Invisible Waves (2006)

WHO: Pen-ek Ratanaruang directed, Tadanobu Asano starring, and Christopher Doyle in the cinematographer role.

WHAT: After the unexpected international success of Last Life in the Universe Pen-ek re-teamed with  his aforementioned collaborators from that film and, armed with financing from pre-sold distribution deals in many territories where Last Life had audiences anxious for more, made an art film on a larger canvas than he'd ever tried before. Shooting in Hong Kong, Macao, Bangkok and post-tsumani Phuket ("not the Phuket for tourists we're familiar with. It's more like the weird corners of Phuket we've fished out to the screen") not to mention an eerily empty cruise ship, and utilizing a pan-Asian cast including Korean, Thai, Hong Kong and Filipino actors as well as its Japanese star, Invisible Waves is by far Pen-ek's most elaborately international production.

But when the film was premiered at the Berlin film festival in 2006, reviews were mixed at best. Theatrical distribution in the US was first postponed, and finally (at least in San Francisco) foregone entirely. All of Pen-ek's prior features had screened somewhere locally, if only at a film festival, but Invisible Waves to this day has never played in a Frisco Bay cinema. I eventually succumbed to watching a DVD rented from Le Video and found the film to be a charming and fascinating admixture of film noir with the calm, dreamlike atmosphere of Last Life in the Universe, with a dose of Tati-esque humor thrown in for good measure (I believe Tati's Trafic is the most appropriate predecessor to cite). I suspect the generally poor critical reception for the film might be traced to the broken-English that dominates communication between characters, even more than in Last Life. This was an intentional strategy on the director's part; he was even quoted as casting his performers for their poor English skills. But I can see why some reviewers, especially those with ideas about 'great performances' still steeped in the theatrical tradition, might find it off-putting. Anyway, I'm excited to finally get a chance to see it on the big screen.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:30 PM at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

WHY: There are only two films remaining in the YBCA's Pen-ek retrospective, Invisible Waves and the one that got me interested in Thailand's cinema when I was living in that country in 1999-2000: 6ixtynin9. What else is on the docket for Frisco Bay fans of the cinema of ASEAN countries? As far as I'm aware the only other Thai moving image work screening publicly locally in the near future is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's video installation Emerald, which continues for just a few more days at the Berkeley Art Museum. 

That museum's conjoined institution the Pacific Film Archive is bringing Dutch Indonesian documentarian Leonard Retel Helmrich to Berkeley this weekend for screenings of his trilogy Eye of the Day, Shape of the Moon and Position Among the Stars. Indonesia is also the setting for one of two South-East Asian oriented documentaries in the San Francisco International Film Festival's Asian line-up: The Act of Killing, which comes endorsed by Werner Herzog and a slew of critics who saw it in Toronto, Berlin and other festivals. The other is the Cambodian/local co-production A River Changes Course. Both are scheduled to screen in San Francisco and Berkeley, the latter with director Kalyanee Mam present at some or all of her screenings. 

The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival comes to the Roxie on the last weekend of April, and includes a screening of Norwegian Wood, the latest by that country's most prominent auteur export Tran Anh Hung. And not to leave out arguably the most vibrant cinematic production scene in the region, the Philippines, the YBCA has just announced a sequel to last year's successful New Filipino Cinema festival for the first weekend in June; plenty of time to prepare and practice learning your Himala from your Hirana.  

HOW: Invisible Waves screens from a 35mm print.

Last Life In The Universe (2003)

WHO: Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang directed this.

WHAT: An often dreamlike tale of a shy, fastidious library assistant named Kenji (played by Tadanobu Asano) who has fled Japan for Bangkok in order to escape his yakuza family ties. A random accident leads to an encounter with a slovenly extrovert named Noi leads to an "opposites attract" romance between the pair. But there are bound to be complications...

Last Life In The Universe is probably Pen-ek's most widely admired film, and it forms a pivot point in his career. After making three plot-heavy, purely Thai films that proved his versatility in directing individual scenes with aplomb, he had never really put together a film that was completely structurally satisfying. With his fourth film, the director accepted international financing and both a foreign star (Asano) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle, best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai). Though all these complications threw off his confidence during filming, the finished product found him a natural at maintaining a more languid pace and visually depicting his characters' interior emotions. Since this, he's made four more films that represent varied attempts at elaborating on this stylistic success.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tonight only at 7:30 PM.

WHY: I was pleasantly surprised that YBCA curator Joel Shepard, while interviewing Pen-ek from the stage following last Thursday's opening to the six-film retrospective of his work, mentioned my name and the name of this blog while quoting the passage I borrowed for my recent post on Headshot. Thanks Joel, not just for the plug but for putting together a series like this that allows us to fill in gaps from this undervalued director's career, and revisit old favorites like Last Life in the Universe. After hearing Pen-ek talk about his films both publicly and in an interview I was able to conduct before he flew out of town, I'm more eager than ever to see my own personal favorite films on the big screen once again. I'm still in the midst of transcribing the interview but I'll keep readers posted when it's ready to be unveiled. In the meantime, enjoy the four remaining films in this series; Joel mentioned that the retrospective required the importing of 35mm prints from Europe as his work is no longer distributed in that form in the United States (and some of it, like this coming Sunday's Ploy, probably my second-favorite of his films, was never distributed in this country to begin with.)

Since this particular film is a Japanese co-production, it seems a worthwhile moment to mention that the next YBCA screening series will be an eight-title selection of genre films made at the Shintoho studio between 1956 and 1960. It kicks off May 9th with Ghost Story of Yostuya, directed by supernatural specialist Nobuo Nakagawa the year before he made his most famous film, Jigoku (a.k.a. Hell). None of these will be shown on film, I'm told, because there simply are no projectable and/or English-subtitled prints available anywhere in the world.

HOW: Last Life in the Universe screens from a 35mm print.

Headshot (2011)

WHO: Pen-ek Ratanaruang wrote and directed this. He's coming to town this weekend; his first visit to San Francisco, apparently.

WHAT: The latest feature by the Thai director is, I believe, his first shot digitally. (UPDATE 4/7/13: it's his second after Nymph, as it turn out.) His usual cinematographer Chankit Chamnivikaipong used the famed Red One camera for this so-called "Buddhist neo-noir" piece about a Bangkok policeman who gets embroiled in a world of gangsters, corruption and conspiracy against his will. He receives a headwound which leads to an unusual form of brain damage in which his vision is turned upside down. Luckily, the audience doesn't get too many disorienting point-of-view shots from this topsy-turvy perspective. One gently humorous scene involving a television set reminds us that when the world around us (or even just our perception of it) has been upended, it's comforting to at least be able to spend some time watching images on a screen that don't make us feel completely out-of-sync with reality. This might be a good summation of Pen-ek's motivation for filming in the first place; in a 2009 interview recently published in the book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema he stresses his desire to make films that connect him to like-minded audiences around the world who are alienated by the fare that dominates international cinema screens. A quote:

Lonely people tend to like my films a lot. Happy people don't seem to get my films. When I meet someone who says she liked my films, ninety percent of the time she prefers funerals to weddings, and its also a fan of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Nick Cave, like myself. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 7:30 at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts screening room. Pen-ek is expected to attend.

WHY: This screening kicks off a six-title retrospective of most of Pen-ek's feature films (his promising debut Fun Bar Karaoke and his third film Mon-Rak Transistor, which seems more and more to be the biggest stylistic and thematic anomaly in his filmography, are omitted) at YBCA, including the local premiere screenings of his three films which inexplicably never screened in the Bay Area. There has been a good deal of worthwhile press for this event, including articles by Valerie Soe, Cheryl Eddy and Jonathan Kiefer. Though one might expect films that other venues have passed on to be markedly inferior to the ones that have played here; I bet the average uninitiated attendee of this series wouldn't be able to guess that Ploy failed to make it into any local festivals while Nymph succeeded, or that 6ixtynin9 had a week-long run here but Invisible Waves didn't. (Last Life in the Universe remains Pen-ek's most fully satisfying film and it won't be a surprise to anyone that it's had the most Frisco Bay cinema showtimes of all his works).

It's a good reminder that there's a lot more to program a cinema or a festival than just sussing out quality. The fiscal states, marketing plans, or simple whims of distributors, sales agents, or filmmakers themselves can have more impact on whether a given film screens here than the best efforts of the smartest programmers can. It's important to remember this during the week of the San Francisco International Film Festival's announcement. If you follow the goings-on at other festivals around the country and the globe, there's surely a film or two (or more) that you were practically certain would/could/should appear at SFIFF this year. I like to channel such frustrations into hopes that another programmer might give the film a shot at another nearby venue. If, for example, you wonder why Carlos Reygadas's Cannes 2012 entry Post Tenebras Lux has yet to rear its head locally, be heartened that YBCA's Joel Shepard is bringing it in May 30 through June 1st.

HOW: Though the rest of this series is sourced from 35mm, Headshot was shot digitally and will be screened that way.

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.

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.

On The Air

Yesterday I went to San Jose, where I taped a segment for a new film discussion series hosted by Sara Vizcarrondo of Box Office Magazine and Rotten Tomatoes. Honored to follow in the footsteps of the terrific Slant Magazine critic Fernando F. Croce, who discussed the Hollywood films of Fritz Lang on the first episode of the series, I was recruited to speak about Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, presumably because I can pronounce his name without butchering it (having taught English in Chiang Mai for a year and a half has resume applications after all!) I watched his new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives twice at the Kabuki last Friday in preparation, and hope to see it again at least once more before it departs from the San Francisco Film Society Screen this Thursday. It will open for a week at the Elmwood Theatre in Berkeley on Friday. I don't want to give away anything I might have mentioned on the program, but I will say this: if you haven't already, you should see Uncle Boonmee too! Watching this on a computer or even a large television screen is simply not going to do justice to Apichatpong's visual strategies, which I feel are so important to the film as a whole.

Another guest interviewd by Vizcarrondo on this episode was local filmmaker Jarrod Whaley, whose new picture The Glass Slipper is part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival line-up this year; it plays March 9th and again on March 12th. I have not yet seen The Glass Slipper, but I was impressed by Whaley's feature-length debut Hell Is Other People, as I wrote last year. The episode with Whaley and I in it should be edited and posted by the end of the week; keep an eye on my Twitter feed for a link as soon as it's ready for viewing.

I'm actually not too familiar with much of this year's Cinequest program, in fact, but there are a couple of noteworthy films I've seen that will be playing the last few days of fest. F. W. Murnau's silent Nosferatu, of course, is always a treat on the big screen, and sure to be particularly so at the California Theatre March 11 with Dennis James performing at the organ to a color tinted 35mm print. I know I'm not the only one to feel that Nosferatu is particularly necessary in today's vampire movie landscape; people need to be reminded to feel frightened when they encounter the undead, not lustful.

Another Cinequest film I've had a chance to preview is Raavanan starring India's most famous actres Aishwara Ray Bachchan. She plays Ragini, the wife of a law enforcement official named Dev (played by Prithviraj) who falls into the clutches of his arch-nemesis Veera (played by Vikram), who takes her as a hostage while he mounts a popular insurrection against the government authorities. Of course Ragnini develops a Stockholm-Syndrome-like attachment to her rugged and powerful captor, which raises the stakes on the inevitable confrontation between law-maker and law-breaker. Bound by conventions of Indian popular cinema (plenty of action, musical numbers that stand in for love scenes, an anything-goes approach to filming technique, etc.), Raavanan nonetheless surprised me on more than one occasion, thanks to its toying with audience sympathies for its various characters. It helped that, if I had learned its classical source material prior to viewing, I had forgotten it (i.e., don't look it up unless you're completely unfamiliar with ancient Indian literature or else don't mind missing out on the surprises I was pleased to experience.)

After playing Cinequest, Raavanan will also play at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which opens this Thursday with a screening of West Is West. After 29 years of operations, more than a decade of it under the sure stewardship of former festival director Chi-hui Yang, the programming team for the SFIAAFF now has new faces of leadership in Masashi Niwano and Christine Kwon, who have brought together a set of 108 films and videos, most of them from young Asian and Asian American filmmakers. Though the lineup may include fewer "known-quantity" directors than I've come to espect from this festival, there are a number of new films by relatively established artists that I've admired, leading off with China's critically-acclaimed master Jia Zhang-Ke, whose controversial I Wish I Knew plays twice at the festival, on March 12th at the Kabuki and on the 15th at the Pacific Film Archive. Other filmmakers I'm personally excited for the opportunity to follow are Zhang Lu, whose Grain In Ear impressed me at the 2006 SFIAAFF, and Chang Tso-Chi, whose The Best Of Times was a favorite at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. Their new films are Dooman River and When Love Comes, respectively. Add in new documentaries on Anna May Wong and Mongolian film history, and archival screenings of Charlie Chan At The Olympics (with author Yunte Huang on hand to contextualize that film's complex racial issues) and Nonzee Nimibutr's 1999 hit Nang Nak (the first Thai film I ever saw, and part of a three-film focus on South-East Asian horror), and there's plenty of attractions to fill a film lover's viewing schedule.

The festival's closing night selection should appeal not only to cinephiles but to Frisco Bay's many indie music enthusiasts. It's called Surrogate Valentine, and it's a comedy about a musician performing in coffee houses and other small West Coast venues, and though I must admit I had low expectations going into the press screening (perhaps leftover from the bland taste I had in my mouth from the last SFIAAFF gala presentation I saw, last year's opening night film Today's Special), these were very pleasantly upended. I will publish a full review of Surrogate Valentine after a press embargo lifts this Saturday, when it makes its world premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, but for now I'll just recommend it. It plays the last SFIAAFF night in San Francisco on March 17th, and the festival's last day in San Jose on March 20.

Fans of Surrogate Valentine's star Goh Nakamura who are intrigued by his prominence in one of the highlighted features might find themselves checking out other SFIAAFF programs as well. Music and film are often seen as competing forms of entertainment, but Frisco Bay's festivals have become saavy about finding ways to involve passionate seekers of out-of-the-ordinary music in their events. In a particularly brilliant move, the San Francisco International Film Festival has announced (among a few other early SFIFF program indications) that the Castro Theatre stage will play host to the Tindersticks on May 2nd, where the group will perform live under a screen showing excerpts from six of the Claire Denis films they've provided the musical score to. This makes attendance at the Pacific Film Archive's current Denis retrospective all the more imperative as preparation for this one-of-a-kind film/music event. Of the six films to be excerpted for this performance, only White Material has already had its PFA screening. Nénette et Boni plays March 25, Trouble Every Day on April 2nd, L'Intrus on April 8th & 9th, Friday Night on April 15, and 35 Shots of Rum on April 16th.

It wasn't so long ago that I considered myself much more of a music aficionado than a cinephile myself. The first film I tried to buy a ticket for at the SFIFF was Iara Lee's electronic music documentary, Modulations. It was sold out, and I ended up seeing it during its theatrical run, and waiting another year before actually attending SFIFF. I've recently been reminded that my first excursions to truly independent movie theatres the Red Vic and the Roxie were facilitated by frequent ticket giveaways from my favorite radio station I've ever regularly listened to, 90.3 KUSF-FM. Without my interest in keeping on top of exciting independent music curated by the KUSF DJs, I might never have gotten into the habit of attending these alternative screening venues. Even after my attention to music became eclipsed by my attention to movies, I became a loyal listener to the Movie Magazine International radio program produced by Monica Sullivan out of the station. It was a great way to keep on top of festivals, revivals, new releases, etc. And yes, they had ticket giveaways on that weekly program as well.

In case you haven't heard about the University of San Francisco's decision to sell off the 90.3 frequency earlier this year, here's a good primer. At the end of last month, I was one of many who sent a letter to the Federal Communcations Commission in Washington, D.C., asking that they deny the premature transfer of the frequency the public had entrusted the University to operate in the interest of the local community (which KUSF had, with great panache, as it hosted over a dozen foreign-language broadcasts and partnered with countless local businesses and non-profit organizations to get the word out on important activities.) While KUSF supporters wait to hear what will happen next on the legal front, they continue to rally support for their cause by organizing events to benefit the cost of fighting the transfer. Tomorrow night, a special screening of the punk rock documentary A History Lesson, part 1 will be held at the 9th Street Independent Film Center, and this Saturday at midnight, a screening of a surprise film (perhaps you can figure it out from this blurb) will be presented at the Red Vic (whose March and April calendars are as strong as any two months at that venue as I can remember). Proceeds from both screenings will go to the Save KUSF campaign. Of course, if you can't make it to either screening, the fight to keep San Francisco airwaves locally-controlled in the face of media consolidation can also be aided with a direct donation.

Season of Light

It's truly Winter on Frisco Bay now, with temperatures to prove it. What better time to spend inside a movie theatre, being warmed by the heat of artistic achievement? Though it may be tougher to find time for culture in a December packed with holiday parties and shopping trips, the potential psychological and, dare I say, spiritual rewards, of seeing a good or great movie seem to be ramped up at this time of year. Why else do so many film companies release so many of the films they think will resonate with adult audiences during this season? (So they can position their films for critics' top tens and Academy Awards, you say? Don't be such a Scrooge!) This week Frisco Bay hosts at least two screenings likely to have a profound mood-altering effect on religious and secular cinephiles alike. I mentioned both in my last post but they're worth repeating. There's Thursday's screening of Carl Dreyer's 1928 The Passion of Joan Of Arc at the glorious Paramount, with a 22-piece orchestra and full chorus performing Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light composition as underscore. Seeing the trial of the Maid of Orleans enacted (almost entirely in facial close-ups) on such a large screen with such glorious music accompanying is likely to be the cultural highlight of the month (if not year) for anyone no matter what their religious affiliation, or lack thereof. Then on Saturday the Rafael Film Center screens Apichatpong Weerasethakul's very spiritually-attuned new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as part of a week-long International Buddhist Film Festival Showcase.

I haven't seen any of the other selections in the Rafael program of Buddhist-themed films (though I should note that the documentary Saint Misbehavin': the Wavy Gravy Movie will begin a week-long engagement at the Red Vic this Friday, before it screens at the Rafael on Sunday), but I have previewed DVD screener copies of two hour-long films playing together as part of the International Buddhist Film Festival's December 9-19 stint at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts. Titled The Inland Sea and Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden, these two Nipponophile documentaries from the early 1990s will be presented in rare 35mm prints, and the cinematographer for The Inland Sea, Hiro Narita (who also shot Never Cry Wolf and La Mission among many other titles) will be present at the films' December 12 pairing.

The Inland Sea ties nicely into the Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives screening because the latter film's director Apichatpong has reportedly been planning to follow his Cannes prize-winning film with a project on Donald Richie, who narrates and briefly appears in The Inland Sea, quite appropriately since he wrote the 1971 travel memoir upon which it was based. Richie is of course best known to cinephiles for his writings on Japanese film, but in fact his writing on the country he's lived in since the late 1940s investigates more than just its cinema. The Inland Sea, both in book and film form, seeks a traditional Japan fading from view in the latter part of the 20th century, by journeying between the coastal towns bordering the Seto Inland Sea that separates the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. One gets a good sense of the subject and tone of the documentary from Vincent Canby's New York Times review from 1991. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is how it straddles the line between time capsule and period piece. Richie wrote the following for a 1993 reprinting of the memoir:

It has now been over twenty years since The Inland Sea was first published, and nearly thirty since I began the journals on which it is based. During this time the area has much changed. Last year, when the book was made into a film, the crew could no longer follow all of my original route since large portions of it were now unrecognizably developed.

Yet, they discovered that by jumping one island over, as it were, they could parallel my journey of three decades before; they could find places where, mirroring the words of my text, the past had not vanished, not quite. The Inland Sea I wrote about yet exists--it is there, if you know where to look.

I do wonder if the same could be said today, now that nearly another twenty years have passed.

Both The Inland Sea and suitably titled Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden are enriched by a musical score from 20th century Japan's arguably greatest composer, Toru Takemitsu, who wrote music for films by Nagisa Oshima, Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, Akira Kurosawa (though not for any of the Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune collaborations, like the seven playing the VIZ over the holidays), and many other directors before his 1996 death. His contribution to Dream Window is much stronger than to The Inland Sea, however. Not only is there more music, featured more prominently, but Takemitsu is interviewed on camera, and even the title Dream Window was taken from the title of one of his serialist compositions. Any Takemitsu fan should consider this film a must-watch; it's especially enlightening to be able to hear the man speak about the affinity he feels between music composition and gardens, and then hear a passage from one of his Messaien-influenced pieces, while an image from the garden at Sai-Hochi appears on screen.

Perhaps Toru Takemitsu's most fruitful if not frequent composer/director relationship was the one he had with Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman In The Dunes, Antonio Gaudí, and Rikyu as well as other films Takmitsu scored. Teshigahara, too, appears prominently in Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden, not in the role of film director but as grand master of his father's Sogetsu school of Ikebana (flower arranging), and as a budding outdoor garden designer as well. Since the documentary was released between Teshigahara's final two films Rikyu and Basara: Princess Goh, the only two jidai-geki (period films) the multitalented artist made in his career, it's particularly interesting to hear him advise, "we have to think of what we can create for today's world. It would be pointless just to copy what went before."

Ultimately both The Inland Sea and Dream Window are likely to be satisfying viewing for anyone with a natural interest in Japanese culture, with added excitement for cinephiles curious to see legendary figures associated with Japanese cinema (Richie, Takemitsu, Teshigahara) speaking of matters separate from their involvement in film. They certainly make sense paired together (perhaps this was first done in a 1993 issue of the Buddhism journal Tricycle) by the International Buddhist Film Festival. Though neither film addresses Buddhism in a sustained and direct way (Shintoism is in fact more prominently dealt with in The Inland Sea), they both invite a kind of contemplative observational style that may appeal to Buddhist viewers, especially those who remember that the festival programmed Thomas Riedelsheimer's documentary on artist Andy Goldsworthy Rivers And Tides at a previous event. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Riedelsheimer had encountered Dream Window in particular before developing the rhythms he employed in that film.

Before I sign off, let me point out that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is equally devoted to the sacred and the profane in December, as in addition to their Buddhist film series, the venue is also hosting a devious horror film series called Go To Hell For the Holidays From December 2-18. Dennis Harvey has previewed most of the titles, including Wolf Creek (the Australian film that was released on Christmas Day 2005 in the US). The only selection I've seen myself is the Thai film about the cannibalistic-minded noodle vendor, The Meat Grinder. I'll simply say it was just as gory and twice as atmospheric as I expected it to be.

What I'm Thinking About This Week

Ten years ago at this time I was living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, teaching English at a local high school. It seems like such a long time ago, but the impact of spending a year and a half living and working in a foreign country did so much to change my perspectives on the world, and my place in it, that I still feel very close to the experience. I'm sometimes wistful that I've lost touch with all of my former students and fellow teachers, and indeed most of the friends I made while living abroad, but returning to my native city where I've resided ever since, has not made me feel as if I've completely lost touch with Thailand. I cherish my mostly-fond memories of the country, and still try to keep up with major current events there, as depressing as they often may be (as they have been lately).

Cinema has been a major component of my feeling of connectedness. While in Chiang Mai I first tried my hand at criticism, penning a monthly video review column for a local English-language news magazine catering to the British/Australian/North American ex-patriot community. At the time, I wrote mostly about the latest Hollywood films, because they were the ones widely available in rental shops. It was easy to experience the cultural artifacts of my own culture while abroad. Now I'm lucky to live in a place where I can more than just vicariously experience some of the benefits of Thai cinema's resurgence and global emergence over the past decade or so. Between all of the film festivals and alternative screening venues that exist here on Frisco Bay, there are usually a few opportunities a year, and sometimes as many as a half-dozen or more, to view Thai films in 35mm prints on the big screen; of these I've missed only a scant few over the past decade. I've been able to keep relatively current with the work of directors I was first exposed to during my time in the Land of Smiles- Wisit Sasanatieng, Nonzee Nimibutr and Pen-ek Ratanaruang (the latter's latest Nymph was not among the best films I saw at the latest San Francisco International Film Festival, but I was extremely pleased for the opportunity to view it, and particularly its nearly-supernatural opening camera move, in a cinema in my own town.) I've been able to discover from afar the work of newer talent like Uruphong Raksasad, who makes his digital quasi-documentaries in the region of Thailand I'm most personally familiar with, or Anocha Suwichakornpong, whose Mundane History was my most truly transcendent highlight of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival earlier this year.

The constant Thai cinematic presence over these years as a Frisco guy who left some small piece of his heart in Thailand, however, has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who ten years ago was seeing his first feature film, Mysterious Object At Noon, travel the global festival circuit. I first heard his name in 2001, shortly before the film played to a small audience at the Pacific Film Archive. Since then, thanks to the SFIFF, SFIAAFF, and other local venues tapped into international cinephile dialogue, I've been able to watch most of his film and video work, much of it repeatedly. How much of a debt do I owe my affection for and fascination with Apichatpong's filmmaking to my stint in Thailand? I can't be sure, but it's been heartening to feel like I've been following this still-young director over the past decade as his visibility has increased among film-lovers everywhere. I was so thrilled and surprised on Sunday, when his latest feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the first such win for an Asian film since films by Shohei Imamura and Abbas Kiarostami shared the honor in 1997. Of course I have not yet seen Uncle Boonmee (although I was delighted to see his companion short video piece Letter to Uncle Boonmee at the SFIAAFF in March) and perhaps I'll even find it a letdown compared to his three masterful 35mm features, Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, and Blissfully Yours. But I feel glad that this high-profile win will surely secure a chance for Frisco Bay Apichatpong fans to see the film eventually, and hopefully sooner than such an opportunity would otherwise be likely to occur.

In the meantime, I'm all the more excited to plunge into the viewing opportunities that have been laid upon my table. One certainly doesn't need to be an Apichatpong Weerasethakul admirer to be excited by chances to see Andy Warhol films, but it supplies another reason; Apichatpong has often named Warhol, along with Frisco Bay experimental film legend Bruce Baillie, as favorite filmmakers and key inspirations for his work. SFMOMA will screen confirmed Apichatpong favorite The Chelsea Girls on July 8. And the longest-running lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender film festival in the world, Frameline, has announced as part of its upcoming program next month a large-scale focus on Andy Warhol. It consists of screenings of a new documentary, Beautiful Darling, the Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar, a clips lecture by Ron Gregg, and two programs of shorter Warhol films selected by Gregg, including Vinyl, which adapted Anthony Burgess's a Clockwork Orange with Gerard Malanga six years before Stanley Kubrick did it with Malcolm McDowell.

In addition to the Warhol films, Frameline selections I'm anxious to see include I Killed My Mother by Xavier Dolan and Spring Fever by Lou Ye, both of which come highly regarded by those who have seen them at festivals over the past year, and Géza von Radvány's 1958 version of Madchen In Uniform, screening as an archival selection. Frameline veterans from Cheryl Dunye to François Ozon to Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman each will have new films presented at this year's festival, but the full range of filmmaking, from documentary to short form to a robust selection of South America's New Queer Cinema cannot be adequately summarized in a paragraph of preview, so I urge you to browse the full schedule before finalizing your festival plans. I know I will.

June's going to be a crowded month of filmgoing however, even with Sex In The City 2 virtually* dominating the Castro Theatre from now until Frameline opens there June 17. After a near-month of hiatus, the Pacific Film Archive reopens this weekend. The venue's regular projection space (at least until 2014 or so) at 2575 Bancroft Way has its first screenings of the summer tomorrow evening, when a double feature of Whistler films you may or may not have seen at the Roxie's I Still Wake Up Dreaming B-noir festival, play. As does the 1975 King Hu martial arts extravaganza The Valiant Ones. The latter kicks off a remarkable series of recent acquisitions to the PFA film collection, which reminds us that Berkeley's most-revered film exhibition venue has roots much deeper than mere exhibition. (So that's what the 'A' stood for!) Films by Hayao Miyazaki, Agnès Varda, Alberto Gout, Robert Gardner, Judy Irving and others round out the eclectic series. Tributes to Mexican science fiction, the Romanian New Wave and the Residents ensure a little something for everyone, but surely the centerpiece of the PFA's summer is the complete Akira Kurosawa retrospective being held in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Completists are already drooling over the chance to see rarities like Sanshiro Sugata I & II and the Quiet Duel on the big screen, but Berekely is not the only place to get an A.K. fix in June. On this side of the bridge, the Embarcadero will screen a new print of Kurosawa's most famous color film, Ran for a week beginning June 4th. And four of the master's most noirish black-and-white films will play in 35mm prints at the still-new VIZ Cinema at Post and Webster Streets that same week: Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, the Bad Sleep Well and High and Low are the titles, not a samurai sword among them. The VIZ lineup for June is truly jawdropping for those of us who can't get enough classic Japanese cinema. After a week of Kurosawa films, the Japantown venue will bring four Yasujiro Ozu films including his most-widely-acknowledged masterpiece Tokyo Story, his following film Early Spring, and two earlier films I've been wishing to see return to Frisco Bay since I missed them during his PFA centennial six and a half years ago: The Only Son and Record Of A Tenement Gentlemen. As if that weren't enough, VIZ will screen four Kenji Mizoguchi masterpieces (I confidently say this not having seen all of them) June 19-24: Sisters of The Gion (pictured above), Ugetsu Monogatari, Street of Shame and Utamaro and His Five Women (the one I haven't seen yet). This is a truly special set of twelve films VIZ is bringing in June, each with multiple playdates, so go to as many as you can while you can, and tell your friends, if you want to encourage future screenings of Japanese classics on this side of Frisco Bay, where they've been pretty scarce in recent years.

VIZ Cinema, which until recently focused on screening the films of its affiliated DVD label almost exclusively, is obviously stretching its programming muscles, and if this keeps up it will rapidly become one of the most exciting venues on Frisco Bay. Also to play there in June are two programs with a South Asian, rather than East Asian, focus: 3rd i's Queer Eye, an outpost of LGBT films presented by the folks who bring the South Asian Film Festival to town every November, and the locally-made Indian diasporic film Bicycle Bride.

What else is happening in June? The previously-mentioned "I Still Wake Up Dreaming" series experienced rush line level crowds for some of its 35mm screenings, as well as some technical difficulties in the sound quality of certain of the 16mm prints it showed, so programmer Elliot Lavine and the Roxie Theater decided to reprise some of the affected films from June 4. I wholeheartedly recommend the June 6th double-bill in particular, featuring the two best films I saw at the festival: Phil Karlson's luckless boxer nailbiter 99 River Street, and the sultry policier Cop Hater. Everyone seemed to love the cameo-studded rat pack gangster film Johnny Cool but me; it plays June 4 if you want to see for yourself. (For me, it couldn't live up to its theme song.) The Fearmakers, Jacques Tourneur's 1958 expose of the communist infiltration of Washington, D.C. publicity firms is not among the director's great films, but it's an interesting time capsule worth a look in 35mm; it plays June 6th along with a 35mm print of Nightmare, which I missed the first time around. I also missed the three 16mm prints that suffered the worst sound problems, and which will play on a triple-bill June 7th, for free for those who attended their prior screenings and for $11 for the rest of us. Gustav Machatý's Jealousy sounds the most intriguing of the trio.

Oakland's Paramount Theatre begins its summer film series the same weekend, with a June 4 screening of the late Lynn Redgrave's defining film Georgy Girl. Other films scheduled to screen at Frisco Bay's largest, most opulent (if intermittently-utilized) movie palace are the original King Kong July 9, E.T. July 23, and the great Howard Hawks film To Have And Have Not August 6. The Rafael Film Center will play the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda as a special presentation with Oscar winners Craig Barron and Ben Burtt on June 13. SFMOMA screens Clint Eastwood's first directorial effort Play Misty For Me June 10. And the Red Vic has a new calendar on the streets with its usual combination of second-run, repertory, and special event bookings. The documentary on influential filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar (the latter of whom gets a rare solo show at Artists' Television Access June 5) called It Came From Kuchar makes its landing June 14 & 15. Bong Joon-ho's Mother plays June 16 & 17 (his The Host plays the PFA June 18), the sheepherding documentary Sweetgrass appears July 12 & 13, and Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop closes the door on this particular calendar August 6-9. Along with the theatre's annual anniversary screenings of Harold and Maude (July 25-28) the Red Vic celebrates its 30th year of operation by showcasing three winners of a recent audience poll of its favorite repertory films. The winners: Alejandro Jodorowski's El Topo (August 1 & 2) takes the bronze, Dead Man (August 3 & 4) the silver, and Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (July 18 & 19) the gold. I'm a deep admirer of all three of these not-quite-canonized films. Congratulations to Red Vic patrons on your discerning and non-conforming taste!

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto still has a few more weeks left on its appetizing current calendar, which ends with a Josef Von Sternberg double-bill (Morocco and The Devil Is A Woman) June 16-18. The day after that, another southerly film venue plays another Sternberg film, this time one of his most highly-regarded silent films, the Last Command. The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, tucked in a lovely corner of Fremont, will present that Oscar-winning film with Jon Mirsalis providing musical accompaniment on Kurzweil synthesizer. It's part of the Silent Film Museum's busiest month of the year; the first weekend in June is given over to Charlie Chaplin Days, honoring the most well-known actor to have worked in Niles back when Hollywood's supremacy as California's movie-making hub was not yet secure. The Gold Rush and other Chaplin films will screen. The final weekend of the month brings a festival named for a cowboy star who was every bit as well-known as Chaplin in his day, but has become something of a footnote today. This year's 13th Annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival features seven different programs of features and short subjects starring figures once famous to all, but now forgotten to most moviegoers, such as Wallace Reid, J. Warren Kerrigan, and G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson himself. An early (1920) King Vidor-directed film, the Jack-Knife Man promises to be a high point of the weekend.

Frisco's own Silent Film Festival has announced its program as well; expanded to a four-day event for its 15th edition, the festival has really outdone itself in lining up well-known and rare silent films, musicians, and special guests for the July 15-18 event. I will surely have more to say on this festival in the weeks to come, but in the meantime, Lincoln Spector has covered some of the highlights. This marks the sixth time I've contributed a contextual essay for the festival's program booklet, a copy of which will be handed to every attendee at the Castro that weekend. "My" film, this time around, has been Dziga Vertov's magnum opus Man With A Movie Camera, which will screen on Sunday afternoon, July 18th, with the Alloy Orchestra performing its critically-acclaimed musical score based on Vertov's 1929 instructions. Familiarizing myself with the history of early Soviet film-making, and sorting through the mountains of material written on Vertov in particular, has made for one of the most challenging and rewarding research projects I've attempted yet. I hope that the end-products (a pre-screening slide show, as well as the essay) prove valuable to festgoers. I have no doubt that the screening and musical performance will be entertaining and eye-opening for people who have already seen Man With A Movie Camera, and for those who haven't. If there was ever a film that deserves repeat viewings, this is it.

While looking through libraries and archives, trying to better understand the conditions under which Vertov's films were screened for the public in his day, I found a collection of program notes from The Film Society Of London which thrust my imagination back into early 1930s art-cinema exhibition. The Film Society had been founded in 1925 by Anthony Asquith, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, and H.G. Wells among other original members. In early 1931 the group screened Man With a Movie Camera on a program with a Silly Symphony (Artic Antics), a set of color (excuse me, colour) photography tests from British and American companies, an Austrian puppet play (The Dragon Prince), and a section of Alberto Cavalcanti's Little Red Riding Hood. Later that year, the same venue played Vertov's first sound film, Enthusiasm with the director personally in attendance; this was two days prior to Charlie Chaplin's famous pronouncement: "Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to seem so beautiful...Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician. The professors should learn from him not quarrel with him." In late 1935 Vertov's following film Three Songs About Lenin screened on a bill with Cavalcanti's GPO documentary Coal Face and Len Lye's Kaleidoscope among other short subjects.

I find it thrilling to learn such details about a bygone era of cinephilia, in which leading playwrights, novelists, and economists rubbed shoulders with animators, documentarians, film technologists, and avant-garde filmmakers from home and abroad. I do wonder what the membership requirements of The Film Society of London were like-- did one have to be a living legend to gain access, or are those simply the member names that have been handed down to us? Is there an equivalent of that activity today amidst the film festivals and venues right here in this town? I know that there are others who would disagree with me, but I just love that the SF Silent Film Festival programs films of diverse types, from all the corners of the world it can, alongside the justly classic and unjustly obscure entertainments from the Hollywood studio era. An 'us vs. them' attitude about independent and foreign filmmaking no doubt existed among some American film producers of the era, but in some corners of film appreciation, it feels like boundaries (national, stylistic, genre, etc.) are being patrolled more fiercely than ever. The Film Society Of London appeared to smash these kinds of barriers in its day, and from what I understand, early programming at places like SFMOMA did the same in the 1930s, mixing the avant-garde, documentary, an popular animation from various countries of origin, all on the same program.

Eighty years ago feels like a world away, but another little discovery made it seem just a little bit closer: on the back of the program for the Three Songs of Lenin screening was a list of films that had their British premiere at The Film Society in 1934-5, and it included (along with Jean Vigo's Zero For Conduct and Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon) a title I saw at the Pacific Film Archive a year and a half ago, Douro by Manoel de Oliveira. A silent, poetic documentary that was clearly made by a man who was then a young contemporary of Walter Ruttmann, Joris Ivens, and Vertov, Douro is almost certainly the only remaining silent-era debut film made by a director who is not only still living, but still making films, at 101 years of age. And here was his name listed amidst those of long-dead filmmakers who it's hard not to think of as belonging to a long-dead era.

While Oliveira's latest film just debuted alongside Apichatpong's in Cannes (Dennis Lim found the pair comparable highlights), his previous one is poised to make its first appearance here on Frisco Bay, also in June, at pretty much the only major local film venue I haven't yet mentioned in this post, the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. Called Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, on June 24, 26 & 27 it wraps up what looks to be an extremely strong month at the venue that has allowed me to see more Apichatpong Weerasethakul films than any other. No, YBCA hasn't announced plans to screen Uncle Boonmee yet, but they will be showing, in addition to the Oliveira, three films any serious cinephile will probably want to experience: Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers June 3-6, Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay June 12-13 (both of which have been among the most contentious new films of the past year's film festival circuit) and Catherine Breillat's wonderful Bluebeard June 17-19. If Apichatpong, Korine, Mendoza and Breillat can be counted as contemporaries of Oliveira (and why not), and Oliveira was a contemporary of Vertov, Vigo and Chaplin, then the boundary between contemporary and "old" cinema is obliterated. What a refreshing thought!

27th SFIAAFF Planning Guide

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival schedule is now available on line, complete with a few important changes from the printed schedule. The festival runs March 12-22 in venues all over Frisco Bay, and tickets can be purchased Monday by non-members (member tickets are already on sale). This year's festival is somewhat scaled-down in some respects but it still looks extremely robust, with a strong mix of new works by Asian-American filmmakers and Asian auteurs, and a diverse selection of retrospective screenings.

The latter category includes Diamond Head, a 1962 film about interracial romance in Hawai'i featuring a cast including Charlton Heston, France Nuyen, Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, and Philip Ahn. It was directed by Guy Green, who got his start as cinematographer for David Lean's early films. Ang Lee will be at the festival to screen and talk about his 2007 film Lust, Caution on March 17th. SF Cinematheque is co-presenting two programs of 16mm and video work by Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Iimura, including 1962's Ai, featuring a soundtrack by Yoko Ono. And the tradition of spotlighting the filmography of a recent film festival powerhouse from East Asia (after 2007's Hong Sang-soo retrospective and 2008's 3-film Edward Yang tribute) continues with a 7-film spotlight on Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kurosawa is expected to attend the festival himself. Five rarely-seen works from his fertile 1997-1998 period will screen- this period produced Cure, which was the first of the director's films to be widely seen in the West. Cure will not screen, but his perhaps most chilling hit Pulse will. Pulse premiered at festivals in 2001 but was buried for being too prescient of September 11, and unearthed with less fanfare than it deserved. It played in Frisco cinemas a few years ago but I'm sure many missed it and caught up with it on video if at all. Suffice to say its visual frights are more effective in a communal screening environment.

Kurosawa's latest film Tokyo Sonata will screen as part of the series as well. Though his two prior features, Retributionand Loft have still never shown in Frisco Bay cinemas (and I can't pretend I don't wish the SFIAAFF had been able to squeeze them into the festival to catch us up, even while I appreciate the opportunity for immersion in the early films), Tokyo Sonata is stopping that streak in a big way. Not only is it playing the SFIAAFF, but it has two screenings at Cinequest in San Jose, and is planned for a late-March theatrical release in the area. It certainly deserves it. Tokyo Sonata takes Kurosawa's work squarely outside the territory of supernatural horror he's known for inhabiting, by mining the dramatic and comic potential of Japanese family constructions deconstructed. A father clings to his authority when his position is outsourced, by hiding the development behind his salaryman routine, even though he now is standing in unemployment and food lines. His wife is locked into a submissive 'pleaser' role, while their two sons rebel in very disparate ways. The set-up is masterful, and in the final reel or two events breathlessly unravel. A second (perhaps third) viewing is certainly in order. SFIAAFF provides two chances, March 13th and 14th.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing several other new feature films on the program. The closing night film, Treeless Mountain is So Yong Kim's follow-up to the lovely low-budget In Between Days, and like that film is a U.S./ South Korean co-production. The opening night film is a U.S. premiere, also from Korea: My Dear Enemy, which joins director Lee Yoon-ki (of Ad Lib Night) with actress Jeon Do-yeon (of Secret Sunshine) in their first collaboration. The Centerpiece film is the directorial debut of Colma: the Musical actor/songwriter H.P. Mendoza. It's another indie musical shot in Frisco called Fruit Fly, and it plays at the Castro Sunday March 15th, followed by the SFIAAFF's annual Bollywood extravaganza; following last year's audience-award-winning presentation of Om Shanti Om, heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan is back in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Bong Joon-ho of the Host fame contributes to a portmanteau film with Frenchmen Leos Carax and Michel Gondry entitled Tokyo! And one of the biggest commercial hits of recent Thai cinema, a gay teen romance called The Love of Siam is on hand to represent mainland South-East Asia (there are no features from Vietnam, Malaysia, or Cambodia in this year's program.)

It's going to be hard to fit all of this and everything else intriguing into a workable viewing schedule so picking and choosing is mandatory. But I certainly don't want to miss 24 City, the latest from Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke, who was the subject of a complete retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive last autumn. The PFA is an SFIAAFF venue from March 13-21, and will play 24 City on Saturday afternoon, March 14th - opposite the only screenings of Kurosawa's License to Live, the Love of Siam, one of the two unique Iimura programs, and a conversation with my elementary school-mate Alex Tse (now a successful Hollywood screenwriter with Sucker Free City and Watchmen on his list of credits). Yikes! That's going to be a tough time slot to navigate! Luckily 24 City is also playing at the Kabuki on Sunday March 15th.

Of course I couldn't cover it all here tonight- there's also two competitive sections, one for narrative features and one for documentaries, that I haven't touched on at all. The International Showcase includes many titles I'm wholly unfamiliar with in addition to the ones mentioned above. There's always copious shorts programs, panels and parties as well. Better not make other plans for March 12-22!