Japan, Iran, and Newsmakers On Screen

When a foreign nation is in the news, do we find ourselves more drawn to the cinema of that nation than we had been before? I'm not sure that those of us who normally avoid subtitled cinema are much likelier to suddenly seek out the cinematic traditions of a country that, thanks to natural disaster or political events or anything else, is now on the "front burner" of our brains. But those of us who regularly watch foreign films anyway may be prompted by news-making events to choose a film made in a topical country, whether out of curiousity or in a gesture of solidarity with its suffering citizens. The latter is the motivation for next Saturday's Viz Cinema benefit screenings of Hula Girls, a cheery film about a 1960s dance craze, set in the region of Japan most severely affected by the recent earthquake. Though the VIZ is no longer in daily operation, it continues to hold more frequent screenings of Japanese films than any other Frisco Bay venue, mostly as special events. Its screen will be in use for more of April than it has in recent months.

In a recent conversation with Michael Guillén, scholar Thomas Elsaesser advises, "If you want to invest your money right now in a festival idea, get to know Egyptian cinema." He's referring to the fact that we Western cinephiles almost uniformly know little to nothing of Egypt's vast cinematic heritage. The imdb lists 2052 film titles with Egypt as a country of origin, surely an undercount. Compare against the eleven titles from Libyan cinema history - quite possibly not much of an undercount. I'm unaware of any locally planned Egyptian or Libyan screenings on the horizon- perhaps it's "too soon" from, at minimuim, an organizational standpoint. I suspect it's luck rather than intentional synergy with current events that brings a Tunisian documentary At The Bottom Of The Ladder to the Tiburon International Film Festival next month.

No, these kinds of programming maneuvers usually are the result of months of pre-planning, which is why I was so impressed that Yerba Buene Center for the Arts was able to announce a short series of Iranian films so soon after Tehran filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to prison for his "crime" of putting into production a film presumed to be sympathetic to the "Green Revolution". That The White Meadows, by Panahi's filmmaking compadre Mohammad Rasoulof was added to the program belatedly is a tribute to YBCA programmer Joel Shepard's commitment to making this as current and multi-faceted as a small series can be. The White Meadows was one of the gems of last Spring's San Francisco International Film Festival, and Frisco Bay audiences should be eager for next Sunday's chance to see this beautifully-shot film in a cinema.

The inclusion in the YBCA series of Close-Up, the meta-cinematic masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami provides context and counterpoint. After Close-Up secured his spot as Iran's most internationally-known director, Kiarostami contributed the screenplay to Panahi's first feature film The White Balloon. But Kiarostami's recent response to his country's suppression of filmmakers has been to work outside of Iran. His latest film, Certified Copy, is a thoroughly European production, and I saw it at last year's French Cinema Now festival hosted by the San Francisco Film Society. It's every bit the masterpiece that Close-Up is, in part because of the way it transplants Kiarostami's usual concerns into an entirely new environment for him. It's now playing at the Clay and other Frisco Bay venues, and should be a high priority for any cinephile to see on the big screen.

Panahi, by contrast, insists that he does not want to make films outside of Iran. Though his films are made with formal rigor, their social critique seems inextricable from the society he knows first and best, although proposed readings of Offside, for example, which plays at 2PM today at YBCA, have also suggested he may be commenting on restrictions he's encountered trying to bring his films to an international audience as well as restrictions in his homeland. Three of Panahi's films will play this YBCA series. I recently revisited Offside, and found it to be even more stunning than I'd remembered it. the technical feat of shooting documentary-style at a live sporting event is jaw-dropping on its own terms, and that leaves aside the panoply of social observations the film makes. Crimson Gold, his previous feature, is probably his most critically beloved, although it's the one I've seen least recently in this series and will therefore withhold personal comment.

Preceding both today's and next Sunday's screenings of Panahi's last two features will be the last film he was able to complete before his sentencing, The Accordion. Made as part of an omnibus film Then And Now: Beyond Borders and Differences, which just had its world premiere in Geneva, this piece is so short (under six minutes, not inlcuding titles and credits) that to say almost anything about it seems to constitute a spoiler. I was able to preview a screener copy of it, and I can say that it's brilliantly Panahi for its entire running time. It particularly showcases one of the filmmaker's great stregnths: his ability to shoot characters moving naturally through a crowd. There's a tempatation, as might be expected, to read the Accordion at more than just face value as a grander political statement, and I'm not sure the title card "Any reference to real facts or real people is purely accidental" is likely to diffuse this tendency (it might in fact exacerbate it!) Anyway, if you can make it to either of the Panahi screenings, don't be late because you won't want to miss this short!

Jonathan Kiefer's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from journalist/critic Jonathan Kiefer, who archives reviews from his many outlets at JonathanKiefer.com:

Five local showings I’m ashamed to have missed in 2010

I need to get out more, by which I mean sit quietly in the dark with strangers for hours at a time more often than I already do. I’m still missing so much of the good stuff.

Of course the blessings of a professional obligation to see movies like Going the Distance and The Back-Up Plan sometimes can be mixed. And that’s all the more reason for me to be a better supporter of the persistently splendid Bay Area repertory scene. But I only have two eyes!

So here’s a shortlist of the many offerings from last year that I regret having missed.

1. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? God asked me the same question when that film played at the Red Vic in April and I didn’t go see it. David Lynch produces, Werner Herzog directs, Michael Shannon stars -- and I can’t even manage to show up? What the hell is wrong with me?

2. Thundercrack! at the Roxie, April. Written by and starring George Kuchar, directed by Curt McDowell, and rightly described -- even by Glenn Beck -- as “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla,” yet still never seen in its entirety by me. The shame!

3. Orlando. In late July and early August, Landmark briefly offered another chance for a theatrical view of Tilda Swinton as the sex-shifting 400-year-old nobleman in Sally Potter’s 1992 movie of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Guess who apparently had better things to do?

4. I Want to Live! at the PFA, in July. Actually, I want to live at the PFA most months. Having studied the relentless, true-ish story of Barbara Graham’s mid-1950s stint on San Quentin’s Death Row, I am convinced that watching it on my flat-screen by myself instead of on a big screen with other people is indeed a miscarriage of justice.

5. In September, the Red Vic showed Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 horror-fantasy Hausu, which has been called “a fear too beautiful to resist!” And yet, unaccountably, I did resist it. Idiot!

No Time Like Cinema Time

The are only two days left to see Dogtooth on the San Francisco Film Society Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. I had hoped to write a full review of this remarkable, unsettling film about one family's bizarre home-schooling experiment gone to the extreme, which I was able to catch at the Greek Film Festival back in May. A modern-day application of classical Greek philosophy- particularly Plato's concept of The Cave, it's one of the best films I've seen all year, and it demands to be seen on the big screen, where one is held captive to cinema's traditional nature as a purely time-based medium (a quality compromised by the existence of the DVD player's pause function). Unfortunately time has not been on my side on this matter, so I must refer you to recent reviews by Cheryl Eddy and Dennis Harvey instead.

On Friday, Dogtooth will be replaced by Change Of Plans on the SFFS Screen, and also joined at the Kabuki by a weaker new opening, Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop. The latter is a remake of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple that is at least (at most?) interesting in that it's more faithful to the original film in some of its aesthetic approaches, including a long wordless segment that mirrors the Coens' achievement, and even a recurrent sound effect surely intended to replicate the Balinese chant on the original film's soundtrack, than it is to the overall milieu, plot, tone, or character design. More broad Chinese-style slapstick than we Westerners are likely to forgive makes this remake a rather jarring one, even if certain individual scenes are impressive.

As the SFFS begins unveiling its Fall Season, it's also trying to negotiate a takeover of the Clay Theatre on Fillmore Street, which was expected to close near the end of last month but was spared for the time being; a French film Mademoiselle Chambon opens Friday. Michael Krasny recently hosted a fascinating radio program on the fate of the Clay and other single-screen theatres on Frisco Bay, in which the SFFS's Graham Leggatt outlined his hopes for the 100-year-old venue. In the meantime, R.A. McBride and Julie Lindow's book Left In The Dark has begun appearing on the shelves of Frisco Bay bookstores (City Lights and The Green Arcade, for two). I was honored to be quoted in a piece by Sam Sharkey, formerly of the Clay, now of the Red Vic, on the future of moviegoing; other essays by Chi-hui Yang, Eddie Muller, Gary Meyer with Laura Horak, and Sergio de la Mora help make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Frisco Bay cinemagoing, but it's the superb photography by R.A. McBride which makes it a must-own for anyone with a coffee table or a bookshelf.

Another Frisco bay-centric film book entitled Radical Light focuses on the many permutations of experimental cinema made and screened here over the second half of the last century. After purchasing it at the Berkeley Art Museum Store on Friday, I've only been able to get about halfway through it so far, but it's absolutely required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in American avant-garde filmmaking, of which Frisco Bay has been the major center for much of the time period covered in the book (1945-2000). And since, despite having twice as many pages as Left in the Dark, it's actually got a cheaper list price, at least in paperback, I have to say I'm even more satisfied with this purchase (as unfair as it feels to compare these two very worthy and exciting publications). The Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque will hold a spectacular array of special-guest laden screenings in conjunction with the book release over the next several months, beginning with a PFA screening September 19th that I cannot recommend more highly. Aesthetically diverse masterpieces from Dion Vigne's North Beach to Bruce Baillie's All My Life to Chris Marker's Junkopia will play together, and filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan will appear in person. BAM will also open a gallery exhibition of documents related to the book and to the experimental film scene on October 6th.

Among other tasks that took up my time in recent weeks was a very enjoyable one: writing a review of the new Josef Von Sternberg box set published over a week ago at GreenCine Daily. As I begin the review, Criterion has traditionally not been a major force in releasing American silent films, but with this set (of Underworld, the Last Command, and the Docks of New York), and its upcoming Charlie Chaplin releases, it seems intent on becoming a major player in this field after all. Criterion's affiliated company Janus is bringing five days full of Chaplin films to the Castro Theatre later this month, and I can't wait to see these films on the big screen.

Although I must admit, I may be a bit exhausted by the time the Chaplin series begins with his still-underrated The Circus September 18th. I'll have just returned from over a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, my first-ever visit to this festival, or indeed this city. In fact, I'd better wrap up this post now if I want to make my flight! See you in a week and a half!

Miyazaki Midnights & Matinees (and more)

One of my favorite films of the year so far is the latest animated feature from Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo on the Cliff By the Sea, also know as just Ponyo. Made by a near-septuagenarian, and perhaps aimed primarily for children just barely old enough to sit still for a movie, this Japanese re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen holds the power to captivate a childless 30-something willing to be awash in Miyazaki's visuals, whether depicting the crashing of furious waves as a Hokusai woodcut come to life, or the simple process of serving a bowl of ramen to a little girl who has never eaten noodles before. Miyazaki's inked lines are more robust than ever, and his gentle-handed ecological message perfectly apropos for his pre-school protagonist Sosuke, who understands the import of the chain of events he has set off less completely than audiences of any age will, yet it better able to make a crucial narrative leap of faith than a more world-weary individual might. He provides an inspirational model for us all.

Some Miyazaki fans seem to be, at least mildly, disappointed in Ponyo in comparison to the master's other animated films. I can't understand almost any of their arguments, and I can't help but wonder if some are registering disagreement less with the film itself than with the Disney Corporation's decision to release the film only in a dubbed version, in contrast to their making Howl's Moving Castle available to theatres both an English-dubbed and a Japanese-language version with English subtitles. Sprited Away, too, was sent on the festival circuit in a Japanese version before its theatrical release with American voice artists providing the soundtrack.

I've watched both versions of Ponyo. First I saw a 35mm print of the Disney-dubbed version; though I was mildly bothered by Liam Neeson's distinctive tones, and Cate Blanchett's essential reprisal of her Galadriel role, their Ponyo characters are relatively minor and I was so overwhelmed by Miyazaki's fluid animation and florid imagination that they couldn't mar the experience in any meaningful way. The other voice actors submerged their star personae and were unrecognizable to me until the end credits. In sum it was a terrific dub job; nothing like the distracting celebrity voice-fest of the Miramax Princess Mononke dub. Watching a friend's Japanese Ponyo DVD import with English subtitles shortly afterward was nearly as wonderful, but I'm glad it was not my first experience with the film. In fact the dub translation was slightly superior in a few instances, as I confirmed with a native Japanese speaker. The only major improvement was the end-title song, which Disney turned from a sweet farewell to the film into a groan-worthy techno remix involving its stable of pop singers.

In any language, Ponyo is absolutely something to see on the big screen if you can, and if you live in Frisco that's still possible, at least for another week, as it continues to play at the Balboa Theatre until Thursday. Miyazaki fans holding out for the subtitled DVD, you'll thank yourself for taking the opportunity to see it in a cinema. If you want to display your original-version-purist credentials, take the rare opportunity to watch the Japanese-language version of Miyazaki's Spirited Away this November when it plays four midnight shows and a matinee in Frisco Bay theatres. Both the Clay here in Frisco and the Piedmont in Oakland have included the 45th San Francisco International Film Festival's audience award-winning film in their autumn lineup of cult favorite screenings. The Clay shows it November 6th & 7th, and the Piedmont on November 13th & 14th, with an additional 10 AM screening on the 15th.

Other midnight movies coming to Landmark theatres this season include This is Spinal Tap, the Wiz (featuring Michael Jackson as the scarecrow, of course) the original release cut of Donnie Darko, the Graduate, the Shining, and more. Check the Landmark After Dark website. And though the Bridge will no longer be the site for full summer seasons of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass series, the horror hostess will present a one-off screening of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 there on October 24th.

Meanwhile, the Red Vic on Haight Street has a midnight hit on its hands as well these days. The Room, Tommy Wiseau's enigmatically awful, but clearly rather expensive passion project, has been packing in viewers and solidifying screen-talkback rituals the last Saturday of every month all summer. The tradition, as revealed in the latest Red Vic calendar, is planned to continue this fall with shows on September 26th and October 31st (come in costume as one of the characters for additional fun.)

Finally, my friend Jesse Ficks has been hard at work putting together his season of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS shows at the Castro. Tonight he's playing Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Last American Virgin in a set entitled "Cocky White Guys". October 2 is "Bite Nite", pairing the Santa Cruz-set the Lost Boys with Katheryn Bigelow's Near Dark, which I've never seen (for shame!) And November 6th is called "Love Kills", with True Romance, Natural Born Killers and a midnight MiDNiTE screening to be determined. Looking at the thematic pattern, I bet it'll be something written by Quentin Tarantino. Though Jesse has been known to have unexpected surprises up his sleeve.

Adam Hartzell: Sugar Ball

Brian here. By now, Adam Harztell is a familiar enough contributor to Hell on Frisco Bay regular readers that he really needs no introduction. But since I haven't bothered figuring out how to turn this into a functioning "team blog" he's getting one anyway. He recently wrote pieces on the Mosque in Morgantown and the cricket angle in Slumdog Millionaire. Now I'm excited to present his latest piece on Sugar, the newest film by the writing/directing team responsible for Have You Seen This Man? and Half Nelson. It's currently playing exclusively at the Embarcadero Cinema and the Camera 12 here on Frisco Bay. Here's Adam, after the image (supplied by Sony Pictures Classics, along with others in this piece):

Like a good wine at dinner, I like to compliment my films with a good book. Just as I read books from the countries where I travel while I’m traveling there, I seek out films and books of related topics to experience those mediums in tandem. I want these texts to talk to each other within me. If some scholar hasn’t already named what I’m talking about, let’s call it "Intentional Intertextuality".

So when I found out there was a pre-screening of Sugar (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) that I could actually attend, I immediately sought out Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line by Adrian Burgos, Jr. An assistant professor of History at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I had heard a fascinating interview with Burgos Jr. on Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports Radio show about the baseball academies in Latin America. After hearing the interview, I added his book to my checklist of books to check out one day. And now that Sugar, like Major League Baseball, is upon us, this was the book I needed to provide the proper context for the film.

Although I acquired the book within two days of searching, the search included failed efforts to find it at Bird and Beckett in Glen Park, Green Apple in the Richmond District, and Books Inc. in Laurel Village. The latter was particularly ironic since they had a major display of baseball books to celebrate opening 2009, just not the one I was looking for. My commitment to independent bookstores over Amazon was rewarded when after my wife and I caught a matinee of Tokyo Sonata at the Clay on Fillmore we found Playing America’s Game waiting for me in the shelves of Browser Books.

Sugar the film follows the baseball dreams of an eponymously nicknamed "Sugar", real character name Miguel Santos (debut performance by Algenis Pérez Soto). We meet Sugar at a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. Although the film provides various theories for why Miguel is named "Sugar", it seems equally plausible that his name came from Alan Klein’s book Sugarball, where Klein has this to say about these academies – "The academy is the baseball counterpart of the colonial outposts, the physical embodiment overseas of the parent franchise. It operates...like the subsidiary of any other foreign country: it finds raw materials (talented athletes), refines them (trains the athletes), and ships abroad finished products (baseball players)" (quoted in page 227 of Burgos Jr.’s book). This isn’t a metaphor. That is how some scholars literally see these baseball academies. It is Sugar's carpentry that is the metaphor for the reality of the human bodies as raw material refined into product that the baseball academies enable under the guise of 'opportunity' for the aspiring ballplayers, 'opportunity' being a code word for your employer wanting access to your labor at a reduced rate.

Wow! That sure sounds dehumanizing, doesn't it? The quote and my extension of the argument seem to strip all agency away from the ballplayers at these academies. It’s the pull-quoting that's the problem. There's a lot more context provided in Burgos Jr.'s book, (and I’m sure Klein's) since "it illuminates Latinos as actors, not just people acted upon" (p 268). He focuses in on the agency of the players, how they negotiated the racial and economic impositions of their particular time in history through each man's attempts to play organized baseball. And that's what Sugar seeks to do too: humanize a composite of the experience of ballplayers from the Spanish-speaking Americas. It seeks to humanize by seeking to sympathize. It shows the players as actors through actors. And it’s Sugar's actions later in the film that lead some reviewers to point out how the film steps away from the clichés of the genre of the sports film.

Where Sugar the film works for me is in its moments of tenderness, such as those Sugar experiences with a local waitress. It works for me when the camera juxtaposes images of the cityscapes of New York, Sugar's home in the Dominican Republic, and the fields of Iowa. It works for me in the blurring of the background as Sugar enters the collapsing maze and oppressive pings and whoops of a casino.

Sugar is a movie that wears its politics with its sympathy. It name drops Latino heroes such as Roberto Clemente and Vic Power. (I grew up well-versed in Clemente lore since my father grew up outside of Pittsburgh and thus a Pirates fan. The lore was later enhanced with research provided by David Maraniss' excellent biography Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, a book I learned about again from Zirin. Whereas, I had only been familiarized with the controversies surrounding Vic Power through passages from Burgos Jr.'s book I’d finished reading just before heading into the screening.) It is at these political talking point moments the film doesn't have the subtlety I prefer. It's moments like these where Sugar seems forced. Sugar the movie is not Burgos Jr.'s book. Burgos Jr. has the space to lay out a more nuanced argument about the history of peoples from the Spanish-speaking Americas in organized baseball.

And this history is much longer than is often recognized, from Cuban Esteban Bellán in the 1870s to the Venezuelan rookies debuting this year. And Playing America's Game seeks to remedy that by laying out the forgotten or misunderstood histories of the many Latino players. He contextualizes where they came from and how they negotiated their way into organized baseball before and after Jackie Robinson broke through the color line. Transnational links were established from Havana to DC via the Washington Senators cost-cutting efforts in the early years of the 20th century. So when similar links were established from Santo Domingo to San Francisco and our Giants in the later years of the century, this was nothing new, just a modification of previous ventures. Each Latino player had his own way of negotiating the linguistic, political, racial and economic obstacles of their sojourns, whether it be Ted Williams who didn't publicly acknowledge his Mexican ancestry while playing, or Roberto Clemente who confronted racism and poverty head-on, or Reggie Jackson who resisted the press by briefly insisting on only speaking Spanish, or Felipe Alou’s response to the racism of a San Francisco talk-show boast. Sugar does not speak for all of these players. It is a composite of the issues these players face. It works hard, sometimes too hard.

Burgos Jr.'s book offers more to me than Sugar right now, but that's because books in general are offering more to me than film. Just as baseball offers more to some than football, cricket more to some than rugby, basketball more to some than hockey. If you're one of those who value baseball, Sugar just might be the sweet spot on the glove that baseball films have been pounding for so long. For those of you who don't want to be taken out to the ball game, I do wonder if this would be the film for you. You won’t be disappointed, it’s a decent film. But I have much more to say about Burgos Jr.'s book than I do Sugar. But at least I finally got around to reading the book thanks to Sugar.

March (and April) of the Women Filmmakers

A week ago Thursday I passed a major milestone in my cinephilia: I saw Chantel Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles for the first time ever. It was screened in a newly-struck 35mm print from Janus, although reel two was sadly misplaced by another institution showing the film, and had to be sourced from a PAL DVD. The transition between film and video provided a fine lesson in the virtues of celluloid over everyday digital projection; though Jeanne Dielman is more of a narrative film than I had been led to believe, it's singularity derives from the way the narrative "events" of the film are conveyed through the subtle variance of repetition. Some of these subtleties are undoubtedly clouded over by the digital haze of even a superb DVD transfer. What's more, the way the film works as a light & motion study as well as a "story" is undeniably altered when the medium shifts. I don't think I have to tell you which of the two I found more visually glorious. For more about the film, I would like to call attention to a piece on the film written by SFMOMA projectionist Brecht Andersch, who was instrumental in facilitating the mid-screening media switches.

Andersch is also board chair of the Film on Film Foundation, which in addition to having a great blog on local film screenings that almost makes Hell On Frisco Bay feel obsolete (luckily this beat's big enough for more than one interest-drummer to cover), also presents screenings. As mentioned here before, their next event is this Sunday's Ida Lupino double-bill at the Pacific Film Archive, part of a series of actor-turned-auteur programs entitled the Film Gods Shot Back. The case of Ida Lupino is seemingly unique; if there was another woman directing feature films for Hollywood studios in the early 1950s, I'd love to learn her name because I'm certain I've never heard of her before. And it just so happens that this pairing of the Outrage in 16mm and the Bigamist in 35mm is occuring on International Women's Day. Check out Frako Loden's article on these two films at the Evening Class.

March and April might be considered International Women's Season at the PFA. Not only do we have the Lupino twofer, but a major retrospective by the so-called "grandmother of the French New Wave" Agnès Varda. For those like me who have seen landmark films like Vagabond and the Gleaners & I on DVD but never on the big screen, and/or have huge gaps in our experience with Varda's filmography, this series is a godsend. It began last night with La Pointe Courte and her most well-known film Cleo From 5 To 7, but thankfully most of the titles in the series play twice so there's another chance to see them both. Her latest documentary, the Beaches of Agnès, plays April 10th and 11th. I tried to see it at the Portland International Film Festival last month but was turned away for lack of available seats.

If that weren't enough, the PFA also is in the midst of a series entitled Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran, spotlighting filmmakers from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Islamic countries. It covers relatively well-known names like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Marziyeh Meshkini (the Day I Became a Woman - a must-see in case you didn't already know that) to little-known figures like Moufida Tlatli (the Silences of the Palace) and the recently-departed Randa Chahal Sabbag (the Kite). The series on essay films the Way of the Termite, curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin continues through the months and includes a trove of rarities, including two directed or co-directed by women, Akerman's Jeanne Dielman-prefiguring Je tu il elle and From Today Until Tomorrow by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub. A set of Argentine Experimental Films that includes work by women and men was recently reported on by Jennifer MacMillan, who caught the touring program on its New York stop.

And of course, both the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (Mar. 12-22) and the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 23-May 7) both use the PFA as a venue this Spring and include women-directed films in their lineups. The SFIAAFF's full program is known and includes Jennifer Phang's lo-fi sci-fi Half-Life and Heiward Mak's Hong Kong delinquent film High Noon among others. The SFIFF has started announcing titles as well, though few as yet attached to venues. Its relaunched website has information on competition films, including new directors and documentary features. In the meantime a documentary on philosophers called Examined Life is currently playing on the SFFS Screen at the Kabuki Theatre. It's director Astra Taylor's follow-up to her 2005 film Zizek! (not to be confused with the following year's the Pervert's Guide to Cinema by Sophie Fiennes)

Though I move out out talking about PFA events, I'm going to hang on to the "women filmmakers" thread, as a number of Frisco Bay screening venues which have recently revealed new calendars have films directed by women among the more intriguing and/or recommendable upcoming options.

For instance, the program I'm most interested in catching at the Tiburon Film Festival (Mar. 19-26) is unquestionably Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, an animated riff on both a tale from the Ramayana and songs from Annette Hanshaw. When last this film played publicly in Frisco (at the SF Film Society's animation festival in November) I hadn't yet been following Paley's blog and was still unaware that this particular intercultural mash-up was causing copyright consternation and that the film would almost certainly be blocked from a "normal" distribution. You have to find it at a film festival or another non-traditional screening venue if you want to see it projected in a big dark room with a bunch of strangers. March 20th provides such a chance in Marin County.

The Red Vic shows Jennifer Baichwal's terrific documentary that considers the aesthetic value of ecological devastation, Manufactured Landscapes, on March 15 & 16. Read my 2007 interview with Baichwal here.

The latest updates to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts calendar include four screenings of Chiara Clemente's Our City Dreams, focusing on five women artists working in New York. That's April 9-12.

The Castro Theatre's March calendar has the dead white male auteurs we know and love on it (Truffaut, Hawks, Fosse) but what of Martha Coolidge, first and thus-far only female president of the Directors Guild of America? She may not be quite as much of a cinephile household name but she's represented at the Castro too, by a MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS-presented screening of Real Genius March 20th. I haven't seen Real Genius since its initial theatrical release back when I was in junior high school, perhaps the perfect demographic for a Val Kilmer college comedy. I loved it then, so why not now? I hope to find out March 20th.

More midnight movies come courtesy of the Landmark After Dark series at the Clay here in Frisco and the Piedmont over in Oakland. The latter will show Mary Harron's American Psycho April 17th and 18th at 11:59 PM.

And then there's the San Francisco Women's Film Festival, running April 1-5. It has just announced its program at its blog.

Finally, Artists' Television Access is celebrating International Women's Day it's own way - slightly belatedly- with a March 12th screening of Under the Same Moon. The venue also hosts two evenings of films by local filmmaker Kerry Laitala on March 13 and March 20.

24th SFIAAFF Preview

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The blog-friendly publicity department of the SF International Asian American Film Festival, which runs from March 16-26, kindly let me attend its press screenings over the past couple weeks. I was able to fit four into my schedule.

Wisit Sasanatieng has just been named one of the "three most important Thai directors" in a poll on www.thaicinema.org. His new film Citizen Dog, like his directing debut (still shelved from any US release) Tears of the Black Tiger, takes its gaudy color palette from the film posters, programs, hand-painted promotional stills and other ephemera that remain from the 16mm film production era of the Thai movie industry which lasted until the early 1970s. But instead of the genre pastiche that Wisit's previous film was, Citizen Dog is loosely structured through the cast of eccentric Bangkok characters country bumpkin Pod encounters while stumbling through a series of jobs hoping to defy the prediction his toothless grandma cackles at him as he leaves the family farm: "If you get a job in Bangkok, you will surely grow a tail!"

Luckily Pod (played by Mahasamuth Boonyarak, who I was not surprised to learn is actually a bass player in a rock band; he's got something of a pop star look) is quite unlike the rest of Bangkok's citizens. He's set apart from the crowd in an early sequence in which he's shown moving about town in crowds of people all singing the film's theme song, some quite soulfully, while he glances around at them quizzically. (Another memorable musical sequence comes in the form of a recitative rap song explaining Granny's reincarnation as a gecko clinging to Pod's lamp.) He also has a singular, unrequited devotion to Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong) a quirky cleaning woman he meets while employed as a security guard. I suspect this romance thread in the film, along with Pen-ek Ratanaruang's dryly bemused voice-over, is the origin of the many comparisons to Amelie Wisit's film has garnered. The time we spend with Jin reveals her to have an instinct for romantic self-sabotage similar to Amelie's. But from Pod's point of view, his romantic goals are thwarted not by his own lack of confidence but by the craziness of Bangkok and its absolutely bizarre residents. And indeed the unexpectable flourishes of the writer/director's imagination are the real selling point of Citizen Dog. Read all the plot synopses of this film you want beforehand, but I'm certain there will still be plenty of surprises for you when you actually see it. There's just so much crammed into the running time that no synopsis could cover it all without practically rewriting the screenplay. As of yet without a US distributor, Citizen Dog plays the Castro Theatre March 17 and the PFA March 18.

Linda Linda Linda is perhaps even more fun. It's another in the current cycle of films exploring Japan's teenage subcultures, but unlike my experience watching Kamikaze Girls, Go or All About Lilly Chou-Chou, my interest never flagged and I never sensed director Nobuhiro Yamashita reaching for a sentimental or "shocking" cliche. He drops the audience into the very richly detailed galaxy that is Shibazaki High School counting the days to the upcoming school festival and the accompanying rock and roll talent showcase held in a gymnasium-cum-stage. It took a few scenes for me to find my bearings, but soon after I did I was completely won over by these characters. Kyoko, Nozomi, and Kei need to find a vocalist for their Blue Hearts cover band, and to spite a former bandmate they pick the Korean exchange student, Son. They're not exactly striving against all odds to learn catchy Ramones-esque songs like "Linda, Linda", but rather there's a realness to their struggles competing for practice time at the school's pop music club room, dealing with hopeful and ex-boyfriends, and, for Son especially, figuring out how to fit in. By the end of the film you may just have to struggle not to get up and dance along in the aisles (not only is it a fire hazard as we've all been reminded by Sarah Vowell, but it also blocks the view of your fellow moviegoers. So restrain yourself.) Linda Linda Linda plays Friday, March 17 at the PFA and Wednesday, March 22 at the Kabuki.

The other two I saw were among the films passed over by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in its selection of China's latest Oscar submission in favor of the Promise, which failed to be nominated.

Despite uprooting the setting from Austria to pre-Communist China, Xu Jinglei's Letter From an Unknown Woman is actually more faithful to Stefan Zweig's 1922 tale of romantic obsession than Max Ophuls' revered 1948 version. But perhaps it's most interesting to read Xu's film politically, as Jiang Wen's intellectual playboy character is surrounded by symbols of Westernization, transforming the heroine's infatuation into a manifestation of what might have been called "capitalist thought" after 1949.

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol tells the grippingly true story of a Beijing journalist who travels to the remotest corner of Tibet where the chiru, or Tibetan antelope, is being wiped out by poaching. The film's plot is filled with ethical ambiguities that hooked me in as tightly as a classic Hollywood noir or Western can. It's refreshing to see increasingly layered films like this one coming out of mainland China's film industry.

Though both films are set for US distribution, only Kekexili: Mountain Patrol has its Frisco theatrical release dates: April 21-27, right in the middle of the Film Society's film festival. If you're like me and you tend to be locked into festival mode at that time, avoiding the arthouses like the Lumiere and Act I/II, make an effort to see the film at its March 20th Kabuki screening.

Of course, Landmark would schedule its most enticing calendared programs for the weeks when another major festival, the SFIFF, will be running. Following Kekexili: Mountain Patrol at the Lumiere will be Carol Reed's 1948 the Fallen Idol April 28-May 4. The Act I/II will get the Confomist that week instead. The rest of the current Landmark calendar, I have to say, doesn't inspire me much. I've already seen the Devil and Daniel Johnston (at IndieFest 2005) and though I'd definitely recommend it to people who wish they knew a bit more about this Daniel Johnston guy they keep hearing about, I'm unlikely to prioritize a repeat viewing.