Overview

Long thought of as a place for Asian films to ignite the American film scene, the 43rd San Francisco International Film Festival will this year spotlight an unprecedented 40% of programmed films from women filmmakers marking an extraordinary lineup of sophisticated and complex world cinema. The directors display a comfortable and assured perspective of the world from behind the camera, say the festival organizers, with over a dozen women filmmakers from France alone.

"Having so many films by women in one Festival offers a wonderful opportunity to experience the diversity of voice, style and subject matter that women filmmakers are exploring and to appreciate their remarkable accomplishments," notes Rachel Rosen, Associate Director of Programming for the San Francisco Film Society, which is the host organization presenting the festival.

Sofia Coppola's debut film, The Virgin Suicides (USA), kicks off the Festival, and other feature narratives from female directors include: Life Doesn't Scare Me (Noemie Lvovsky, France); Who Plucks the Moon? (Christine Carriere, France); Helene Angel's first feature, Skin of Man, Heart of Beast (France), and Canadian Lea Pool's most autobiographical film to date, Set Me Free (Canada).

Documentaries are also well represented from women filmmakers: Shari Robertson's Well-Founded Fear (USA); Sandra Davis's experimental documentary A Preponderance of Evidence (USA); Elizabeth Barret's Stranger with a Camera (USA); Jasmine Dellal's American Gypsy: A Stranger in Everybody's Land (USA), and Claire Simon's At All Costs (France) will share the documentary slate with Co-directors Frauke Sandig and Erik Black's After the Fall (Germany); Crazy (Hedy Honigmann, Netherlands); Penelope Price's An Angel Passes (USA), and Oaxaca for Blossoms of Fire (Mexico/USA) from Maureen Gosling and Ellen Osborne.

Three Golden Gate Award Golden Spire winners examine the unusual and startling revelations concerning the circumstances of children adopted out of their native cultures. Two films, First Person Plural (Deann Borshay Liem, USA) and Our Silent Traces (Sophie Bredier and Myriam Aziza, France), are autobiographical accounts of Korean girls who were adopted by families in the United States and France respectively. Tove Torbiornsson's (Sweden) Missing Boy is an amazing odyssey through India and the hazy facts surrounding an Indian boy's adoption by Swedish parents.

Two Golden Spire winners competing for the Grand Prize for Best Bay Area Documentary are co-directed by local women: Long Night's Journey into Day (USA) from Academy Award-nominated East Bay filmmakers Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann; Live Nude Girls, UNITE! (USA) is by Bay Area filmmakers Julia Query and Vicky Funari.

Other themes found emerging from the SFIFF line up include an examination of the mother-child bond from unusual perspectives: Chin Up! (Solveig Anspach, France); Nadia and the Hippos (Dominique Cabrera, France); The Thief of St. Lubin (Claire Devers, France), and Sicily! (France/Italy), the nineteenth film by veteran collaborators Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

Also well represented in the screenings is the exploration of male psychology through an examination of men who are outside of mainstream society--artists, refugees or physically isolated in an all-male environment. Director Claire Denis's most provocative and accomplished film, Beau Travail (France); New Dawn (France), the first feature film by Emilie Deleuze; the painfully brilliant Journey to the Sun from Yesim Ustaoglu, one of the most important directors of Turkey; Dominique Abel's documentary, Agujetas, Cantaor (France); Civilized People (Randa Chahal Sabbag); Around the Pink House (Joana Hadjithomas and Kahlil Joreige, Lebanon/France), and Mercedes Garcia Guevara's debut film, Hidden River, as well as Jana Bokova's romantic Diary for a Story.

Artist and visionary Faith Hubley, this year's recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, is recognized for her lifetime achievement as a director crafting animation as she was at the Sundance Film Festival this year. The Cosmic Eye, Hubley's only feature length film, incorporates snippets of earlier works and a cosmic jazz trio (featuring the voice of Dizzy Gillespie). The Festival will present over 20 of Hubley's short animations in three separate programs.

The Festival will also celebrate dozens of Premiers throughout its two-week run. World Premieres include Blossoms of Fire; And There Was Creation . . .; International Premieres include Crazy and Missing Boy; North American Premiers include Agujetas, Cantaor; AngelosÕ Film; Barracks; Eeny Meeny; The Four Seasons of the Law; The Gospel According to the Papuans; The Lady of the House (Bariwali); The Legends of Rita; The Long Holiday; Mask of Desire; No Coffee, No T.V., No Sex; On the Beach Beyond the Pier; One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich; Our Silent Traces; The Thief of St. Lubin; Who Plucks the Moon?; and U.S. Premieres include After the Fall; Around the Pink House; At All Costs; But Forever in My Mind; Charisma; Civilized People; The Closed Doors; Darkness and Light; The Eleven O'Clock Woman; God's Wedding; The Jazzman from the Gulag; Lies; Mokarrameh, Memories and Dreams; Seventeen Years; and A Trip to the Country.

Competition at the Festival will again include the SKYY Vodka Prize for narrative features by emerging international film directors. Eleven eligible films from eight countries will be judged by an international jury and announced on May 4, 2000. The winning filmmaker will receive a $10,000 cash award.

Artistic Director Peter Scarlet says, "We're happy that 11 excellent first feature films from all around the world, five of them with women as directors or co-directors, will be competing for this substantial prize and the help it can provide to new filmmakers in gaining a foothold in the U.S. market."

The jury consists of three respected members of the international film community: Phillip Lopate, essayist and film critic whose work is often featured in the New York Times and was recently collected in "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically"; Francoise Romand, director of Call Me Madame; and one additional juror yet to be announced. The prize is for a film that has not yet been picked up for U.S. distribution; that exhibits a unique artistic sensibility and is deserving of a wider audience.

The 2000 Skye Vodka Prize films in competition are: Around the Pink House (Joana Hadjithomas, Kahlil Joreige, France/Canada/Lebanon); Chin Up! (Solveig Anspach, France); The Closed Doors (Atef Hetata, Egypt); Crane World (Pablo Trapero, Argentina); Eeny Meeny (Alice Nellis, Czech Republic); Hidden River (Mercedes Garcia Guevara, Argentina); Mask of Desire (Tsering Rhitar Sherpa, Nepal/Japan); New Dawn (Emilie Deleuze, France); No Coffee, No T.V., No Sex (Romed Wyder, Switzerland); Skin of Man, Heart of Beast (Helene Angel, France), and This Year's Love (David Kane, England).

The Festival will also pay tribute to actress Esther Williams, and will screen Williams' favorite among her own films, Million-Dollar Mermaid. Other expected special guests of the Festival include Ethan Hawke whose film, Hamlet, will close the Festival; Winona Ryder who will be awarded the Peter J. Owens Award, and famed Director Abbas Kiarostami who will be presented with the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award.

"We are thrilled to have the opportunity to pay tribute to Abbas Kiarostami, who in many ways has helped revitalize cinema for viewers around the world," said Peter Scarlet, Festival Artistic Director. "Over the last ten years, Iranian cinema has emerged as one of the most important national cinemas, if not the most important--an industry where artistic innovation and humanity flourish. It's especially appropriate that this award should go to Abbas Kiarostami, since Kurosawa was one of the first filmmakers outside Iran to recognize and admire his work."

Also being honored are Donald Krim (Kino International) and David Shepard (creator of the Film Preservation Association) for their work with archival film, and who will present a hand-tinted Italian Silent Film Classic at the Castro as part of their presentation.

The Festival, under the year-round umbrella organization of the San Francisco Film Society, will also again continue its outreach program to create a direct link between the Festival and the local educational community by providing students of all ages the opportunity to participate in the Festival experience.

The Schools at the Festival program is dedicated to exposing a new generation of viewers to the best in international and independent cinema through screenings as well as classroom visits by both local and international filmmakers. Among its educational goals, the Schools program aims to broaden students' insights into different cultures while developing their critical and analytical skills and inspiring a lifelong appreciation for cinema.

To charge by phone and for ticket information, call 510-601-TWEB (510-601-8932). For up-to-date Festival information, call 415-931-FILM.

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Mid-festival Report

The 43rd San Francisco International Film Festival, which marks the first circuit-festival of the year to be considered foremost an audience festival, arrives at its mid-fest point amid an extraordinary line up of world cinema, particularly with films from first and second time directors.

The Festival's strongest program by far is The Next Wave: first and second narrative features by rising stars (as yet without US distribution), eleven of which are competing for the Skyy Prize of $10,000. The most powerful of the new voices in world cinema, the eleven in competition are extraordinary in their breadth of subject matter and visual assuredness. Three that stand out from the first week are, The Closed Doors (Director Atef Hetata, Egypt); Eeny Meeny (Director Alice Nellis, Czech Republic), and Crane World (Director Pablo Trapero, Argentina). All three films have strong political examinations wrapped unassumingly under their veil of simple storytelling.

Artistic Director Peter Scarlet also commented on the series of films chosen over the past two years to represent issues of social justice, pointing to the extremely powerful The Thief of St. Lubin from Director Claire Devers (France) whose film Black and White played the festival in 1997. Calling it the "Left to Right Series", Scarlet described the films as examining the journey of "younger people in France who position themselves politically divergent from their parents." In The Thief of St. Lubin, Dominique Blanc plays a politically unsophisticated woman who is caught between a strong work ethic and the reality of raising her daughters in poverty. When she is caught stealing meat, the resulting court case captures the nation in controversy. An intensely felt emotional statement on the universal themes of poverty and justice, the film is the third from the politically committed French Gauche-Droite collection.

Other highly anticipated films for the upcoming week include the painfully brilliant Journey to the Sun from Director Yesim Ustaoglu (Turkey); Return of the Idiot from Director Sasa Gedeon (Czech Republic), and Shower from rising Chinese Director Zhang Yang. Return of the Idiot, which screened for the first time this past week and will screen again at the end of the festival, was roundly received by the audience who bombarded the two attending stars, Pavel Liska and Anna Geislerova, with thunderous applause at the end of the screening. The film, which took nearly six months to make on a budget miniscule by even American Indie standards, is a gifted, humorous and deeply felt re-telling of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot."

After the industry-laden and acquisition heavy Sundance, Slamdance, SXSW and Los Angeles festivals, the refreshing San Francisco fest draws upon its remarkably diversified audience base to pack theaters with true cinema-loving audiences for nearly all screenings, including mid-week matinees.

Nationalistic pride among local ex-patriots, along with strong audience enthusiasm has meant tremendously receptive screenings for world cinema filmmakers attending the festival with their films, as well as unusually spirited question and answer periods post screenings. Filmmakers in turn, such as Jim McKay (Our Song), are considering the festival one of the highlights on the circuit. "SFIFF is one of the top festivals I've been to," said McKay, "because the focus is on the filmmaker and their interaction with the audience."

Audience members during the first week have also faced the prospect of identifying filmmakers with their films much in the same way pet owners begin to look like their pets. While filmmakers who are generous of spirit seem to translate that into their work, it also appears true that self-indulgence and condescension are mirrored on the screen as well. The over-wrought and excessively drawn-out Berlin Wall documentary, After the Fall, lost whatever impact its few moments of insight might have had: a disappointment many might attribute to the divergent personalities of its co-directors.

The SFIFF Schools at the Festival program (dedicated to exposing a new generation of viewers to the best in international and independent cinema) brought junior and high school students to the matinee screening of Our Song with Director Jim McKay in attendance.

The film, about three young girls over the course of one hot, inner-city summer in Crown Heights, New York, further explores McKay's surprisingly keen insight into the adolescent experience-an experience he hoped would ring true to the kids in the audience. Doubts were erased, however, as the Q&A started with praise for his respect of the subject matter. The hour-long post screening discussion also centered on the remarkable work of the three young leads who were all first-time actors.

Still to come at the festival are the audience-oriented seminars: Unlike other festivals that gear the seminars towards filmmakers and the filmmaking process, SFIFF continues its tradition of audience consideration by making the panels accessible to the movie-going audience at large. Late festival panels are The Evolution of the Revolution: the next stage of digital feature filmmaking, and ShortFilms.com: feeling the impact of the internet on short filmmakers. Mid-festival panels included Calling the Shots: women filmmakers form around the world, and Burt Lancaster: An American Life

The festival continues through May 4 and will close with Director Michael Almereyda's Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke. Almereyda, best known for his features Nadja and Twister, teamed with Indie favorites Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Lieve Schrieber and Steve Zahn along with Bill Murray and Sam Shepard to re-tell the Shakespeare tale with more humorous reinvention than one might imagine.

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Wrap-Up

The 43rd Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, April 20-May 4, wrapped Thursday at an awards ceremony held at the San Francisco Film Center, on the famed Presidio where the festival host organization, San Francisco Film Society, is headquartered.

Announcing the Golden Gate Grand Prizes, the Skyy Prize and the Audience Awards, Festival Director Amy Leissner, Artistic Director Peter Scarlett and Programmers Rachel Rosen, Brian Gordon and Doug Jones, also shared their favorite memories of the two week long festival that attracted over 75,000 filmgoers to more than 100 Festival screenings in San Francisco and throughout the Bay area.

Top of the favorite memory list for all at the festival was the emotional acceptance by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami of the prestigious Akira Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement in directing. Kiarostami spontaneously presented his award to pre-revolutionary-Iran cinema star Behrooz Vossoughi who had made a surprise appearance at the event. Vossoughi, who now lives in San Fransisco, has not made a successful transition to American cinema, and Kiarostami's acknowledgement of his work was a moving tribute.

Scarlett also attempted the most ambitious (and humorous) yet unsuccessful congratulatory phone call of the awards ceremony when he tried three times to reach Skyy Prize Winner Czech Writer/Director Alice Nellis (Eeny Meeny) on set in Prague. The Skyy Prize jury also cited New Dawn from Director Emilie Deleuze (France) for "freshness and power".

Other winners announced included the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, The Lady of the House (Bariwali) from Diector Rituparno Ghosh (India) and the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature, Live Nude Girls Unite! from Directors Julia Query and Vicky Funari (USA).

The juried Golden Gate Award Grand Prize Winners, awarded in four categories from a selection of semi-finalists chosen prior to the festival, included Best Documentary, American Gypsy: A Stranger in Everybody's Land (Director Jasmine Dellal, USA); Best Short, Outer Space (Director Peter Tscherkassky, Austria); Best Bay Area Documentary, First Person Plural (Director Deann Borshay Liem, USA), and Best Bay Area Short, Window (Director Victoria Livingstone, USA).

Scarlett expressed it an honor to have hosted so many talented filmmakers during the Festival's run, and declared it to have been "the year of the performer" for the remarkable work by the actors in a number of festival films. Standouts for Scarlett included Who Plucks the Moon (one of the most popular films shown at the Festival) and the presentation of the film's lead 15 year-old actress to a classroom of her peers in the Schools at the Festival program. "Those kids looked at her," commented Scarlett, " and could hardly believe one of their own could do what she did up on the screen."

Other performing highlights for Scarlett included Dermot Mulroney in Trixie, Bernard Blancan in Skin of Man, Heart of Beast (who also charmed the four-year-old daughter of Chin Up! Director Solveig Anspach so much so she insisted on inviting him home for dinner once they all returned to Paris), and the striking Chiara Mastroianni in The Letter from famed, 91 year-old Director Manoel de Oliveira.

Mastroianni arrived the final day of the Festival to attend the screening of The Letter, and immediately captivated the audience with her wit and beauty. Surprisingly candid about her experience with de Oliveira, Mastroianni shared her set notes and confided to the audience, "There were so many ideas he had that I'd completely disagree with as unnatural. Yet, once you agree to go on a trip with a director (to make a film) you have to follow him."

The film, based on the 300 year-old French classic novel, "The Princess of Cleves," is a difficult re-telling of the tale set in modern day, yet told in the language of the 16th century. de Oliveira's decision to tell the story in this way made Mastroianni nervous since she never got a chance to meet with the director prior to shooting.

"He pretends to not speak French (which he does quite well) to avoid the question of 'why', which I mistakenly asked after the first week of shooting," remembered Mastroianni. "He had directed my mother (with John Malkovich) and then my father in my father's last film. Perhaps because he was the last witness in the work of my father, he called me for this role...

"I remember at Cannes when the film premiered, he announced he directed only the physical not the psychology since, as he said, "there is no psychology in Cinema". I said, well fine, but I wish I'd known that before I'd taken the role!" concluded the actress.

The Festival was perhaps most successful with regard to audience-filmmaker interaction as it provided rare intimacy for filmmakers to dialogue with audience members at each post-screening discussion.

Memorable Q&A's included high school students with Academy Award-winning animator and Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award Tributee, Faith Hubley, after screening just some of her work from the past four decades; the spirited and somewhat controversial debate in sign language following the screening of Sound and Fury (Josh Aronson, USA) amongst deaf students about the cochlear implant, and the heart-wrenching examination of immigration laws for those seeking political asylum as portrayed in Well-Founded Fear (Shari Robertson, Michael Camerini, USA).

The Festival closed with a screening of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan. Redesigning Denmark as corporate Manhattan, Hawke and Almereyda (Nadja, 1995) along with Cinematographer John de Borman, manage a fresh and witty retelling of this favorite Shakespearean morbidity play.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Kathleen McInnis