SFFILM 61 Day 14: Minding the Gap

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began two weeks ago and ends today. Each day during the festival I've posted about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from Minding the Gap supplied by SFFILM

Minding The Gap (USA: Bing Liu, 2017)
playing: 8:45 tonight at the Roxie

With this year's daily SFFILM blog posts I've made an effort to highlight festival selections I've already seen, even if that meant highlighting a television show or an unannounced cartoon that ended up screening in a black-and-white Castle Films print (which was fine, honestly; that show could've benefited from Xenon 16mm projectors to make the image brighter, but the event was really as much a showcase for the musicians than the films; which was much better than Wednesday night's event where the band and its ego completely overwhelmed the image. I had to walk out midway through).

Today, on the festival's final day, I admit defeat. I'd made the best-laid plans to attend Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. and Tigre and Jupiter's Moon last week but couldn't make it happen after all. They all sound good and I hope to see at least one of them in a cinema today. Tigre will have to be the sacrificial lamb; it's just been revealed as one of the eleven SFFILM 61 features available for members to stream online (also including: Carcasse, Claire's Camera, Djon Africa, Louise Lecavalier - In Motion, The Next Guardian, The Other Side of Everything, Purge This Land, Salyut-7, Those Who Are Fine and Golden Gate Award honorable mention City of the Sun). But the most promising-sounding title screening in a cinema today, that I already have a ticket for is Minding the Gap. It's a much-praised feature from the venerable Chicago documentary production organization Kartemquin Films, best known for incubating Steve James films such as Hoop Dreams. James executive-produced Minding the Gap, and it appears to share his signature film's focus on young men inspired by athletic activity, in this case skateboarding. I'll see tonight if the similarities run deeper. I'm excited because Minding the Gap has been screening in festival after festival and picking up prizes at many of them.

In fact, today is definitely not your last chance to see Minding the Gap on a Frisco Bay screen. In May, it will make a return visit to two different festivals, the California Film Insitute's 2nd annual Doclands in Marin County, where it screens May 4th, and CAAM Fest (formerly known as the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival), where it screens May 13th. I was very pleased to see that the latter festival, which like SFFILM had used the Alamo Drafthouse in 2016 and 2017, has declined to do so in 2018.Read my "Forgetting the Alamo" blog post from a couple weeks back to see why this venue change matters to me.

I'm intrigued by the fact that CAAM Fest is moving back to their home base through 2015, the Kabuki. The ownership chain at this Japantown cinema goes back to the 1980s, when it was transformed by AMC from a live theatre to San Francisco's first 8-screen multiplex. When AMC sold the theatre to Robert Redford's Sundance Cinemas in 2006, both SFFILM (then SFIFF) and CAAM (then SFIAAFF) used the venue as their main hub. They continued to do so when Sundance replaced the old seats with more comfortable, better raked chairs and small tables suitable for heavier-duty food and drink options. But the Sundance Cinemas chain was purchased by Carmike in 2015, and I've heard many people speculate that the new owners had no interest in hosting film festivals, at least not without higher rental payments. Now, with Carmike gobbled by AMC, the Kabuki's ownership has come full circle. CAAM's return to the venue may reflect more willingness on AMC's part to host a festival than a stand taken about the Drafthouse. But I'll take it. Look for me at some of the CAAM shows; at minimum I hope to be at the Kabuki (for the first time in over three years) for the May 15th screening of the Shaw Brothers martial arts classic Golden Swallow starring the legendary Cheng Pei-Pei.

SFFILM61 Day 14
Other festival options: The last two days of the festival were originally supposed to involve only two venues but on today, the very last day, a third was added; Lauren Greenfield's follow-up to The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth, is getting a make-up showing from a previous one that had technical difficulties, and it's happening at a venue I can't recall being used during the San Francisco International Film Festival before (though my festival memory only goes back 20 years), the underrated Laurel Heights single-screener the Vogue. If you'd prefer to stick to the Mission venues as planned, your options include the aforementioned Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. or Jupiter's Moon at the Roxie, or Tigre or (the non-aforementioned) Jordana Spiro's Night Comes On at the Victoria.

Non-SFFILM option: The New Parkway's weekly Tuesday Doc Night is tonight, this time featuring a screening of The United States of Detroit, with its director Tyler Norwood and Detroit native Karinda Dobbins in person. The United States of Detroit had its Frisco bay premiere at Doclands.

IOHTE: Maureen Russell

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Maureen Russell is a cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.

There is a lot of noir on my list for 2014.

Screen capture from Strand DVD of Victims Of Sin

1) Noir City 12– The Castro Theatre, Jan. 24 – Feb. 2
The theme of international noir brought rarities and classics from around the globe. Seeing French alongside American, British, rare Argentinian and European selections provided great context, as filmmakers adapted what others were doing and made their own mark. Highlights include the Kurosawa directing Toshiro Mifune double feature Stray Dog (1949) with Drunken Angel (1948) and the wildly fun Mexican musical noir Victims of Sin / Victimas del Pecado (1951) with great music and dance numbers.

2) SF Silent Film Fest
Highlights: the creative Russian film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, USSR (1924). Musical Accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble

Underground, UK (1928). Directed by Anthony Asquith, Musical Accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne. This love triad turns dark, set in working class London with beautiful cinematography.   

Also Dragnet Girl, Japan (1933). Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, Musical Accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald

3) The French Had a Name for It / French Film Noir 1946-64 San Francisco's Roxie Theatre from November 14-17
Great festival with many sold-out screenings. My favorite was Witness in the City (Un Temoin Dans La Ville) (1959) for its story, characters, tension, location shooting and chase scenes through the streets of Paris, and beautiful cinematography.

4) A Hard Day’s Night (1964) New 4K restoration for the 50th Anniversary – The Castro Theatre
A double bill with Richard Lester’s next film, The Knack…and how to get it (’65). Seeing the beautiful restoration, I wasn’t sure if I’d even seen this on the big screen. The audience seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the Fab 4 as much as I was. The Knack is a farce set in Swinging London.

5) Marketa Lazarova (1967) – the Roxie 7/14 – new 35mm print Czechoslovakia I hadn’t heard of this classic Czech film before. Medieval setting shot using inventive technique.

6) Double feature at I Wake Up Dreaming noir festival, 5/25 – The Roxie
Brainstorm. Directed by William Conrad. (1965)
The Couch. Directed by Owen Crump. (1962)

Screen capture from Warner DVD

7) The Unknown (Director Tod Browning, 1927, USA, with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford)
SFIFF – The Castro 5/6/14 – Silent film with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt 
Shown with Guy Maddin's short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1995) 
I’d seen this film before: great characters, visuals and acting, with darkness and humor that Chaney and Browning can give. 

8) Inland Empire (2006) 
The Roxie 7/22 
David Lynch’s own 35mm print screened. I had never seen this and was waiting to watch it on the big screen. 

Screen capture from Celestial DVD

9) King Boxer (Five Fingers of Death) – Hong Kong, 1972
CAAM Fest – Great Star Theater 3/14/14 – Run Run Shaw Tribute
Released in the USA by Warner Bros. in March 1973, the film was responsible for beginning the North American kung fu film craze of the 1970s.

10) Burroughs at 100: The Films of William S Burroughs
February 3, 2014. City Lights Bookstore, with commentary by Mindaugis Bagdon.
A screening of the William S Burrough's films Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony. (early 60s). It was great to be able to see entire short films using the cut-up technique, even if at least one film tested your patience.

Adam Hartzell on CAAM Fest and Accessibility

I've found a place to live! I expect I'll be updating this blog more often once I've actually completed the move, but I'm happy I'll be able to stay in my beloved hometown, even in this crazy rental market. I'll be moving to a spot not far from the Great Star Theatre in Chinatown, which is one of the only cinemas in town I've never actually been inside. It hasn't been used for movies much in years, but will be a venue CAAM Fest, the long-standing Asian American film festival that starts its 32nd annual edition tonight at the Castro. My move will preclude me from attending much, but I hope to catch at least one of the Shaw Brothers titles screening at my new neighborhood theatre this Saturday. More coverage of CAAM Fest comes from Michael Hawley and Tony An, but here at Hell On Frisco Bay I'm so pleased that my friend Adam Hartzell has offered an article on an (unfortunately) often-overlooked topic that every film festival and screening location, not just CAAM and its venues (also including the Kabuki & New People in SF'S Japantown, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the New Parkway among other cinemas in Oakland), should consider seriously. Here's Adam:

Film Festivals make films accessible to us that would often otherwise not be. Those who are excited about seeing films earlier than their theater release, if they even get one, have their interests accommodated by film festivals. Films from other countries are shipped to local venues so one does not have to travel far to watch them. Through subtitles, films that would be partially accessible through images and music are made more accessible through translation of dialogue. Yes, some but not all films ultimately become available on the internet, but festivals provide a communal experience that film-goers savor and the buzz from a festival makes films more 'accessible' in that they are on the radar of folks who might stumble upon them on the internet. Film festivals make films accessible in tangible ways and through the word of mouth that spreads from audience responses that eventually land on the internet as tweets and likes.

Many don't think of these as accommodations. Words like 'accessibility' and 'accommodation' are reserved when talking about the disabled. Non-disabled privilege is not having to think about how your 'orthodox' body is accommodated daily in how buildings and transportation are engineered, in how your convenience is structured for you.

Through efforts such as the displaying of films in foreign languages, film festivals provide accommodations to some disabled groups unintentionally. Subtitling is not closed captioning, as the latter include notation of diegetic sound, but subtitled films provide greater film access for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. By taking place in venues that meet ADA guidelines, many of the venues where film festivals take place are already accessible for wheelchair users and other individuals who require greater mobility assistance.

One of the Centerpiece Presentations at CAAMFest this year is on the work of director Grace Lee and includes her most recent documentary, American Revolutionary, about the amazing Civil Rights activist Grace Lee Boggs. In addition to her political work, Boggs is also a wheelchair user. Her presence at this year's CAAMFest had me wanting to explore something that should always be on the minds of filmmakers and film festivals - accessibility.

Even though the internet has increased our access to media, many of us still enjoy, if not prefer, watching films communally, watching with others. So how does a film festival like CAAMFest make their festival accessible to all who might appreciate what the Center for Asian American Media provides the San Francisco Bay Area every March? In addition, what makes film sets accessible? To find out, I spoke to three individuals about aspects of film accessibility, primarily focusing on wheelchair accessibility.  I spoke with Festival & Exhibitions Director Masashi Niwano about making CAAMFest accessible, with wheelchair-using actress Jennifer Kumiyama about film/stage/TV accessibility, and with local disability activist Alice Wong about her experience attending local San Francisco Bay Area film festivals as a wheelchair user.

Niwano pointed out you don't want to rely on assumptions of venues meeting ADA (American Disability Act) guidelines, because it's not just about securing , say, hotel accommodations that meet attendees' needs. "It's not only for attendees, but also for our staff, volunteers, filmmakers and industry guests who come to our festival. Our Operations team works very closely with the venues to make sure all goes well."  Older venues provide particular challenges "With the addition of the Great Star Theater, we reserved a lot of time making sure that it could accommodate people with disabilities, including people who are wheelchair-enabled. Since the theater recently re-opened and is close to 100 years old, there was much to be done. Their restrooms are located down stairs which aren't wheelchair accessible, so we work with wonderful neighborhood businesses who lend their restrooms."

Part of CAAMFest's efforts to make their venues accessible is to listen to their patrons/attendees.  "...At the Great Star we also spent a good amount of funds to steam clean all the furniture (including 600 seats). We learned from the senior citizen community that dust can negatively effect their film viewing. Of course, it effects everyone and we'll be pre-cleaning all of our theaters before showtime." If you're someone who pays attention to the sponsors of film festivals, you might have noticed that CAAMFest acquired the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) as one of their sponsors this year. The AARP's sponsorship was mainly motivated by the Memories to Light program, a program encouraging Asian-Americans to digitize their home movies for greater archival access. By having a sponsor like the AARP on board, CAAMFest now has more opportunities to hear what the needs of that segment of the population, which includes things like mobility issues, would need to make the festival truly accessible.

Alice Wong, who when chosen as the Angry Asian Man's 'Angry Reader of the Week' partially described herself as "A wheelchair-using, hell-raising disabled Asian-American woman", is also a film fan. I was particularly curious to ask her about how lines at screenings or the scrums after screenings impact her.. Lines snaking around the corner causing consternation for local businesses or non-festival-going pedestrians on the sidewalk can be even more problematic for wheelchair users. (This is something that isn't the fault of the venues or festivals. This is mainly caused by our culture's insistence on providing heavily, publically subsidized space for private car storage along our streets which keeps our sidewalks narrow, but that's a whole other tangent I'll leave in this parenthetical.) The San Francisco Film Society gets high marks from Wong in regards to this specific area of access. "I really appreciate the SF Film Society--they have signage marking a priority line (in the front) for ADA and Festival Pass holders." But as for other festivals, "It would be great if there was language somewhere in a festival's website saying that there is priority seating/wait lines for people w/ disabilities, especially for first-time attendees."

Sometimes there are problems once you get past the line. During one gala screening at a film festival, Wong found the only wheelchair-accessible seats were taken up by sound/video equipment. "The only way I could watch was to sit near the center of the aisle close to the door. It really annoyed me. When I'm in areas like that, I usually get called a 'fire hazard' which isn't always my fault!" I would say it's never her fault, but poor design that puts wheelchair-users into positions where non-disabled people falsely see them, not the design, as the problem.

Wong has two tactics she uses to avoid the post-screening bottlenecking that often occurs at festivals. "After a film ends, my strategy is either to leave quickly before the credits, (I try to avoid doing that because I think that's part of the experience), or to wait until most of the people exit. For some people with disabilities, exiting while the theater is still dark with lots of people crowding around can be disorienting and possibly dangerous. I usually wait until the lights are up and most of the audience has left."

An area of access many don't think about is how festivals present films that feature the disabled. "When it comes to movies about people with disabilities, there's always a bit of a cringe-factor/trepidation when I read the synopsis. If I see the word 'inspiration' I will slightly vomit in my mouth and probably not buy tickets to see it. I understand that in general people love seeing people with disabilities 'overcome their disability' and inspire others through their suffering. Just ick. I find most of these films gloss over the disability experience and are really geared for the self-satisfaction of non-disabled people, (there's usually a charitable non-disabled character)."

As a result of, to use Wong's response, this 'ick'-factor, just like a dearth of Asian-American roles of depth and dignity led to the creation of a film festival like CAAMFest, Wong pointed out that the SF Bay Area Disabled community also has its own film festival, Superfest, which highlights the highs and lows of portrayals of disability in cinema. Put on by the cultural center/think tank the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, even they can occasionally miss an accessibility need, having recently posted their Superfest promo online without captioning. (That was quickly changed when brought to their attention.)

As the experience of even the Longmore Institute notes, seeing accessibility needs and listening for them from your constituencies are key. Wheelchair-using singer/actress Jennifer Kumiyama told me speaking up to those in charge helps as well. When the folks on the film set of The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012) told her 'Whatever you need, just ask for it', Kumiyama never hesitated to voice accommodations she would require. A big problem she's found is "I wish there were more accessible trailers". Due to this lack, while on the set of The Sessions, besides being provided her own portable toilet, Kumiyama was given one of the master bedrooms of one of the houses utilized in the film. She said that even though she shouldn't, she kind of felt bad that her digs were even better than Helen Hunt's trailer, leading Kumiyama to offer Hunt her master bedroom in order for Hunt to perform her morning yoga exercises.

Like the situation Niwano mentions at the Great Star Theater, accommodations often have to be provided by surrounding businesses. Kumiyama said she's never had an experience like that portrayed in one episode of the web series My Gimpy Life where the main character's dressing room is the wheelchair accessible restroom, but at one shoot she did have to use the restroom at the nearest Starbucks.

Kumiyama, who you will be able to find on stage this year again as part of the Aladdin musical production at Disney California Adventure Park, added that "In a perfect world, I have everything I need." But many folks on film sets aren't comfortable broaching the subject with disabled actresses and actors. "Disability is still taboo in a very weird way." She'd like every location scout in the business to know that it is totally ok to ask her what she needs. "It's comforting to me to deal with people who have a take-charge mentality."

And it's that quote that seems to resonate for all three individuals with whom I spoke. Kumiyama works at her best with proactive location scouts. Wong has a better film festival experience with proactive staff and volunteers. And Niwano finds that listening to the needs of CAAMFest patrons makes their experience at a renewed venue such as the Great Star Theater an even more pleasurable experience for all.

Memories To Light (2013)

WHO: Mark Decena (director of Dopamine among other films) has edited together home movies for the closing night presentation for this final evening of CAAMFest.

WHAT: I must admit I'm a bit unclear on some of the specifics here. I know that Decena has edited a film from his own family's home movie footage which is entitled The War Inside, as he talked about it on KALW radio earlier this week; the seven-minute interview can be heard here. 

But the Center for Asian American Media is also using tonight's event to launch a project they're calling Memories To Light, which intends to collect home movies from all over the United States for digitization and potential presentation. The rationale for this is best described on the still-under-construction website: 

Since the mainstream media has given us so few authentic images of the Asian American experience, home videos become the most real way to see how our grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles lived their lives.

A more worthwhile and interesting initiative is hard to imagine; home movies can tell us so much that they weren't necessarily intending to communicate across time when they were filmed; not just about culture but about geography, ecology, fashion, and even the evolving relationship ordinary people have had with the camera over the decades. Although this project is Asian-American specific and I'm about as Anglo as they come, I'm tempted to dig back into my parents' reels of home movie footage to see if there are images of me playing with the many Asian-American friends I made growing up in the diverse Richmond District of San Francisco, that might be of use to CAAM.

I'm under the impression that CAAM already has collected quite a bit of home movie footage aside from Decena's, and that he may have been responsible for the editing of this other footage together for tonight's presentation as well as his own. Perhaps this compilation should be thought of as a film entitled Memories To Light, like the CAAM initiative. Those with tickets to tonight's event will soon be able to untangle all of this and report back; unfortunately I won't be able to attend myself.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People tonight only at 5:00 PM. Advance tickets are all sold but there may be "Rush" tickets available for attendees willing to wait in line at the venue about an hour beforehand.

WHY: The festival program gives special thanks to archivists Rick Prelinger and Antonella Bonfanti, both of whom I've become friends with over the past year or two, but that shouldn't make me, them, or you feel awkward when I decide to highlight their excellent work here on this blog. Bonfanti is interviewed about her role in digitizing home movies used in tonight's presentation in the organization's brief promotional video, which also features CAAM executive director Stephen Gong speaking about the project. 

Prelinger is Frisco Bay's, and perhaps even the country's, leading advocate for increased prominence of home movies in cinemas and in our conversations about moving images. He annually puts together the extraordinarily popular Lost Landscapes of San Francisco events at the Castro Theatre, and his passion for home movies is perhaps most succinctly and eloquently expressed in words in this Open Space blog post from last year. I'm very excited that on May 5th the San Francisco International Film Festival will host the hometown premiere of his brand-new film No More Road Trips? also at the Castro. This film (which I've seen a brief but powerful excerpt from) is compiled from home movie footage and intended to spark a dialogue about the connections between the car culture of the past century and that of today, whether it's sustainable into the future, and if not, what that means.  Preferably this conversation will be carried out during the screening itself among the audience, as like his Lost Landscapes shows, he has designed the presentation to be an interactive one for an audience encouraged to provide a kind of crowd-sourced benshi soundtrack of comments, questions, and other verbal expressions.

HOW: Memories To Light will be a digital presentation with live "performance controlled" music by Davin Agatep. I'm not sure if the audience will be encouraged to interject during this screening like they are at Prelinger's, but I'm sure they'll be told one way or another beforehand.

15 (2003)

WHO: Royston Tan wrote & directed this, his first feature film.

WHAT: Well known to Singapore moviegoers but practically unknown elsewhere is the fact that the city-state has one of the most restrictive motion picture rating systems around. As one of the producers of 15, Eric Khoo, puts it in an interview with Tilman-Baumgärtel (published in his book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema):

I only wish they would bring down the age for R-rated pictures. I don't think anywhere else in the world, you have to be twenty-one to see a film. You can have sex when you are sixteen, but you cannot watch Borat!

Under such conditions, it should be unsurprising that 15 had to endure a record 27 cuts by Singapore censors before it could be released theatrically in the country it was made, And even then, only those over 21 were allowed to watch it. Combined with a ban on local home video release, it meant that teenagers of the age depicted in the film (the title derives from the age of the adolescents we see on the screen- most of them non-actors recruited from real youth gangs) would have to wait six years to be old enough to legally view the film. 

It's perhaps even less surprising that filmmakers like Tan and Khoo (whose first feature as a director was the punk-rock-inflected Mee Pok Man) would begin their feature filmmaking careers with films that pushed censorship boundaries- the most passionate independent artists are often inclined to press against whatever boundary they feel constraining them, and if, as in Singapore, that boundary is the censor's razor they gravitate to material that gives it resistance. 15 features drugs, violence, and full-frontal male nudity, among other screen taboos. No wonder it became one of the most notorious - and internationally popular - films ever produced on the island nation.

WHERE/WHEN: A CAAMFest presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only at 7:00.

WHY: CAAMFest is one of the Bay Area's great examples of a film festival loyal to the filmmakers it helps local audiences discover, and to the audiences who appreciate discovering them. Royston Tan's relationship with the festival is a great example. Though the festival hasn't shown every one of his films made over the years, in 2002 (back when it was called the SF International Asian American Film Festival) it screened his short Sons (which is now viewable legally and for free via Youtube), followed up by programming a 35-minute version of 15 the following year. By this time the feature version was in the pipeline and it was screened at the 2004 SFIAAFF; that's where I saw it. I barely remember it so it's clearly time to view it again and the CAAM programmers know it, bringing Tan himself to discuss it and the rest of his career tonight in conversation with Valerie Soe. It's the culmination of a mini-retrospective of Tan's work that also included a festival reprise of his biggest hometown commercial success 881 and the U.S. premiere of his latest film Old Romances. It's great to have the festival bring back its tradition of hosting career surveys of Asian auteurs after a couple-year hiatus.

15 is not the only case of CAAMFest/SFIAAFF screening a short film and later an feature-length remake or sequel version. I'm sure there have been many over the festival history but what comes to mind right now is the 2002 screening of SF Art Institute graduate Michael Shaowanasai's To Be...Or Not To Be?: The Adventures of Iron Pussy III, which foretold a 2004 showing of Shaowanasai's The Adventure of Iron Pussy, co-directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I suppose I think of this example because the short video work that preceded Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel at CAAMFest screenings this past weekend, Jennifer Phang's Advantageous, is getting expanded into a feature-length film later this year. It's good news, because although the short is thought-provoking and emotionally powerful on its own, its science-fiction concept feels at times constrained by its 25-minute frame and deserves a larger canvas. Perhaps we'll see it screened at a future CAAMFest...

HOW: 15 shows via a 35mm print.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

WHAT: A little over two years ago, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives played a brief run in Frisco Bay cinemas, and I was interviewed by Sara Vizcarrando for an episode of her much-missed show "Look Of The Week". You can hear what I had to say by viewing this (my segment begins shortly after the five minute mark), but here's a brief transcribed excerpt:

[Apichatpong is] really exploring veils. There's the veil between life and death, of course. All these ghosts coming back. And then there's the veil, which he's always been interested in in his films, the veil between cinema and reality...  

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive tonight only at 7:00 PM.

WHY: As pleased as I was that CAAMFest chose to bring Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel to the festival this year, I realize this pleasure comes as a loyal fan of the Thai director, interested in following him on any artistic journeys he decides to take. But Mekong Hotel is not a particularly good introduction to Apichatpong's oeuvre, or even as satisfying an experience for a confirmed fan; it's formally stripped-down and not nearly as aesthetically luxurious as a film like Uncle Boonmee. Watching it at the PFA Saturday was a treat, but left me wanting to see one of his more eye-popping films. Thankfully the opportunity has arrived just a few days later; it's unclear whether this is really a CAAMFest screening or not, however; the PFA site indicates it is, but it's nowhere to be found on the festival website or in its printed materials.

Both Mekong Hotel and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives deal with "hauntings"- a theme and a word that has characterized Apichatpong's filmmaking for much of his career, but find more explicit expression lately. The reason the filmmaker was unable to be present at this weekend's screenings is because he was in the United Arab Emirates, presenting films picked by himself and a number of other curators (including at least a couple familiar to San Francisco cinephiles: Tilda Swinton and Steve Anker) to screen at the eleventh Sharjah Biennial (yes, this year's iteration of the event that had a vexed interaction with Caveh Zahedi two years ago). For this event, Apichatpong asked curators to pick works that have "haunted them" and his own curatorial selections include "haunted" films by Georges Méliès and Osamu Tezuka among others I haven't myself seen; the full list is found here.

HOW: 35mm print.

The Cheer Ambassadors (2012)

WHO: Linguist and photographer Luke Cassady-Doiron makes his documentary directing debut with this. As a US citizen living in Bangkok since 2005, he could qualify as an "American Asian" filmmaker included at a festival that specializes in films made by Asian American filmmakers. Close enough, right?

WHAT: The Cheer Ambassadors is a documentary as peppy, poppy, and eager to inspire audiences as is its subject: the Bangkok University coed cheerleading squad, which made a splash at the 2009 Universal Cheerleaders Association international competition in Orlando, Florida. 

Like a stereotypical cheerleader, it's an attractive film full of enthusiasm, but is not intellectually deep. Heady topics relevant to the story are touched upon but not really explored. Is cheerleading a real sport or a form of performance? Is there a difference? What is it like for male and female athletes to compete on one team together, especially in a country that considers itself conservative with regard to relations between unmarried men and women? What does it say about globalization that such an American activity has caught hold so firmly among young people half a world away? These questions may be raised but not much progress is made toward helping the audience come closer to answers to them. That's okay. Cassady-Doiron does a good job of making an engaging entertainment out of his material, taking a more emotional than intellectual route to resonance and depth by spending time interviewing the Bangkok cheerleaders about their own dreams, life histories and personal struggles trying to stay focused on their training and development as athletes and teammates.

What most interests me about The Cheer Ambassadors is how it was constructed. The various aspect ratios, levels of resolution, and styles of camera movement suggest that many different cameras and cinematographers were used to capture footage in the film. Clearly some shots come directly from television broadcasts, while others appear to be handheld, consumer-grade (perhaps even cellphone) cameras. Yet the interviews and much of the training footage appears to be shot in HD by Cassady-Doiron himself. Though all the footage is edited together deftly to create a clear narrative, with the addition of some handsome animated sequences to fill certain gaps (the latter technique used by Caveh Zahedi among other seasoned documentarians), an attentive viewer may wonder if the director and his camera were even on hand for certain critical moments, including the Florida culmination. All documentaries are chronicles of history once they hit the screen of course, but might this one be, like Budrus or Grizzly Man, a film in which the director got involved in its making after the story was already over, and more a feat of collecting and editing pre-existing footage (while adding supplemental contextual material like the interviews), than a feat of embedded documenting, like in Restrepo or The White Diamond? If so, perhaps it also explains why my friend Adam Hartzell in his otherwise-positive review noticed that demonstration of the specific innovations the Thai team brought to international cheerleading felt missing from the film. And it makes the all-but-seamless construction of the film seem all the more impressive an achievement on the part of Cassady-Doiron and his editor Duangporn Pakavirojkul.

WHERE/WHEN: One last CAAMFest screening 8:30 tonight at the Kabuki.

WHY: If you've been watching too many slow-paced movies on grim subjects (as there are certainly some in the program, though not unworthwhile) at this weekend's CAAMFest, The Cheer Ambassadors might be just the right pick-me-up. Not that there aren't moments of darkness in the film, but it certainly maintains an appropriately cheery outlook for most of its running time. 

It's an extremely tenuous connection, but yesterday the latest issue of the Australian film journal Senses Of Cinema dropped, including my new article on a completely different film featuring an American-style performance/athletic activity imported to an Asian country: Carmen Comes Home, starring Hideko Takamine as a striptease dancer visiting her traditional Japanese village for the first time since her career change.

HOW: Digital screening of a digital production.

When Night Falls (2012)

WHO: Ying Liang directed this, following-up on his previous films Taking Father Home, The Other Half, Good Cats and the short Condolences.

WHAT: Sometimes the most austere movies can become political fireballs. This video-film about the repercussions of a young man's violent acts upon representatives of the Chinese state upon the man's mother Wang Jingmei, has created its own state repercussions on its filmmaker, documented up through October on this website. Now it finally has its first screenings inside the United States, and I was able to view it. Nothing I could say, however, would be as cogent as what Michael Sicinski wrote on the film last summer. A sample:

Part of what makes When Night Falls excel as a work of cinema, as well as a political intervention, comes from Ying’s harnessing of isolation and pathos for the express purpose of displaying, through spatial articulation and physical bombardment, what it feels like when the entire apparatus of the Chinese government bears down on a lone individual. A great deal of this results from Nai’s performance as Wang, whose slow, hunched movements through Ying’s deep, recessed compositions return a specific social valence to Antonioni/Tsai architectural imprisonment. One particularly fine shot finds Wang walking alone through a street towards the camera as an unseen loudspeaker trumpets the “splendid” Olympic Games. A woman bikes past her quizzically. The scene would be Kafkaesque except there is no paranoia, only bone-aching sorrow.

WHERE/WHEN: Has one final CAAMFest screening today at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: If you haven't yet had a chance to sample the wave of micro-budgeted video features coming out of China, this is a good opportunity to start. Though some of Ying's prior films have screened at local festivals before, most of the examples of this wave seen by Frisco Bay cinema audiences have been documentaries like those presented at showcases at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and New People. Though I got a sense of Taking Father Home as less evidently excited about the possibilities of oppositional filmmaking than some of the best of these documentaries I've sampled (notably Ghost Town and Disorder), it helps round out a more complete picture of the kind of image-making being performed well outside the sanction of the Beijing government, and would give a newcomer to the movement a strong sample of the political and aesthetic strategies being utilized in the world's most populated country.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

Mekong Hotel (2012)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasetkaul wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Mekong Hotel feels more like a conceptual piece, than an aesthetic work like Apichatpong's best-known films distributed on 35mm prints and commercial DVDs. Very static shots and simple blocking foreground thematic concerns over visual ones. Shot entirely in a hotel beside the titular river marking the border between Thailand and Laos, actors appear to play themselves, discussing current and past events calmly until, just as matter-of-factly, some of their bodies become inhabited by carnivorous "Phi Pob" ghosts. A plaintive guitar soundtrack may seem incongruous for a quasi-horror story, but its agreeability indicates just how normal spiritual visitations are considered in the region. The final shot of jet-skiers on the Mekong is reminiscent of James Benning.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens via CAAMFest twice this weekend: today at 4:00 PM at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and tomorrow at 2:10 at New People.

WHY: It's a pretty good time to be a Frisco Bay fan of so-called "Thai New Wave" filmmakers. Not only are we getting two screenings of Mekong Hotel followed by one of Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives this Tuesday, in conjunction with access to his Emerald installation in Berkeley through next month, but Yerba Buena Center For the Arts has recently announced a sizable retrospective devoted to perhaps the second-best-known Thai filmmaker currently on the international festival circuit. Pen-ek Ratanaruang will be on hand for screenings of his two most recent features, Headshot and Nymph, and four more of his features will screen in 35mm prints (two of which, Ploy and Invisible Waves, will be making their local cinema premieres along with Headshot). Those of us who are fans of 6ixtynin9 and/or Last Life in the Universe will also be pleased to have opportunities to see them on the big screen again.

HOW: Digital screenings of a digital production, paired with local filmmaker Jennifer Phang's latest digital short Advantageous.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya: Filmmaker On A Voyage (2012)

WHO: Marilou Diaz-Abaya, the subject of this documentary, directed Reef Hunters, Jose Rizal and more than a dozen other films before her death of breast cancer at age 57 last October.

WHAT: Constructed mostly of talking-head interviews with figures in the Phillipine film industry, including generous clips of Diaz-Abaya speaking about her career, this television-friendly profile doesn't break cinematic ground in its own right, but does a good job of chronicling how a Filipina director broke ground in a male-dominated industry for more than thirty years. We learn how Diaz-Abaya began making films as an acolyte of the famed Lino Brocka, how she maintained her career through the 1980s and 1990s, how she innovated in broadcast media, producing television satire such as Sic O' Clock News, how she became an advocate for social and environmental issues through her filmmaking as well as outside of it, how she devoted herself to teaching a new generation of filmmakers through her film school outside of Manila, and how she persevered as a director in the 2000s despite her battle with cancer. 

This is not an impartial piece of journalism but a loving tribute made by Diaz-Abaya's brother-in-law's ex-wife Mona Lisa Yuchengco, a Filipina making her film directing debut at age 62. But it still serves as an excellent introduction to the inspiring life and work of a neglected artist; numerous clips from her filmography tantalize the viewer who hasn't seen many (or any) of her completed works. I've only seen two myself years ago; I loved Reef Hunters, a gripping morality tale investigating the authority adults wield over children, especially in an isolated environment like that of an ocean vessel, and was less enthralled by New Moon, a well-intentioned plea for empathy for the plight of innocent Muslims trapped by violent cycles in Mindanao. But after watching Filmmaker On A Voyage I want to dive into the rest of her films as soon as I can.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens via CAAM Fest at the Kabuki twice: a free screening this afternoon at 2:30 PM and a reprise showing at normal festival prices at 12:40 PM on Sunday, March 17th.

WHY: CAAM Fest is the longest-running film festival devoted to screening the work of Asian-American and Asian filmmakers, and though it began last night with a screening of the sports doc Linsanity, the deluge of viewing options begins tonight. Cheryl Eddy, Kimberly Chun, and Michael Hawley have each provided previews of selected films in this year's line-up, but none of them mention Marilou Diaz-Abaya: Filmmaker On A Voyage. Yet a film about an independent-minded filmmaker seems the ideal way to start a weekend of screenings, especially since its first showing is a freebie!

HOW: Digital projection of a digital production.

Like Someone In Love (2012)

WHO: Abbas Kiarostami wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I saw this with my friend Ryland last Friday, a kind of make-up date for a screening we'd tried to attend at the Mill Valley Film Festival last fall that was cancelled 5 minutes into the movie when it was discovered the fest's DCP drive lacked an English subtitle file. If I'd seen more than 5 unsubtitled minutes of it in 2012  it'd have been one of my favorites of the year. Now it's in pole position to be my best of 2013. I'd write more about it but I'd rather see it again first, so let me direct you to an excellent (essentially spoiler-free) review by the perceptive Steven Boone.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens three times daily at the Opera Plaza and four times daily at the Shattuck in Berkeley. It will continue for another week starting this Friday at the Opera Plaza, but is being edged off the Shattuck screen after Thursday, to make room for A Fierce Green Fire, Beyond The Hills, etc.

WHY: CAAMFest, Frisco Bay's biggest annual showcase of contemporary independent cinema by filmmakers from Asia and from the Asian Diaspora, is just around the corner and I'll be posting recommendations for films in its program starting this Friday. Like Someone In Love could easily be placed among the selections; like CAAMFest selection Inheritance it's made by an Iranian-born filmmaker working outside Iran. In this case, in Japan with a Japanese cast and crew; CAAMfest has a relatively small number of Japanese films in its program this year, with just one feature (Sion Sono's Land of Hope) and one short (No Longer There) in the festival. Like Someone In Love is a terrific example of a filmmaker working on a low budget in a foreign country, and I suspect anyone interested in the kinds of films CAAM programs would get a lot out of squeezing this into their screening schedule over the next couple weeks, whether in the next couple days or in a free slot after CAAMFest begins.

HOW: Like Someone In Love screens as a digital projection at both theatres.

Cops (1922)

WHO: The great Buster Keaton wrote, directed and starred in this, along with his frequent co-writer and co-director Edward Cline, who in this instance also appears in the film in a small role.

WHAT: Leave it to Buster to take one of the most overused clichés of silent cinema, the chase involving a bunch of bumbling police officers, and turn it into something brilliant and sublime, just by extending the scale of the trope well past the point of any semblance of logic. While the Keystone Kops films were extremely popular in the 1910s, one might say Cops expands on their concept in a way most appropriate to how the popular view of policemen changed after Prohibition.

This is not the only topical aspect of this film. There's a gag that depends on knowledge of "goat gland" treatments, a chapter in American quackery that is almost entirely forgotten today, but was widely enough known in the 1920s to become the nickname for silent movies which contained one reel of talking scenes, uniformly for publicity and not artistic purposes, when sound came to cinema later in the decade. Goat gland treatments were disgusting enough that I'm not going to get into their so-called "medical" details, but if you want to understand this gag you might want to read about John R. Brinkley, but please, not while eating. Honestly, it's just one gag and not "getting it" won't hinder the rest of the film in the least.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the beautifully restored and shamefully underused (as a film screening space, at least) California Theatre in downtown San Jose at 7:00.

WHY: Cops plays as part of the Cinequest Film Festival's annual silent film presentation at the California Theatre, always with a live organist performing. The festival ends with the weekend, but before it does there are three full days of screenings, including the local premiere of Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children a week before its appearance at CAAMFest, an Argentine film featuring film critic Jorge Jellinek, last seen on screen in A Useful Life, and a 4K digital presentation of the restoration of Dr. Strangelove that San Francisco Silent Film Festival audiences got to see a sample of last summer. (It had phenomenal clarity compared side-by-side against an unrestored 35mm print- perhaps too much clarity, as it might be distracting to be able to make out background details I'm not sure Stanley Kubrick expected to register on screen.) 

HOW: Cops screens prior to the feature-length Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last!, both in 35mm prints, with live musical accompaniment by my own favorite silent film organist Dennis James, whose performances at local venues I try hard not to miss, yet somehow I'm not sure I've heard him perform for a Harold Lloyd film before- he's certainly excellent with Keaton, and is the one who reminded me of the aforementioned "goat gland" gag while I was preparing this post. He also had this to say about Harold Lloyd:

I spent the entire Summer of 1972 as a guest at 'Greenacres'- Harold Lloyd's mansion up in Benedict Canyon above Hollywood. Harold had died earlier that year and my residency was arranged by the executor of his estate. They had kept the house staff under employment, so I had a laundress, cook and even chauffeur plus vintage Rolls Royce at my command . . . talk about seeing just how those movie stars lived!

Emerald (2007)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

WHAT: As a long-time, loyal Apichatpong fan, I've been about as interested in seeing and engaging with his video works as with his better-known 35mm features. Luckily, local curators have been very helpful in helping me pursue this interest over the years. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, for example, has screened his 2001 work Haunted Houses and programmed two sets of his shorts. And last year the Asian Art Museum included his installation Phantoms of Nabua as a centerpiece of a group show; I got to see it there many times. (It was also acquired for the SFMOMA collection as well though it has not yet screened there; my girlfriend Kerry Laitala recently highlighted it along with other works in the collection for the SFMOMA Open Space blog.)

But the above are all purely single-channel works, and I've until now only been able to read about Apichatpong's installations that involve more than just an image on a screen in a darkened room. Emerald (known also as Morakot, a transliteration of the Thai word for the gemstone) is the first I've been able to view. Named for the shut-down Bangkok hotel where it was shot, this 10-minute looped video is projected onto a screen across the room from its ingress. Between the screen and the entering viewer hangs a lantern emitting a low level of green light, "creating a focal point and a meditative portal into the space of the single-channel video", as Dena Beard writes in the exhibition brochure.

Not unlike in his 1999 work Windows, the images on the screen are evocative of abandonment; most contain no human figures but the traces of them in these hotel bedrooms remain. The air is filled with illuminated particles of dust and feathers; have birds made a home of this structure in the absence of tourists and travelers? The soundtrack is certainly human though: voices of a few of Apichatpong's favorite actors from his features, including Jenjira Pongpas (the facial-cream fanatic from Blissfully Yours) and Sakda Kaewbuadee (the soldier from Tropical Malady and monk from Syndromes and a Century), relate personal stories from their own lives in a conversation that recalls the first-person narratives the filmmaker elicits in his debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon.  

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Berkeley Art Museum during its gallery hours (11AM to 5PM Wednesday through Sunday) until April 21st.

WHY: As many associations as I've made above between Emerald and previous Apichatpong Weerasethakul works, it also seems to anticipate his most recent featurette Mekong Hotel, which is (as its title suggests) another video work shot entirely in a hotel, this time one in Nong Khai, a small city on the Thai bank of the river that delineates most of the border between the Thai region of Isan (where Apichatpong grew up) and the country Laos. It also features performances by Jenjira and Sakda, though not just voiceover in this case, and even makes reference the Emerald Buddha which changed hands between Thailand and Laos and back centuries ago, and whose tears some believe cause the flooding of the mighty Mekong.

I was able to view Mekong Hotel on screener in anticipation of its March 16 & 17 appearances at this year's CAAM Fest, which runs from March 14-24 in San Francisco and Berkeley (though not, for the first time in memory, in San Jose, which will have to make do with the currently-running Cinequest for its fix of Asian and other international and independent movies this month). Apichatpong's Cannes Palme D'Or prize-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives also screens at the Berkeley Art Museum's conjoined organization the Pacific Film Archive during the festival, but I'm unclear whether or not it's actually an official festival screening or not; the PFA site seems to indicate it is, but the CAAM site doesn't include it.

Ill be previewing more CAAM Fest titles soon, but for now I'll just mention a few titles I'm excited the festival is bringing to Frisco Bay: 

Beautiful 2012, a portmanteau with contributions from the great Tsai Ming-Liang (The Wayward Cloud), Ann Hui (A Simple Life), Kim Tae-yong (Memento Mori) and Gu Changwei (cinematographer for Zhang Yimou, Jiang Wen, Robert Altman, etc. and now a director in his own right)

When Night Falls, a critically-acclaimed representative of the current crop of low-budget independent Chinese filmmaking, which has made its director Ying Liang (Taking Father Home, The Other Half) an exile from his own homeland.

Touch of the Light, a Taiwanese production about a visually impaired pianist that Wong Kar-Wai is credited with executive producing. 

A closing-night presentation of Asian-American home movies entitled Memories To Light. A brilliant idea for a closing night presentation that I suspect may start a trend among other festivals. New People seems far too small a venue for such an occasion.

HOW: The Emerald installation is made up of a video projection and a low-hanging lantern. I'm not sure why, but there are no subtitles projected as part of the piece for the Berkeley installation, but an English translation of the disembodied dialogue is available as a handout to museum guests.