layover (2014)

A scene from Vanessa Renwick's LAYOVER, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Vanessa Renwick made this.

WHAT: I've only seen a handful of items from Renwick's extensive filmography; essentially only the ones collected on this DVD (I plan to place an order for this one soon). What I've seen reveals her accomplishment in many filmmaking tools and techniques, but the film that has stuck with me most over the years is Britton, South Dakota, a found footage piece that apparently involved minimal intervention on her part. Yet those few strokes: selecting a particular nine minutes of images from two and a half hours of footage shot by one man in one town back in 1938, and finding music to go with it, turned the footage into a particularly haunting form of contemporary art.

Her latest short piece, a 6-minute work called layover, is a stunningly beautiful cine-poem documenting the swirling flight patterns of a group of Vaux's swifts (a West Coast relative to the more famous chimney swift of the Eastern U.S.) as they make their annual stop at a Portland school building (which looks like a repurposed factory smokestack) on the way down their migratory path toward Central America. In this case Renwick's interventions are not nearly as apparently minimal as those in Britton, South Dakota, although I do not know whether or not the footage, shot in HD by perennial collaborator Eric Edwards (also director of photography for many Gus van Sant films), was captured with Renwick present. I have no reason to think she wasn't on hand, directing Edwards and his assistants to shoot the material she knew she'd need for the edit, but it's possible that, like Ivan Besse's footage in Britton, South Dakota, these images were something Edwards had caught without Renwick's involvement, and that she instead instigated their formation into a work unto itself.

Either way, there is an element of the swifts' abstract patterning that foreground's the camera's role in preserving fleeting, unstaged moments. Their spirals and funnels sometimes resemble the animated motions found in a Jordan Belson film, but were not choreographed by any animator besides the instinct and social behavior of Mother Nature. This is a film that invites particular reflections on the role of humans and their inventions in relation to the fabric of organic matter we're surrounded by and indeed part of, whether we're present to that fact or not. Max Goldberg recently put it more succinctly: "each time the awed camera bucks or racks focus to keep up with the flock, it’s a reminder of our human weakness for wanting to hold what will not be held."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 9:30 PM tonight at the Kabuki Theatre, and 6:30 PM this Sunday, May 3rd at the Pacific Film Archive, both courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: Max Goldberg's article, linked above, is from his wrap-up on SF Cinematheque's Crossroads Festival, which occurred earlier this month. He doesn't mention that layover in fact kicked off the very first program of the entire weekend-long festival, its uplift making an ideal opening to a weekend full of flights into unknown spaces. If the order of films in the Nothing But a Dream: Experimental Shorts program at SFIFF this year is the order of showing, then layover will again provide the first images of the program, and for those who may have missed out on Crossroads, an ideal opening of a month of SF Cinematheque co-presentations and presentations.

The "Nothing But a Dream" program is the annual SFIFF show programmed not by festival staff but by Kathy Gertiz of the Pacific Film Archive and Vanessa O'Neill of Cinematheque; it includes works by artists frequently showcased by those institutions, like Janie Geiser and T. Marie, as well as relative newcomers like local Zachary Epcar, whose terrific short Under the Heat Lamp an Opening is the first of his pieces screened at any of these three partnering organizations (its slightly-earlier showing at Crossroads shouldn't take away from the prestige of this premiere; this time Epcar is expected to be on hand for audience questions after the showings).

SF Cinematheque has also joined as a co-presenter for Jenni Olson's latest feature The Royal Road, but also presents a couple of programs during SFIFF that have nothing to do with the festival: an Andrew Puls performance occurs (quite unfortunately) during the second screening of layover and its "Nothing But a Dream" kin this Sunday. And small-gauge film legend Saul Levine makes a rare visit from New England to Oakland next Tuesday, May 5th. Later in the month, after SFIFF is over, two more artists present work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Kevin Jerome Everson on the 19th & 20th and Tommy Becker on the 29th. Further into the future, SF Cinematheque promises screenings of work by Zach Iannazzi & Margaret Rorison in August, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder in October, and Nathaniel Dorsky in November.

HOW: According to the PFA listing, all but three of the pieces in the "Nothing But A Dream" program screen digitally. Those three are 16mm prints: Ryan Marino's Old Growth, Jennifer Reeves's Color Neutral and Mike Gibisser's Blue Loop, July. Of course layover will be shown digitally, its native format.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's the final festival screenings of Andrei Konchalovsky's The Postman's White Nights, Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders, Sergei Loznitza's Maidan, and the Chinese noir I wrote about on Monday, Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Castro Theatre (which incidentally has just revealed its May calendar) is screening a 35mm print of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope with a digital version of the Wachowskis' Bound.

Iris (2014)

A scene from Albert Maysles' IRIS, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: The late Albert Maysles directed this.

WHAT: I'm allowed to write no more than a seventy-five word review of this film during the festival; because of its "Hold Review" status I'm supposed to wait until its upcoming commercial release to say more. So here goes:

Manhattan's fearlessly original, supremely quoteable, style maven-about-town Iris Apfel and centenarian husband Carl prove ideal subjects for Maysles' perhaps most poptacular documentary, the last released before his March passing. I doubt it's merely the theme of exuberance in the face of mortality that makes it seem like he's filming a mirror; the fly even comes off the wall for a few warmly unguarded moments. Wear your craziest outfit to this one.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only in House 1 of the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It also opens commercially on May 8th for a (minimum) week-long engagement at the Opera Plaza, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: With this going into general release so soon, you may be tempted to schedule another screening in its timeslot and see it in a couple weeks. The main reason why this is not a perfectly good idea is that the day Iris is released commercially, the day after SFIFF ends, is the first day of a seven-day festival of Maysles documentaries at the Vogue Theatre, coinciding precisely with the seven days it's booked at the above venues. I mentioned this Maysles series in a post last month, but now the entire schedule of sixteen features and shorts has been posted online and tickets are already on sale. Although the series is all-digital, it includes many guest appearances by Maysles associates. I don't think any true admirer of Maysles life and work will want to go into this week-long event without having seen Iris first.

HOW: Digital presentations at each venue.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today is the only festival screening of Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent, with director and star Gaspard Uillel both expected to attend the Castro showing. It's also the final showing of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, at the Pacific Film Archive, and the first showing of Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain at the Kabuki.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The last double-bill in Yerba Buena Center For the Arts' Noir Westerns series may or not be noir, but it's a powerhouse: John Ford's masterful (yet somehow today undervalued) The Searchers and the first of Anthony Mann's cycle of gritty treatises on American civilization starring Jimmy Stewart, Winchester '73, both in 35mm prints.

Ed & Pauline (2014)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: Famed film critic Pauline Kael and lesser-known film exhibitor Ed Landberg are the two subjects of this short documentary.

WHAT: If you've spent much time traveling in Frisco Bay cinema circles you've probably at some point heard that Pauline Kael was, before making an indelible mark on English-language film criticism, an important force in the local moviegoing scene. Kael was born in Petaluma, educated officially at the now-defunct San Francisco Girls' High School and UC Berkeley, and cinematically at places like (according to Brian Kellow's 2011 biography) "the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro and...the Paramount over in Oakland." She fell in with the San Francisco Renaissance crowd, living with and ultimately bearing a child by experimental filmmaker James Broughton.

Ed & Pauline, co-directed by former San Francisco residents Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic, takes up at about this point, referencing Broughton only by still photograph and their daughter Gina only by a moment in the narration when Kael is described as a "single mother". For someone who has gleaned only the barest outlines of this period in Kael's life, this 18-minute documentary appears to do a wonderful job painting a richer portrait of how her early work as a freelance film critic in magazines and at the influential radio station KPFA led to her involvement with Landberg. In 1952 he had founded the Cinema Guild near the corner of Haste and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and which he (erroneously) liked to claim as the country's first twin-screen cinema. At any rate it was Berkeley's first repertory house and an early training ground for future Frisco Bay exhibitors like Sheldon Renan, Tom Luddy, Mike Thomas, and Bill Banning, each of whom are interviewed on-camera here (joined by more widely-recognizable figures like J. Hoberman and John Waters). Kael and Landberg formed a dual partnership: she began writing program notes for the Cinema Guild screenings, and later selecting the films to screen as well, and they got married. Both partnerships were fleeting.

Though this film's generous archival footage, engaging interview clips, and understated re-enactments might make it a fine brief introduction to the history of arthouse culture for a casual moviegoer, for a cinephile it's also tremendous fun to hear choice snippets of Kael's discussions of certain landmark films such as Letter From an Unknown Woman, Passion of Joan of Arc and Night of the Hunter as scans of old Cinema Guild calendars are flipped through. Keen eyes will pick out the recurring auteur names (Chaplin, Renoir, Bergman, Flaherty, McLaren...) and feel a greater sense of the primordial cinema scene from which came the eventual champion of filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma.

Kael is much better known than Landberg, of course, but his part of the story is equally prominent, in part because Bruno and Vekic were able to interview him and even have him revisit the section of Telegraph where his cinema once stood (since filming, even the cafe that replaced it has been demolished). If, as Tom Luddy relates, Landberg was "the first exhibitor in this country to show Ozu in a truly crusading way" then as far as I'm concerned he's a genuine unsung hero.

One quote from Ed & Pauline particularly stood out for me. Mike Thomas, who would go on to run the Strand on San Francisco's Market Street, notes that "it's hard to imagine when these films were not all around us, but they were more legendary, than anybody actually got a chance to see them." For those of us who haven't fully embraced the ethereal future of all-digital cinephilia there's a deep sense of the loss of the screening as an unrepeatable event. Wayfinders like Kael and Landberg helped thirsty moviegoers locate water in the desert. Now we all can swim in an ocean, but are in no less need of divining rods to help us find fresh drink.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, 1:00 on May 2nd at the Clay, and 6:15 on May 4th at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: Tonight's screening is the only one happening in Berkeley, mere blocks from the Cinema Guild itself (and the scene of the crime of my first exposure to Kael's program notes, which I actually prefer to her reviews.) If you can fit it into your schedule you won't be sorry; I understand the filmmakers are expected to be present as well (I'm not sure if they'll still be in town for the later, San Francisco screenings).

But seeing this film at the SFIFF at all feels particularly vital as a stand for an institution proving it harbors no grudges- at least not after 54 years. Kellow's book on Kael devotes a paragraph to her withering opinion of the festival circa 1961: that "those who had paid $2.50, expecting to see a movie of quality, emerged from the festival 'sleepy and bored, asking, how could they have picked that movie?'" Especially harsh words about a year in which Jean Cocteau's The Testament of Orpheus, Luis Buñuel's Viridiana and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles were all screened.

HOW: Ed & Pauline screens in front of a documentary co-directed by Gina Leibrecht and the late Les Blank, who worked together on 2007's All In This Tea; this new film is called How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy, a title self-explanatory to anyone who knows about Leacock, one of the instrumental figures along with D.A. Pennebaker and David and Albert Maysles in revolutionizing non-fiction filmmaking in the post-World War II era.  Both films show digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's the sole SFIFF screenings of Liz Garbus's documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? about the phenomenal singer, playing at the Castro, and of the first of the "Dark Wave" midnight-ish screenings at the Roxie, Cop Car. It's also the first festival screening of Lisandro Alonso's critically-acclaimed Jauja at the Clay.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A 35mm print of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window screens at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland tonight.

Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (2015)

A scene from Alex Gibney's STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Alex Gibney directed and co-produced this documentary in between his recent Scientology exposé Going Clear and his upcoming Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. It's all in a season's work for a man who has director credit on about two dozen non-fiction releases since busting onto the scene as a feature documentary director ten years ago with Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room.

WHAT: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine hasn't screened publicly anywhere since its world premiere last month at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX, as far as I can tell. It was that screening that prompted Ryan Lattanzio of Indiewire to write:

This bracing film at first seduces you with the charms of the man, and then guts you with what a tricky riddle he was, an at-times sociopathic mogul who flew close to the Sun, touched it and never quite fell as he should have.

I'm curious about this documentary, although as Kelly Vance notes at the tail end of his epic East Bay Express SFIFF preview, Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine "is neither the first nor the last movie to capitalize on the late Apple godhead's popularity." I doubt it will be able to supplant this concise video as my own personal favorite moving image take on the Apple founder and his legacy.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF)

WHY: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine is the opening-night film of the "longest-running film festival in the Americas" as David Hudson calls SFIFF in his essential Keyframe Daily preview. Last year I attended this festival's opening-night event for the first time ever, after writing a bit on why I hadn't ever done so before. Unfortunately I picked a bit of a dud year to finally walk down the red carpet, as Two Faces of January, while showcasing its actors and locations nicely enough, was ultimately a rather dull and predictable thriller and a disappointing directorial debut by a strong screenwriter. Still, it was nice to see what kind of a crowd the festival was able to assemble at the Castro; familiar faces from just about all corners of the Frisco Bay film scene (excepting, perhaps, the 35mm purists) were gathered together to watch a film that ended up being one of the least-memorable of the year. A bit of a waste, really.

Opening the festival with a documentary by a proven director seems a much safer choice, but in some ways it's quite a bold one; since SFIFF first appeared on my radar screen in the late 1990s, the festival has always selected a narrative feature to kick off its fifteen days of screenings. I should ask Michael Hawley, whose memory as an attendee goes back much farther, how long this tradition goes back, but at least in the past twenty years there has never been a documentary screened on SFIFF's opening night. Which is perhaps a bit strange considering that local film festival audiences tend to collectively eat up documentaries like they're scoops of ice cream in danger of melting in the hot sun. This year's crop at SFIFF also includes highly-anticipated non-fiction works like The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up The Look of Silence, the late Albert Maysles' Iris, and from locals, Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution and Jenni Olson's experimental doc The Royal Road (which, full-disclosure, I contributed to the crowd-funding campaign for).

It's always fun to see a movie in a packed Castro Theatre, though (in just about every way except for the line for the restroom), so I hope I can make it to quite a few festival screenings there even if I miss tonight's show. This year the festival's using the 1922-built venue for more screenings than it has in the recent past, including three six more showings over the upcoming weekend, each of which is highlighted among the festival's own opening weekend picks. I will definitely be there for the Saturday afternoon showing of Barbara Loden's sole directing effort Wanda, one of the three films expected to screen via 35mm print in the whole festival, and a film that's been high on my to-see list for years, and even more so since I was out of town during its last San Francisco screening.

HOW: Digital projection.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Trouble in Paradise screens in 35mm at the Stanford Theatre along with Rouben Mamoulian's flawed but interesting (and containing the most sublime Russian Easter scene ever filmed, surely) Tolstoy adaptation We Live Again. It's the midway point of the Stanford Theatre's ongoing series of Lubitsch/Mamoulian pairings every Wednesday and Thursday.

Christo's Valley Curtain (1973)

WHO: Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Ellen Giffard co-directed this.

WHAT: The first of six films the Maysles Brothers made documenting the creation of ambitious, if temporary, "environmental art" installations by Bulgarian-born visionary Christo and his artistic and matrimonial partner Jeanne-Claude, Christo's Valley Curtain is also at 28 minutes the shortest of these six films, and the only Maysles film to be nominated for an Academy Award. It documents the erection of a giant strip of orange fabric in a windswept valley in Colorado. Joe McElhaney writes in his top-notch book, Albert Maysles:

The film places great importance on the two remaining hours the workers have in which to get the curtain up before the winds change direction, thereby threatening not only the completion of the curtain but the lives of the workers. But time here is simply a question of deadlines to be faced -- a classical overcoming of obstacles, successfully achieved in all of these Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, which, with one exception, end on a note of triumph. These films return to a variation on the crisis structure of the Robert Drew films from which David and Albert Maysles had originally wanted to break away.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight as part of Oddball Films's 8PM Monumental Artscapes program, and will also screen during the week of May 8-14 (precise time/day to be announced) at the Vogue.

WHY: With the passing away of great filmmaker Albert Maysles earlier this month at the age of 88, an era of documentary production in America seems to have come to an end. The influential figure who, with his late brother David (as well as other collaborators) filmed such landmark non-fiction works as Salesman and Grey Gardens is deserving of as many cinematic tributes as can be thought up, especially in the Frisco Bay area, at the outskirts of which at least two of his greatest achievements were filmed (Gimme Shelter, portraying a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway on the Eastern edge of Alameda county between Livermore and Tracy, and Running Fence, the second Christo/Jeanne-Claude film, set at the border of Marin and Sonoma counties.)

Tonight's Oddball Films show juxtaposes Christo's Valley Curtain with Robert Smithson's 1970 film of his own Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake, as well as films and footage focusing on artists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Claes Oldenburg and G. Augustine Lynas, providing an opportunity to contrast the Maysles documentary approach against other filmmakers'. A more jarring juxtaposition may be achieved by the opening double-bill in the Castro Theatre's just-announced April calendar, which pairs the Maysles' (and Ellen Hovde's and Muffie Meyer's) Grey Gardens with a 35mm print of the notorious John Waters gross-out Pink Flamingos. No fooling!

Further down on the horizon, details are just starting to come out about a week-long Maysles tribute at Frisco's forgotten single-screen cinema the Vogue, on May 8th-14th. Sixteen films co-directed by Albert Maysles will be collected together, presented by luminary special guests including (but perhaps not limited to) Jon Else, Joan Churchill, Stephen Lighthill, and (by Skype) D. A. Pennebaker and Susan Froemke. All of the aforementioned Maysles films will screen at least once during the festival, as well as Meet Marlon Brando on May 8th, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! on May 9th & 14th, and more Christo/Jeanne-Claude films The Gates May 10th and both Islands and Umbrellas on May 12th. More information is forthcoming. The festival is the brainchild of Brisbane documentarian David L. Brown, who I suspect was involved in the film screening at this "Sneak Preview" tribute to another non-fiction legend, Les Blank at the Sebastapol Documentary Film Festival tomorrow night.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball screening will be all 16mm; I'm told Christo's Valley Curtain is a particularly lovely print. The May festival's formats are as yet unspecified, although I would bet on digital knowing how infrequently the Vogue has screened celluloid in the last couple of years.

Berkeley In the Sixties (1990)

Screen capture image from First Run Features DVD

WHO: Documentarian Mark Kitchell, whose most recent release was last year's environmentalism doc A Fierce Green Fire, co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Berkeley In The Sixties is a well-crafted, aesthetically conservative film about leftists, radicals, and other key figures in the 1960s social protest movements that have been so strongly associated with the East Bay city's public image ever since. For those of us who know this period only second-hand, it's a concise primer on far-ranging subjects like the Free Speech Movement, Anti-Vietnam War protests, "Hippie" counterculture, the Black Panthers, and the battle over People's Park.  Made when the events were 20-30 years old (imagine, as a parallel, a documentary on the final ten years of South African apartheid released today), its interviews with 1960s activists show a remarkable candor about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their own protest tactics, frozen at a pre-Clinton-era moment. It would be interesting to know if the interviewees (including Susan Griffin, David Hilliard and Frank Bardacke) would have similar things to say today, now that the term "Free Speech" has been appropriated by the Right to mean "money". At any rate, this nearly quarter-century-year-old film has yet to be superseded by another documentary on these topics, as far as I'm aware.

In addition to interviews, Berkeley in the Sixties is constructed of often astonishing archival footage, collected from from rarely-seen films from the period, some by names as well-known as Agnès Varda, David Peoples, Irving Saraf, Lenny Lipton, and Will Vinton. Although I found it odd that Scott Bartlett's 1972 work OffOn was used to illustrate the visual component of a March 1966 Jefferson Airplane concert thrown by the Vietnam Day Committee and later denounced by then-gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan.  The first several archival clips used are not from Berkeley at all, but from early 1960s San Francisco protests that are said to have laid the foundation for the galvanization of UC Berkeley students to fight for freedom of speech on their own campus. The image above is from a remarkable anti-HUAC protest in San Francisco's City Hall in 1960.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM today only at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Tonight's screening, which will be attended by filmmaker Kitchell as well as Frank Bardacke and other activists from the era, launches an important series at the Pacific Film Archive that will last until the end of next month. Entitled Activate Yourself: The Free Speech Movement At 50, this series collects a diverse array of rarely-seen films that together aim to paint an essential portrait of the Bay Area's political roots from a half-century ago or so. Tuesday, September 23rd's show highlights films from the San Francisco Newsreel media collective, as well as Desert Hearts director Donna Deitch's early PP1, which sounds irresistible from the PFA's description to this Steve Reich & John Cage fan. October 9th's Sons and Daughters is one of the especially obscure films whose footage is borrowed for Berkeley in the Sixties: extremely charged documentation of protesters trying to convince young military recruits to turn away from the Oakland Army Terminal where they're being processed on the way to Vietnam. October 14th's program features two sub-feature-length documentaries made by filmmakers with a very different viewpoint from that of the anti-HUAC protesters shown in the image above, and will be contextualized by a UC Berkeley law professor following the screenings.

Most of the series films are from the era itself, but KPFA On The Air by Veronica Selver (who was the editor of Berkeley in the Sixties) is a portrait of the broadcasting fulcrum of politics and culture released 51 years after the station first went on the air in 1949. It screens October 26th with Norman Yamamoto's Second Campaign. Finally, the series ends with the sole non-documentary of the set, Art Napoleon's The Activist, shot on the cheap in Berkeley and released with an X rating the same year as Midnight Cowboy was.

Although this series is certainly of interest to cinephiles and political history buffs from across Frisco Bay, not just Berkeley, most of its films do focus on that city. San Francisco gets its own spotlight in a perhaps-complimentary Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series showcasing activist-oriented films shot on this side of the Bay. Starting October 2nd, canonized independent classics like The Times of Harvey Milk and Chan is Missing rub up against lesser-known films documenting Frisco's key communities, such as Take This Hammer featuring James Baldwin on a visit to Hunter's Point (showing free October 26th) and Alcatraz Is Not An Island, about the "Urban Indians" who occupied the former prison, future tourist trap in November 1969. I'm especially excited by the 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's 1983 The Fall of the I-Hotel, which documented the destruction of the last remnant of a now-almost-forgotten neighborhood known as Manilatown. I've been wanting to see it for years, and I hope to be there among an intergenerational audience of activists and cinephiles, historians and tech workers, landlords and tenants, SF natives and newcomers, all realizing we need to come together to look at this city's past if we're going to understand how to prepare for its future.

HOW: Berkeley in the Sixties screens from a 16mm print

Santa Cruz Del Islote (2014)

A scene from Luke Lorentzen's SANTA CRUZ DEL ISLOTE, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society. 

WHO: Luke Lorentzen is the Stanford-based filmmaker who directed this, and many other familiar Frisco Bay filmmaking names (consulting producer Jamie Meltzer, sound mixer Dan Olmstead, etc.) are found in the credits.

WHAT: I haven't seen any of the San Francisco International Film Festival's documentary features yet, but I'd be very surprised if many of them are more able to probe an otherwise-invisible corner of the globe with more artistic and documentary integirty than Santa Cruz Del Islote, a 20-minute short about the most densely-populated island in the world. Even Manhattan and Hong Kong have more open space per capita than this 1200-person, 2.4-acre speck off the coast of Columbia, made up of wall-to-wall fisherman's shacks. Eschewing talking heads and infographics for a visually sumptuous approach (every shot is simply gorgeous), Lorentzen allows the island's residents to provide a sparse narration to contextualize what we're seeing and hearing, but for the most part this is not a verbal but a sensory experience of what life is like in the built-up little town and out in the fishing boats. For the residents of Santa Cruz Del Islote, the sky above and the Caribbean around them is their only wilderness, and Lorentzen often frames the horizon low to emphasize the vastness of the island's blue surroundings.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning tonight at 7PM and on Sunday, May 4th at 3:45., both at the Kabuki Theatre.

WHY: Santa Cruz Del Islote screens on the (numerically, not chronologically) first of the San Francisco International Film Festival's seven shorts programs (though one might call this Tuesday's Castro Theatre program an unofficial eighth). This program is nominally half-documentary and half-narrative, but there's definitely some bleedover. There's a documentary element to Jim Granato's comedic narrative Angels, for example, and though up for a documentary award, John Haptas, Kris Samuelson, and Seiwert's Barn Dance is really a performance staged for the camera. Throw in Bill Morrison's archival-footage-based Re:Awakenings, and it makes for a very diverse and surprising program, as SFIFF shorts programs so often are.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 3 at the festival includes other shorts programs such as the also-excellent animation showcase. It's also the night of the first screenings of anticipated-by-me films like Tamako In Moratorium and Our Sunhi.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Other Cinema's weekly screening tonight features the local single-channel premiere of Sam Green's Study of Fog as well as other Frisco-centric offerings.

Manakamana (2013)

A scene from Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's MANAKAMANA, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez are the co-directors of this experimental documentary.

WHAT: I have not yet seen Manakamana, but I've been anticipating it since I first heard about it last summer, when I was primed to see more work by directors associated with the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, beyond Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, who teamed up to make my favorite feature film of 2013, Leviathan. This one is frequently described as an aesthetic opposite of that camera-chaotic work. Featuring eleven static long takes by a 16mm camera planted in a moving cable car ascending a mountain toward a Nepalese temple, it sounds like it may formally resemble a cross between James Benning's 13 Lakes and Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle. But Spray and Velez also come out of an anthropological tradition of filmmaking influenced by Robert Gardner (as discussed a bit in this interview), so I expect much of the film's interest to come from the human element visually absent from Gehr's and Benning's pieces. Indeed, I was recently fortunate to be able to see an untitled 2010 single-take short made in Nepal by Spray, and it begged the viewer to seriously con.sider the complexity of his or her relationship to the people being depicted on screen, and to the filmmaking apparatus itself, as well as the dynamics between Spray and her subjects.

Manakamana was released in New York City last week and has been reviewed extensively. A relatively new website called Critics Round Up has links to many of the most significant voices on the film. Don't expect San Francisco International Film Festival-credentialed critics to be added to the list however, as until Spray's & Velez's film secures commercial distribution here, it will remain in the strange limbo of the "hold review", in which local writers aren't allowed to review the film in more than 75 words.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People Cinema tonight at 6PM and this Sunday afternoon at 1PM, and at the Kabuki on Monday, May 5th at 2PM.

WHY: Manakamana seems like the kind of moviegoing experience that can't really be replicated on small screens at home, and therefore begs to be seen in a cinema. And it's not one of the several SFIFF selections screening tonight that has already gone to "Rush Status", meaning a wait in line for a chance to get a ticket. If you haven't yet mapped out your whole festival, then there's no better place to start figuring it out than by looking at David Hudson's round-up of capsule previews and other press the festival has received up to this point. As he notes, the SF Bay Guardian has more extensive coverage than the SF Weekly, but that's been the norm for a while now. I imagine SFIFF staff and fans feel some mixed emotions about even the SFBG's coverage though, as for the past couple years now the fact that it gives SFIFF its cover story is blunted by the fact that they wrap this issue (unlike almost any others they publish each year) with an advertisement, thus depriving the city of the sense that the festival is the place to be this week, staring out at them from newsstands and coffee shops across town. Oh well; at least they haven't, like SF Weekly has, given more column inches to that Silicon Valley tv show than to SFIFF.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 2 includes the first local screenings of films by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, Frenchman Serge Bozon and Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof as well as a number of lesser-known directoral quantities.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Mildred Pierce screens in 35mm at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its occasional classic film series that always includes cartoon & newsreel for only $5 admission. The Paramount has announced three more screenings of films with perhaps somewhat more dubious "classic" status (ok, I'm mostly talking about The Goonies) than this Joan Crawford noir between now and mid-July.

Cine Wandering Into the White Mountains of New Hampshire (1942)

WHO: An anonymous, presumably amateur, filmmaker. No names are mentioned in the credits or title cards.

WHAT: This film is a silent, 16mm "home movie" presentation of views of the White Mountains region of New Hampshire. Wintry landscapes, mostly unpeopled, though including both natural and human-made elements to the scene. The geology of the region is featured heavily, including in the segment containing the above image of a "split rock" created by constant weathering and temperature change to the (over time) fragile granite substance.

WHERE/WHEN: On a program screening at 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: I'm tooting my own horn here, as I'll be performing live musical accompaniment for this and for another short reel on tonight's program, a digest print of the 1924 Epic Of Everest, telling the tale of a failed trip to the roof of the world. Both films screen along with films and works-in-progress by my filmmaker girlfriend Kerry Laitala, who is presenting some of what she did in her residency in the Granite State this summer, which I wrote a bit about here.

HOW: On a program of 16mm films with a power-point presentation.

At Berkeley (2013)

WHO: Frederick Wiseman directed this.

WHAT: It's the time of year when critics begin listing their best films of the year. I'm generally uncomfortable with applying the word "critic" to myself, as what I write on this blog and elsewhere only very rarely and fleetingly approaches the kind of critical writing I find valuable as a reader. But I expect I will at some point publish a list along these lines, as I have done in previous years. In the meantime I feel pretty comfortable calling At Berkeley the "Frisco Bay" film of the year. As in, the 2013 commercial release of a film shot locally that I think is most "essential viewing" for area cinephiles. Its main competition here is probably from Fruitvale Station and Blue Jasmine, and although I liked both of these films more than I expected to, in the latter case this is especially faint praise (I haven't really admired a new Woody Allen film in over fifteen years) and in the former it's just not enough to compete with a master filmmaker who may still be near the top of his game.

I recognize that not everyone thinks At Berkeley deserves to rank among Wiseman's best films. I must admit I haven't seen enough of them, and those I have perhaps not recently enough, to make a truly informed statement on the matter. But I have seen a good handful of his key works: Titicut Follies, High School, Primate, The Store, and several others including the 1963 film The Cool World which Shirley Clarke directed but that Wiseman, not yet having tried his hand behind the camera, initiated and produced. And although At Berkeley may not include any of the jaw-dropping "I can't believe he was able to film that" moments that make some of his films work almost as smoothly as exploitation (by which I mean exploiting a thrill-seeking audience, not his subjects) as they do as art and as intellectual fodder, I feel it stacks up with just about any of them in presenting an established institution both as true to its own traditions and as a microcosm of larger human concerns represented in its character. In an unmistakably Wiseman way.

Though there may be a tendency for a documentary about a school to resemble in some ways a streamed TED conference, Wiseman prevents his film from slipping into this territory. Every lecture or discussion fragment is bookended by shots of the campus environment that silently comment upon the preceding and subsequent scenes just as methodically as the "pillow shots" that reinforce the dramatic and comedic moments in a Yasujiro Ozu film. Frequently Wiseman's moments of this sort work to weave whole sections of a sprawling, four hour and four minute feature into a tight basket of narrative and argument. Michael Sicinski's review points to one of the more memorable instances of this, an image of a lawn mower maintaining the campus green.

Sicinski's review is excellently written and insightful about a good many of Wiseman's strategies. However, I feel the author may overstate Wiseman's desire to make us feel specific feelings about the (unidentified) participants in the institution he films. His is not the only article to do so; Katy Fox-Hodess has written a compelling account of the campus issues At Berkeley illustrates, from the perspective of someone who believes Wiseman has clearly picked the wrong side to "cheerlead" for; it's  fascinating reading for context, but leaps even further to its conclusions about filmmaker intention. Perhaps I'm missing something these writers are seeing because of my own biases, but I did not sense watching the film that Wiseman's own sympathies lay with then-chancellor Robert Birgeneau and his staff any more than it did with the protesting students. He presents both parties, illustrates their animosities towards each other, and allows both to make cases for their positions and to hang themselves with their own rope. My sense is that open-minded viewers are not guided by the filmmaker to make conclusions about these players, but encouraged to think hard about their perspectives, biases, and the strengths and limitations of their tactics. My own thoughts about Birgeneau while watching the film tended to mirror those of Genevieve Yue more than Wiseman's own public statements about him and his administration, which he could just as easily be making to stay on the good side of an institution that could still cause real trouble for his film's release into the market, as to reflect his own genuine feelings.

WHERE/WHEN: Twice daily at the Elmwood and once per night at the Roxie, through this Thursday, after which it drops to a single showtime per day at the Elmwood (and none at the Roxie). Also screens once at the Pacific Film Archive January 18th.

WHY: I haven't visited the Elmwood in a while, but it's surely the most Berkeley place to see At Berkeley unless perhaps you're willing to wait until January 18th when it returns to the Pacific Film Archive after last week's campus-community-only screening with the director in person, recounted here and expected to be represented on the PFA's list of in-person guest podcasts soon.

I saw At Berkeley at the Roxie however- the "Little Roxie" to be exact, and can certainly recommend that venue as a non-Berkeley option. If you go there, be sure to pick up the newest printed calendar, which details much of the Roxie's upcoming programming not yet available on its website, starting with the 35mm prints of Gone With the Pope, An American Hippie in Israel and Trash Humpers screening December 20th, continuing with the week-long booking of Jia Zhang-ke's controversial A Touch of Sin January 3-9, and well into February.

HOW: Digital production & presentation.

I Am Divine (2013)

WHO: Harris Glenn Milsted a.k.a. Divine, who died twenty-five years ago, is the subject of this documentary.

WHAT: I haven't yet made it to a screening of this documentary but I recommend this Projection Booth podcast interview with its director Jeffrey Schwarz (who has made documentaries on fascinating cinema figures such as Curtis Harrington, Vito Russo and others) and with frequent Divine co-star Mink Stole.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7:00 and 9:00 at the Castro Theatre and daily a the Roxie December 27th, 2013 through January 2nd, 2014.

WHY: With so many Frisco Bay connections (including an on-camera interview with Joshua Grannell, the alter ego of Peaches Christ) I Am Divine promises to be a perennial for local film fans to see and revisit. But this week is a particularly special time to see it, because it will prepare you for this Saturday, December 14th's now-rare 35mm showing of the film that made Divine a star: Pink Flamingos at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

HOW: Digitally-produced documentary screens digitally, preceded at the Castro by a 35mm short film called O Sandra, which I've been unable to glean any other information about.

We Were Here (2011)

WHO: David Weissman and Bill Weber co-directed this.

WHAT: Though released a year beforehand, We Were Here makes an ideal compliment to David France's 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary How To Survive A Plague. The latter is comprised almost entirely of archival video footage of East Coast AIDS activists, the overwhelming majority of them white, male, and connected to ACT UP New York. It's a film filled with inspiring anger, caustic wit, ferocious energy, and quite a bit of rousing chanting. We Were Here includes some archival footage (the above screen shot is from one ACT UP moment on Castro Street) but is on the whole far more calm and even contemplative. It relies almost exclusively on sit-down interviews and still photographs, and focuses on San Francisco rather than New York and Washington, but takes a broader historical look at the history of AIDS from its mysterious and alarming beginnings, includes more oral histories of women and people of color, and gives at least as much attention to the role of caregivers and support networks as to activists in the the fight against the disease's ravages. That at least two excellent documentaries of such disparate styles and approaches have been made on the topic in the last few years is a sign that the subject of the AIDS crisis is likely to yield a wide range of more valuable films to come.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro at 7PM.

WHY: Today is World AIDS Day. A good day to hold in mind the many filmmakers the world has lost to the disease (a partial list here) and wonder what beautiful works might have been created were they still with us. The Castro observes the day with a special screening of We Were Here at which Weissman (who also produced the film) and some of the cast will be present to answer questions afterward.

It's also the first day of December and a new calendar for the theatre, which aside from the glimpse in the above image is also mentioned by one of the We Were Here interviewees, who recalls first learning about the "gay cancer" on his way to a double-bill of Golden Age classics Casablanca and Now, Voyager. Neither of those films are on the December docket, but quite a few Hollywood Studio-System era films of the sort that have grown somewhat scarce within the Castro walls make appearances: To Catch A Thief, Dial 'M' For Murder, It's A Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Some Like It Hot and Singin' in the Rain screen via the new-fangled DCP technology, while Blast of Silence, Christmas Eve, The Fortune Cookie, A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup will show on 35mm prints just as they would have on their original releases or as revivals during the 1980s. The month's sole foreign-language offering is the 1946 French classic Children Of Paradise (not Phantom of the Paradise as I was led to believe earlier) and it will screen from a DCP.

Films made in 1968, 1977, the mid-eighties, early-nineties and beyond each get their own 35mm double-bills sometime during the month: The Tbomas Crown Affair and Bullitt December 21st, Eraserhead and Killer of Sheep on the 13th, Gremlins and Lethal Weapon (both Christmas-related actually) on the 19th, True Romance and Pulp Fiction on the 27th, and the MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS pairing of Home For The Holidays and Love Actually on the 20th of the month. More recent fare includes the documentary on the John Waters collaborator I Am Divine (for which David Weissman is thanked in the credits- perhaps related to the fact that he and Weber's prior film before We Were Here was The Cockettes) December 9th, 3D showings of Gravity on the 10th and 11th, and (in a preview of early 2014) Blue Jasmine January 2nd.

December has more than the usual number of days in which the Castro will be used for something other than motion pictures, but of particular interest is a December 16th Holiday Benefit Concert intended to help raise money to prevent the theatre from losing its Wurlitzer organ. There's also the traditional Christmas Eve Gay Men's Chorus concert of course, which recalls that you've always wanted to sing along to a movie at the Castro, you have several chances over the coming week, including this afternoon. I'm more interested in finally attending another audience-participation screening event; Every year I've had to work during Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco programs of local home-movie and other "ephemeral" footage accompanied by the sounds of audience members calling out questions and comments about the Frisco Bay history unfolding before them on the screen. This year I have the night off and wouldn't you know it the event is sold out already. Look for me in the walk-up line for unclaimed tickets with my fingers crossed.

HOW: Digital production and presentation.

Hotel City (2003)

WHO: Local filmmaker Phoebe Tooke made this short documentary.

WHAT: Though this film is ten years old already, it's as topical as ever, as it gives voice to folks on the front lines of the struggle to prevent San Francisco's perpetual housing crisis from steamrolling its citizens. Constructed of lucid voice-over and alternatingly clear and beautifully impressionistic images, the film is a compassionate and effective look at some of the Tenderloin's Single-Room-Occupancy or SRO hotels, described by one commentator as "the housing of last resort. It's the first step out of homelessness and the last step to homelessness." We briefly get to know four residents of small, one-room dwellings in which a kitchenette might be an unattainable luxury and sharing a bathroom with dozens of neighbors is the norm. Tooke interviews them in their own spaces, crowded as they are with all the necessities and heirlooms that you or I might find ample room for in a house or a spacious apartment. For a sixteen-minute film there is a lot to hear about the daily struggles of semi-communal life on the economic margins, and of efforts to bring SRO issues to City Hall when landlord demands become unreasonable. It's as good a film as I've seen on this subject of particular interest to me (I have friends who do live or have lived in SRO quarters.)

WHERE/WHEN: On a program playing noon today only at the Roxie.

WHY: Hotel City screens on a full program of works by alumni of one of San Francisco's top institutional training grounds for new filmmakers: the San Francisco State University film department. Ten short films and videos have been selected from among the countless made by students and alumni since the department's 1960s origins. There is a focus on films made during the past ten years, but the selections include Irina Leimbacher's 1991 Mothertongue and go back as far as to the 1967 video/film hybrid OffOn by Scott Bartlett and Tom DeWitt, an astonishing work that has been canonized by (among other markers) its inclusion on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2004. 

Most of what I know about the history of the SFSU film department comes from a detailed chapter in the Radical Light book which I consider a must-own for anyone interested in the roots of San Francisco's independent filmmaking. The chapter includes a partial list of SFSU Film Dept. alumni worth plucking some notable names from: Craig Baldwin, Barbara Hammer, Steven Okazaki, Emiko Omori, Ben Van Meter, Jay Rosenblatt, Lynne Sachs, Greta Snider, Michael Wallin, Wayne Wang... it's clear there's enough to create a fantastic full festival of its own, but today's program with its mix of established and relatively unknown filmmaker names is certainly a welcome way to kick off the last day of the San Francisco Film Society's Cinema By The Bay series.

HOW: According to the Film Society, Hotel City will screen via 16mm.

Le Joli Mai (1963)

WHO: Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme made this documentary.

WHAT: One of the earliest Chris Marker films I've seen, and one of the best, it's also at 165 minutes one of the longest he made, certainly the longest he'd directed up to this point in his career. A documentary record of Paris during May of 1962, it's a beautiful work that is finally getting more attention after a recent restoration and Cannes screening.  Richard Brody has written an excellent contextualizing piece.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Opera Plaza and the Shattuck, through this Thursday.

WHY: The first of Marker's films to get a full theatrical release in this country since his death last summer, Le Joli Mai is now fifty years old and as relevant as ever. With the Pacific Film Archive in the middle of a retrospective of work by Marker's friend Agnès Varda and this Wednesday showing the latest feature by his one-time collaborator Lynne Sachs (in case you missed it Saturday at Other Cinema, screening along with her Marker-assisting project Three Cheers For the Whale), it's a good week to fan interest in the so-called "Left Bank" filmmakers on bay Area screens.

HOW: The latest restoration is available only digitally.

Inequality For All (2013)

WHO: Robert Reich is the focus of this documentary.

WHAT: This breezy documentary addresses a weighty topic, the causes and ill effects of the enormous gap between the wealth and income of a few very rich Americans, and that of the rest of us. Some have lamented that the film doesn't go far enough in arguing for effective solutions to the economic mess we find ourselves in, and it's a fair point to be sure. But clearly the filmmaker (Jacob Kornbluth, a local) felt his film would be more powerful as a tool to raise awareness about the magnitude of the issue, and perhaps even convert some skeptics. To that end, he doesn't go overboard on hammering political points but rather centers his film on one eloquent and tireless advocate of the importance of this issue, UC Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whose biography, it turns our, mirrors his chosen cause in poignant ways. Kalvin Henley has written a more complete review I can recommend reading.

WHERE: Screens at 9:00 tonight and at 6:30 tomorrow and Thursday at the Camera 3 in San Jose, and multiple times daily at the California Theatre in Berkeley at least through this Thursday. UPDATE 11/12/2013: The Balboa is also screening the film multiple times daily through Thursday.

WHY: Whether you feel you've heard Reich's arguments enough or feel you could never hear them enough (or more likely, fall somewhere in between those points on the scale), you may be interested in seeing Inequality For All simply for the local angle. A great deal of the documentary was shot in the Bay Area, including the above image of downtown Oakland's majestic Paramount Theatre (which screens The African Queen for $5 this Friday, incidentally).

Reich appears (with much less screen time, I'm led to believe) in another documentary coming to Frisco Bay soon: Frederick Wiseman's latest institutional investigation At Berkeley, which takes a more comprehensive view of the workings of the University of California's flagship campus. Since I last speculated about where it might screen, I've learned it will come to UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive December 3rd that Wiseman will be on hand for, but that will  be open only to the University's students, faculty and staff. A second PFA showing will occur January 18th, 2014 (dare I hope along with a retrospective of Wiseman films? It's been over ten years since the last), but before that both the Elmwood and the Roxie will screen At Berkeley for at least a week starting December 6th, with opening night screenings accompanied by a Skype q&a with the director.

HOW: Inequality For All was made and will screen digitally.

The Gleaners & I (2000)

WHO: Agnès Varda made this documentary, and appears in it too.

WHAT: Late in life, Varda has focused her energy on documentaries, weaving personal, poetic essays in visual form.  Inspired by famous 19th-century paintings of "gleaners", and by the French law that allows people to take food from a farmer's field after a harvest, in this film she playfully investigates a wide array of modern gleaners, from artists and anarchists to the Roma.  But ultimately the film is a touching self-investigation, as Varda recognizes her own status as a gleaner of images others would throw away.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00 PM

WHY: I unfortunately was unable to attend last night's screening of L'Opéra-Mouffe and two other of Varda's earlier shorts last night after all, but I'm hoping to be able to pull myself away from other projects to make it tonight. The Gleaners & I is one of my very favorite of Varda's films, one I've seen several times already, and one I'd particularly love to hear the filmmaker speak about in person.

It's hard to think of a more appropriate day to see it than on an election day, as "gleaning" is something inscribed in the French legal system. It's a cold hard fact that much of the quality of life for the materially impoverished is at the mercy of the laws a society enacts, so it's important for all of us to exercise our democratic voice when we have the opportunity to. You won't want to attend tonight's screening guiltily knowing you missed a chance to weigh in on propositions whose passage or failure are likely to increase or decease economic inequality in the region.

HOW: 35mm print with Varda in person.

The Revolutionary Optimists (2012)

WHO: Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen co-directed this.

WHAT: Documentary about children living in the extreme poverty of Kolkata (a.k.a. Calcutta), India, who become activists on behalf of their communities. I haven't seen it, but here's Jonathan Kiefer's review.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 4:10 today at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on the Stanford University campus, and 4:30 tomorrow at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, both presented by the United Nations Association Film Festival.

WHY: Festivals occurring during the rest of October:
UNAFF through October 27th at various peninsula venues, plus one day (tomorrow) in San Francisco.
The Silicon Valley Jewish Film Fest runs through tomorrow in Palo Alto, Saturday through Wednesday over the next two weeks, with screenings in Campbell on November 10 & 13 and closing-night with Elliot Gould in person in Palo Alto November 17th.
Arab Film Festival resumes in Oakland October 24th, in Berkeley October 24-27, with final Frisco Bay screenings in Palo Alto November 2 & Oakland November 7.
International Black Women's Film Festival occurs in San Francisco October 25 & 27, and Oakland October 26.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-shot doc.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003)

WHO: Judy Irving directed this documentary.

WHAT: It's hard to believe it's been ten years since this lovely documentary about urban nature, the humanity of animals (or, perhaps more pertinently, vice versa), and the struggle for survival in a city with harsh forces pressing for us to turn our backs on our true selves, first began screenings in festivals. Though I'd enjoyed it on its initial release, I recently rewatched it and found it better than I had recalled, avoiding nearly all of the traps that have turned me away from commercially-released documentaries over the past decade or so. Here's a worthwhile review by a Chicago writer who I finally got to meet in person when she came to visit San Francisco earlier this year, Marilyn Ferdinand.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only at New People Cinema in San Francisco's Japantown, as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Zurich/SF film series.

WHY: The Zurich/SF series is an undertaking meant to highlight cinematic connections between San Francisco and the largest city in Switzerland (though still half Frisco's size in terms of population). Other match-ups screening today and tomorrow include Barry Jenkins's Medicine For Melancholy with Andrea Štaka's Fraulein this evening, Mindy Bagdon's furious Frisco punk document Louder, Faster, Shorter and Swiss Punk Cocktail: Zurich Scene 197680 tonight, and a pair of 1970s buddy-cop comedies Freebie and the Bean and The Swissmakers tomorrow. I don't know why Vitus is the odd film out in the weekend set, especially since I haven't seen it. But reading ploy synopses makes me wonder if there just wasn't enough time in the weekend to squeeze in a screening of something like Around The Bay (which has still yet to screen in San Francisco proper).

I'm hoping this series will be a success and lead to more cinematic looks at some of San Francisco's many other Sister Cities. Our city's link to Taipei has surely helped keep the annual Taiwan Film Days festival going, and I'm sure will be seeing some films set in Paris during French Cinema Now. I haven't investigated whether either of our Italian Sister Cities (Assisi and, as of this year, Naples) will be seen on screen during the just-announced New Italian Cinema series, but imagine future festivals devoted to films made in Barcelona, or Shanghai, or Seoul, or Sydney, or Manila? (Not to mention cities with filmmaking scenes I know next to nothing about, like Amman, Jordan or Cork, Ireland or Thessaloniki, Greece.)

In the meantime another recently-announced SFFS mini-fest has also been revealed, that serves as a counterpoint the the SF section of Zurich/SF. This weekend's films are all established classics of one stripe or another (maybe I'm not quite ready to call Freebie and the Bean a classic myself, but you know what I mean). But Cinema By The Bay focuses almost all its attention on brand-new works by local filmmakers. It runs November 22-24.

HOW: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill screens on a 35mm double-feature with another urban documentary made about ten years ago, called Downtown Switzerland