The 52nd Annual San Francisco International Film Festival

April 23-May 7, 2009

http://fest09.sffs.org/

Opening Night Film La Mission

Touted as the oldest film festival in the United States, the San Francisco International Film Festival is now in its 52nd year, and still going strong. Not as industry-driven as the Toronto Film Festival, or its snowbound indie equivalent Sundance, nor as small and intimate—and therefore rigorously programmed—as Telluride, and certainly not the magnum force that is Cannes, San Francisco’s Festival is still pretty impressive, both in the sweep of its global representation and its democratic embrace of all genres. It’s like the city itself—welcoming of diversity, sophisticated in taste, and intrigued by experimentation.

There are “nearly 150” films in this year’s program. Without claiming any critical acumen, I’ve compiled a list of films that have caught my eye, for whatever reason, and have included the heavyweights, just because they are, and the tributes, of course, because what is a film community without its plaudits.

Although truly international in flavor, the festival opens with a local perspective, a film whose underlying subject is a San Francisco neighborhood called the Mission District, populated largely by Hispanic immigrants, where Spanish is the first language, and the city’s best taquerias and cheapest luggage stores make their home. La Mission, written and directed by Peter Bratt and starring his famous brother, Benjamin Bratt, is an examination of a particular stratum of the immigrant Latino culture, the lost boys who deal with their issues through violence and other forms of machismo.

Francis Ford Coppola will be honored for his lifetime work as a director, something long in coming for a native son. the Godfather films have of course, assured Coppola’s legacy, but he has recently come out of his self-imposed creative exile to begin making films of a more personal nature in this later stage of his career. It’s fascinating to see where he’s going with this rejuvenation, which he already explored quite literally in last year’s Youth Without Youth, a flawed but still riveting exploration of regret and second chances. Coppola has just finished production on Tetro, his first film from an original screenplay since The Conversation. Unfortunately, the film wasn’t ready to premiere at the festival, but a scheduled June release is close enough to make Coppola’s tribute feel like a pre-release party.

Robert Redford also gets a tribute for his work as an actor. In honor of his career, the festival will show a new release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not his best work but certainly his most enduring, and in light of Paul Newman’s recent passing, a fitting choice for someone whose star will always be linked with Newman’s.

Lourdes Portillo will be honored for her 30-year career in the experimental documentary form, and her latest venture, Al Mas Alla, a semi-fictionalized documentary about the making of a documentary about Mexican fishermen along the Mayan coast who find a wayward package of cocaine, is also being screened. James Toback, a tough guy Hollywood in-and-outsider, will be honored for his gritty screenwriting work, and then his latest project, Tyson, a documentary about the heavyweight boxing champion who famously bit off part of the ear of an opponent, will be screened. Bruce Goldstein, the founder of Rialto Pictures and legendary programmer at New York’s Film Forum, gets a tribute, which includes screenings of the early Fellini classic, Nights of Cabiria, a movie now distributed by Rialto.

A Woman Under the Influence

The other classics the festival is bringing out of the vaults are: Woman Under the Influence (Gena Rowlands, sublime and beautiful as a crazy suburban mom in John Cassavetes’ exploration of psychosis a lå R.D. Laing); Le Amiche, Antonioni’s early narrative, and a visual paean to women; and Sergio Leone’s epic masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West. All of them are worth the effort to try to catch them on the big screen, especially Once Upon a Time in the West, with its sweeping cinemascope photography and haunting Ennio Morricone score.

Summer Hours

Among the new films from already established directors, there is Adoration, Atom Egoyan’s latest examination of the ambiguous nature of morality and the fundamental need for a sense of family. Olivier Assayas brings us another subtle exploration of modern experience in Summer Hours, an ensemble piece starring Juliette Binoche as one of three middle-aged siblings who reunite briefly following the death of their mother.

Two other favorites among French filmmakers, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat, also return with new films. Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum is all about love, in all its manifestations, and Breillat continues her odyssey into the psychological roots and scars of sexuality with Bluebeard.

A more cerebral plate on which to serve the topic of sexuality is Heaven’s Heart, a chamber drama consisting mostly of one long conversation about adultery. The film is from Sweden; need I say more.

Still Walking

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Maborosi, After Life, Hana) returns to the festival with Still Walking, a sensually photographed domestic drama reminiscent of Ozu. For a more disturbing state of unease, where violence is the linchpin, Spanish filmmaker Jaime Rosales (Solitary Fragments) returns to the festival with Bullet in the Head. Based on a true incident, the film is a reminder of humanity’s capacity for evil.

For those who like introspective films with sweeping landscapes, or at least environmental underpinnings, there are several to choose from, most of them from new directors. Autumn, a film from Turkey, is about a political prisoner who returns to his home in the mountains near the Black Sea only to find that there is very little left to go back to. Snow details the physical hardships that shape life in a remote Bosnian village. Home, starring Isabelle Huppert, follows a bohemian family whose isolated existence is upset by the building of a commuter thoroughfare. Versailles is a grittily poetic exploration of a man who chooses homelessness as a way of life, and who tries to survive on scraps, firewood and sheer determination in the woods surrounding Versailles (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard, in his last film). And there is Wild Field, a Russian-style modern Western about a young doctor practicing medicine in the vast and isolated landscapes of the Kazakh steppes.

The festival has a powerful crop of documentaries this year, many of which address the three major topics of this new century—the battle for social and economic justice in the global community, the catastrophe of climate change, and the effects of economic and social transitions on contemporary culture. The latter is examined in California Company Town, a look at the demise of industrial towns that formerly graced the otherwise sparsely populated outposts of California. The last vestiges of France’s dying agrarian culture are preserved in Modern Life, Raymond Depardon’s loving tribute to the aging farmers of France’s Ardeche region. Crude is a dramatic look at the legal battle between environmental activists and Chevron over the oil company’s practices in Ecuador. For more insight into the horrible cost of industrial proliferation, A Sea Change is a harrowing look at on how climate change is affecting life under the sea.

Documentaries about the pursuit of social justice include Burma VJ, which narrates the global journalistic community’s camcorder access to Myanmar’s tyrannical regime. The Reckoning describes the International Criminal Court’s mission to bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice. My Neighbor, My Killer is a heart-wrenching personal portrait of the surviving victims of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, and their difficult struggle towards reconciliation and forgiveness.

On a lighter note, there’s the seductive, reality television-style competition narrative, Every Little Step, about dancers auditioning for the 1996 revival of A Chorus Line. Veteran experimental documentarian Heddy Honigman’s latest film, Oblivion, is a magically uplifting chronicle of the inventive ways that residents of Lima, Peru choose to survive their poverty. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, Peter Greenaway’s vivid dissection of the Dutch Masterpiece, makes you wish you had had the boundlessly imaginative and erudite filmmaker as your Art History teacher in college.

As I write this, I flip through the pages of the program guide and see all the films I’ve forgotten to mention. It’s a fool’s task, this festival overview. Better to stop here, and let you buy your tickets.

The festival begins April 23rd and runs through May 7th. The program guide, with both capsules and longer summaries of all films, can be accessed online at http://fest09.sffs.org/.

Beverly Berning

beverly@culturevulture.net