up to Alex, he’d wear a Halloween costume every 

day of the year. But on the one day that counts, he can’t get 

anyone to understand that it’s more than just costumes and 

candy that matter. (Daniel Persitz, USA 2008, 14 min) 

THE TRUE STORY OF THE 3 LITTLE PIGS 

Paul Giammatti narrates a bit of revisionist fairytale history, 

from the point of view of the big bad wolf. Was he wrongly 

accused? (Konstantin Bronzit, USA 2008, 8 min) 

MUTT 

A playful pooch, a crabby farmer and a hungry cow all follow 

the bouncing ball to a hilarious conclusion. (Glen Hunwick, 

Australia 2008, 7 min) In GGA competition. 


Sun May 3 12:30 KaBuKi nOVO03K

CIrCLE OF CONFUSION 

PArTINg SHOTS 


This collection of experimental films and videos 

presents visual and aural sparring sessions that 

may or may not prepare you for various states 

of demise. Does someone need a warning? Are 

your affairs in order? These pieces may leave 

you with more questions than answers, but 

after seeing them at least you’ll know where to 

start—or end. 

THE LAST rITES ME BrONI BA: MY wHITE BABY 

CIRCLES OF CONFUSION 

This winner of a Student Academy Award is a documentary 

tracing the effects of hurricane Katrina on two filmmakers: 

one a suicide victim in New Orleans, the other returning to 

the city while trying to come to grips with tragedy. (Phoebe 

Tooke, USA 2008, 11 min) In GGA competition. 

DANSE MACAbRE 

A literal dance of death emerges in the details of a corpse 

and its unexpected beauty. (Pedro Pires, Canada 2008, 8 


FRIDA IN THE MIRROR 

Twenty women take turns resurrecting the spirit of Frida 

Kahlo. The sets are perfect, the visual style intense and the 

costumes and makeup are spot-on. Unibrows for everyone! 

(Adrian Arias, USA 2008, 5 min) In GGA competition. 

THE LAST RITES 

Wrapping one’s mind around the utter immensity of the 

grounded tankers in the ship-breaking yards of Bangladesh 

is difficult even with this visual aid. (Yasmine Kabir, 

Bangladesh 2008, 17 min) In GGA competition. 

LAST THOUGHTS 

A series of flashing sequences take us through the delicate 

last moments of a dying man. (Paul Burke, USA 2009, 5 


ME bRONI bA (MY WHITE bAbY) 

The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Ghana is 

investigated at the sites of hair salons and markets. (Akosua 

Owusu, USA/Ghana 2009, 22 min) In GGA competition. 

RUNNING SUSHI 

Literal and figurative combat ensues from the mental 

associations made with sushi boats floating by two 

customers. (Chris Haring, Mara Mattuschka, Austria 2008, 

28 min) In GGA competition. 


SaT apR 25 8:30 KaBuKi paRT25K 

Tue apR 28 1:15 KaBuKi paRT28K 

175 

ShortS

ShortS 

176 

FAr ATLANTIS AwAY FrOM UNBOUND UrAL 

MEMO TO PIC DESK 

A THOUSAND PICTUrES 


When can a word be worth a thousand pictures? 

“Lies,” “slaves,” “war,” “Jesus” . . . “AANAATT”? 

These terms need unpacking. These animated 

shorts heap image after image in an attempt to 

edify as well as excite, enlighten and entertain. 

They investigate their subjects through 

techniques ranging from CGI and rotoscope to 

stop-motion and hand-inking. 

AANAATT 

esurance is proud to support 


The inventive Max Hattler returns to SFIFF with this 

perspectival conundrum. Are we upside down? (Max Hattler, 

England 2008, 5 min) In GGA competition. 

FAR AWAY FROM URAL 

A tour-de-force in stop-motion puppetry, this strange and 

charming film features a Prussian soldier who is part man, 

part horse, part suitcase. (Katarina Lillqvist, Finland 2008, 


THE HEART OF AMOS kLEIN 

Hand-drawn, live-action and archival footage combine to 

explore significant moments in the history of Israel from the 

perspective of an aged senior army officer. (Michal and Uri 

Kranot, Israel 2008, 15 min) In GGA competition. 

kANIzSA HILL 

Where the mind goes the body will follow. Usually. In this 

case the head and body are separate (in the literal sense) 

and desperate. (Evelyn Lee, USA 2008, 8 min) In GGA 

competition. 

LIES 

PHOTOgrAPH OF JESUS 

Following his wildly successful Never Like the First Time, 

Jonas Odell again taps a series of true stories, this time 

centering on the machinations and effects of lying—and 

there are some doozies. (Jonas Odell, Sweden 2008, 13 


PHOTOGRAPH OF JESUS 

An archivist at Getty Images details the strategies involved 

in informing customers that there is no photograph of 

Jesus available. Likewise, Santa Claus doesn’t exist (i.e., no 

photographs of his actual person available at this time, but 

we will keep you posted). (Laurie Hill, England 2008, 7 min) 


SLAVES 

Two children abducted by government-sponsored militia 

in Sudan recount their experiences. Heartbreaking and 

harrowing, their stories are part of a series of nonfiction 

animated shorts about children in difficult situations. (David 

Aronowitsch, Hanna Heilborn, Sweden 2008, 15 min) In 

GGA competition. 


Sun apR 26 9:45 KaBuKi THOu26K 

MOn May 4 1:00 KaBuKi THOu04K 

WeD May 6 2:00 KaBuKi THOu06K

VOICES CArrY 


In this program, listeners will delight and be 

moved by the dulcet sounds of a ring tone, 

the poignant last recording of Harvey Milk and 

the musings of an elderly artist who gleefully 

admits, “I live for beautiful women.” These films 

depict a variety of real people and fictional 

characters whose voices impact with humor, 

insight, experience and tragedy. 

575 CASTrO ST ZIETEK 

KONVEX-T 

zIETEk 

A retired sculptor lovingly creates a variety of female 

figures, filling his studio and home with women who “watch” 

him as much as he watches them. (Bartosz Blaschke, 

Poland 2008, 17 min) In GGA competition. 

THE LAkE 

Young Yoni, recently fired and possessed of a hilariously 

malfunctioning cell phone, joins his brother on a very 

particular fishing trip. (Boaz Lavie, Israel 2008, 26 min) 


575 CASTRO ST. 

THE LAKE 

Shot in a storefront recreated for Gus Van Sant’s Milk, the 

final words of the slain politician play in voiceover. (Jenni 

Olson, USA 2008, 7 min) 

THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN 

NEXT FLOOr 

THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN 

At 16, Nhem En was forced to take pictures of several 

thousand Cambodians before they were murdered by the 

Khmer Rouge. Nominated for an Academy Award, this film 

interrogates the photographer who is endeavoring to come 

to terms with his actions. (Steven Okazaki, Cambodia 2008, 


kONVEx-T 

A delightfully creepy, Cronenbergian tale of an 

unprepossessing man who discovers a boil in a most 

uncomfortable place. (Johan Lundh, Sweden 2008, 18 min) 


NExT FLOOR 

At an opulent and diverse banquet, diners discover the 

perils of abundance and gluttony. (Denis Villeneuve, Canada 

2007, 12 min) 


Sun apR 26 12:00 KaBuKi VOiC26K 

WeD apR 29 12:15 KaBuKi VOiC29K 

177 

ShortS

ShortS 

178 

YOUTH BrINgS THE TrUTH 

Total running time 81 min. Recommended for 

ages 11 and up. 

They may be underage, but they’re not to be 

underestimated. Young filmmakers are grabbing 

their cameras and tellin’ it like they see it: From 

voting to NAFTA, Vietnam to immigration, their 

take on the world is both fresh and focused. 

CAUSES The Arts, Youth 

THE FrEEZE 

DAILY BrEAD YOUTH VOICES 

YOUTH VOICES 

Too young to have their votes counted but determined to 

have their views recorded, some Oakland teens set up their 

own Election Day voting booth. (Sydney Paige Matterson, 

USA 2008, 7 min) In Youth Film for Change Award 

competition. 

POETRY IN THE DARk 

A touching tribute to a hard-working grandfather who 

emigrated from the Ukraine. (Daniel Kharlak, USA 2008, 11 


THE bEGINNING 

Clever claymation takes us back to the start of it all. One 

man. Lots of aliens. (P. Roxanne Smith, USA 2008, 4 min) 

DAILY bREAD 

An eye-opening examination of the North American Free 

Trade Agreement and its impact on Mexico. (Yianeth Saenz, 

USA 2008, 25 min) In GGA & Youth Film for Change Award 

competition. 

THE FREEzE 

CHANgE: TODAY, TOMOrrOw, AwAYS 

Even a claymation character can suffer a computer freeze. 

But only he can climb inside afterward. (P. Roxanne Smith, 

USA 2008, 4 min) In GGA competition. 

A gENErATION OF CONSOLIDATION 

NO LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 

2008’s GGA Best Youth Work Award–winner returns with 

a hard-hitting look at a singular event in the Vietnam War. 

(Charlotte Burger, USA 2008, 10 min) In GGA competition. 

HEADPHONE HAROLD 

Turning up the tunes and tuning out the world may 

be hazardous to more than just your hearing. (Jason 

Kummerfeldt, USA 2008, 1 min) 

CHANGE: TODAY, TOMORROW, ALWAYS 

New schools, big moves, mom’s new boyfriend—three 

teenage girls discuss changes they’ve endured and the 

ways they’ve adapted. (Savannah Slone, Hannah Vickers 

and Anna Baker, USA 2008, 6 min) 

NUESTRA DIGNIDAD 

Do Lady Liberty’s promises hold true for today’s 

immigrants? (Kathy Vega-Munoz, USA 2008, 2 min) In 

Youth Film for Change Award competition. 

GENERATION OF CONSOLIDATION 

Amid unprecedented media consolidation, young people 

call for a diversity of voices—and step up to incite change. 

(Samantha Muilenburg and Brooke Noel, USA 2008, 10 

min) In GGA & Youth Film for Change Award competition. 


SaT May 2 12:00 KaBuKi yOuT02K

Program Guide - San Francisco International Film Festival - San ...

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