Live + Onstage
Boots Riley: State of Cinema Address
Description:
Each year, SFFILM invites a visionary thinker to discuss the intersecting worlds of contemporary cinema and visual arts, culture and society, images and ideas. We are thrilled to welcome local artist and activist Boots Riley back to the Festival for this special program.
An Oakland native who studied at San Francisco State University, Riley had been known as an activist and front man of the musical group The Coup until his feature film debut Sorry to Bother You (Festival 2018) burst upon the scene. After a year presenting the film at festivals, acquiring a distributor, opening the film in theaters nationally, and bringing home a Spirit Award for Best First Feature in January, Riley has a unique perspective on the current film landscape. In his talk, Riley will discuss the ways in which film is currently answering the call of a variety of social movements and, thus, pushing the boundaries of creativity to reflect the ways these movements are changing the world, including influencing the evolution of a vibrant filmmaking scene in the Bay Area.
Echo in the Canyon
Directed by Andrew Slater
USA | Documentary | 83
Description:
The songs that reverberated from Laurel Canyon in the ’60s remain some of the greatest achievements in rock history. Celebrating 50 years since musicians migrated to the West Coast spot, musician Jakob Dylan takes to the stage, presenting new renditions of classic songs. With performances by Fiona Apple, Beck, and Regina Spektor, accompanied by interviews with Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr, David Crosby, Michelle Phillips, and Tom Petty, the film offers a first-hand account of the scene and the talent that continues to inspire musicians today.
Following the screening and Q&A, Jakob Dylan and his band will take to the Castro stage and perform a set of songs from the Laurel Canyon era.
An Evening with Kahlil Joseph
Description:
Join us for a presentation of short films and videos, art, and conversation with Kahlil Joseph. A recent Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts (2018) and visiting artist at Stanford University, Joseph continues to move between the worlds of film, video, and art with an ease that is rarely seen. Co-director of Beyonce’s Lemonade, winner of a Sundance directing award, participant in the upcoming Venice Biennale, Joseph has been carving out a place for himself as an auteur whose eclectic artistic modes–music video, installation, narrative, and nonfiction film–always lovingly celebrate Black culture while simultaneously addressing Black people’s precarious and complicated status in society at-large. This program will present a series of short works, including two new projects, interspersed with an onstage conversation that will delve into Joseph’s process, concerns, and trajectory.
Presented in collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts.
Black Mary (2017, 6 min)
Commissioned by Tate Modern, Black Mary beautifully fuses Joseph’s documentary, performance, fiction, and music videos in a single, breathtaking presentation of the singer Alice Smith.
Fly Paper (2017, 23 min)
Perhaps your only chance to see this in San Francisco, the theater’s sound system will be specially configured for the presentation. Conceived as an art installation, Fly Paper features Ben Vereen, Storyboard P, and Lauryn Hill, among others. Inspired by Harlem Renaissance photographer Roy DeCarava, the film is a tribute to Joseph’s late father, Keven Davis.
Until the Quiet Comes (2012, 4 min)
Set to a track from Flying Lotus’s album and shot primarily in Nickerson Gardens, this short features the astonishingly beautiful dancing of Storyboard P. Winner of Sundance’s Special Jury Award for short film.
Warpaint: Live Score + Films by Maya Deren
Description:
Warpaint’s unique brand of intricate guitar lines, hypnotic vocals, and driving post-punk rhythms combine to create a gorgeous, enveloping sound. Both on record and on stage, Warpaint sounds like they’re channeling something truly otherworldly and mystical. Their debut album The Fool (2010) was named one of the 50 Best Albums of the Decade by NME; their eponymous sophomore album (2014) debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard Alternative Album Chart as well as the UK Album Chart, and was named one of the albums of the year in several publications. Their most recent album Heads Up was released in 2016 and enjoyed a Top 40 debut on the Billboard Current Albums Chart.
For this evening’s live score, Warpaint co-founder Theresa Wayman joins Stella Mozgawa, the band’s drummer since 2009, for a performance to a selection of films by Maya Deren, one of cinema’s most important experimental filmmakers.
A central figure in avant-garde filmmaking, Maya Deren was a master of expressionistic works full of dramatic angles, bodies in motion, and creative visual elements. This program will feature four of her films: At Land (14 min, 1944), a dream-like narrative about a woman who washes up on a beach; Meshes of the Afternoon (14 min, 1943), one of experimental cinema’s most important works; Ritual in Transfigured Time (14 min, 1946), which uses modern dance to explore the process of change; and The Very Eye of Night (15 min, 1958).
Marquee Presentations
A Faithful Man
Directed by Louis Garrel
France | Fiction Feature | 75
Description:
Louis Garrel stars in his own buoyant romantic farce as Abel, sweetly passive and buffeted by others’ whims. His lover, Marianne (Laetitia Casta), dumps him for his friend Paul, only to come back into the picture years later, while Paul’s winsome younger sister Eve (Lily-Rose Depp) acts out on a years-in-the-making obsessive crush. Garrel wrote the screenplay with the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière (Belle de Jour, 1967), one that takes advantage of the actor’s considerable charisma. Garrel’s diffident, boy-man charm is at full wattage as the triangle plays itself out with gentle hilarity.
Close Enemies
Directed by David Oelhoffen
France | Fiction Feature | 111
Description:
International superstars Matthias Schoenaerts (SFFILM-supported The Mustang, 2019) and Reda Kateb (The White Knights, Festival 2016) headline this gritty crime drama from David Oelhoffen (Far From Men, Festival 2015). Though Manuel (Schoenaerts) and Driss (Kateb) grew up in the same working-class Paris suburb, the present day will find them on opposite sides of the law after a brutal shooting of one of Driss’s informants. In addition to its tense cat-and-mouse scenario, Close Enemies pays careful attention to its characters and their interpersonal relationships, especially the quandary of being a police officer investigating one’s own community.
Aniara
Directed by Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja
Sweden | Fiction Feature | 106
Description:
In this vivid science-fiction drama, a Mars-bound spacecraft is rendered unable to steer after colliding with space debris. Knowing that they have been set adrift for the rest of their lives, the passengers and crew must contend with dangerous group dynamics, relationships formed and sundered, and the power struggles between contentious newly formed cult religions. Stylish and sexy, the film is adapted from the acclaimed epic-length poem by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson.
Q Ball
Directed by Michael Tolajian
USA | Documentary | 97
Guests Expected:
Director Michael Tolajian, producers Rebekah Fergusson and Jamie Patricof, and executive producer Kevin Durant are expected to attend.
Description:
Across the Bay from the NBA champion Golden State Warriors is another Warriors team, one that plays only home games. Felony convictions derailed the lives of the San Quentin Prison squad, some of them promising players. The rocky road to rehabilitation is the point of the game in this eye-opening, inspirational documentary, executive produced by Kevin Durant, who calls his experience playing against San Quentin “unforgettable.” Q Ball‘s focus is on determined men grappling indelibly with the gravity of their crimes and reaching for redemption.
RAISE HELL: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
Directed by Janice Engel
USA | Documentary | 93
Description:
As journalism comes under attack with constant cries of “fake news,” this hugely entertaining documentary about the fierce and fearless writer and social commentator reminds us of how wit and well-channeled vitriol can speak truth to power. Born into a wealthy Texas family and possessed of a razor-sharp pen, Ivins refused to conform to the restrictive Southern belle stereotypes and challenged the stuffy white boys’ club that defined journalism in the ’60s and ’70s. Filmmaker Janice Engel’s feature debut skillfully captures the intelligence, humor, and indefatigable spirit of a true pioneer. Audience Award Winner, SXSW Film Festival.
Walking on Water
Directed by Andrey Paounov
Italy | Documentary | 100
Description:
Renowned environmental artist Christo is trying to execute the project The Floating Piers that he and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, started together in the 1970s. Lake Iseo, Italy, is to be the site of a three-kilometer floating walkway, covered in orange fabric, that guests can walk across, if all of the artist’s demands can be met. Following a feisty, world-renowned creative talent and his equally bombastic operations director, Vladimir Yavachev, Walking on Water delightfully shows just how a large-scale installation comes together, with all of its complications.
Red Joan
Directed by Trevor Nunn
UK | Fiction Feature | 110
Collaborations:
Produced in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the conversation following the April 13 screening of Red Joan will allow members of the filmmaking team and special guests, including David Holloway, Professor of International History at Stanford University and expert on the international history of nuclear weapons to discuss the historical context of the film and the ethics of pursuing scientific discoveries that will have incredible consequence to our collective health and survival.
Description:
Legendary theater director Trevor Nunn and the incomparable Judi Dench combine their efforts to tell a riveting espionage thriller with the ethics of science at its core. Dench plays Joan, arrested late in life for her activities as a spy during Britain’s quest to become an atomic power. Once a promising scientist brought into the nation’s war efforts, young Joan (played by Kingsman’s Sophie Cookson) is horrified by the information she inadvertently absorbs and is ultimately swayed by a German Communist rake and his magnetic sister into passing along secrets to the Soviet Union.
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
USA | Documentary | 119
Description:
“Words have power” says Toni Morrison, and she would know. With a warm gleam in her eye, Morrison recalls her life growing up, how she became an author, editor, and champion of new African-American literary voices. Weaving archival footage and interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Robert Gottlieb, Hilton Als, and many more, The Pieces I Am places the affable and articulate Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author front and center, to tell her own story in her own words.
One Child Nation
Directed by Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang
China | Documentary | 85
Description:
China ended its one-child policy in 2015, but the ramifications of the decades-long law are still reverberating throughout the country in traumatic and haunting ways. Inspired by the birth of her own son, co-director Nanfu Wang returns to her village where questions posed to family members about the policy lead to grim revelations about forced sterilization, property destruction, child abandonment, and human trafficking that were openly practiced. Chilling and complex, One Child Nation reveals the horrific measures taken by its citizens, fed by propaganda, that have long been covered up. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, US Doc.
Wild Rose
Directed by Tom Harper
UK | Fiction Feature | 101
Description:
The classic star-is-born scenario is delightfully turned on its ear in Tom Harper’s rousing Glasgow-set story of the irrepressible Rose-Lynn, a mother of two, freshly released from a short stint in prison, dreaming of Nashville and raring to storm the mountain of fame as a country singer. Jessie Buckley’s (Beast, Festival 2018) performance as the charismatic but troubled Rose-Lynn galvanizes the film; her full-bodied singing and dramatic turn—full of hope, rage, uncertainty, and ambition—are equally impressive. Buckley receives strong support from Julie Walters as Rose-Lynn’s disapproving mother and Sophie Okonedo as a well-meaning woman for whom Rose-Lynn keeps house.
Photograph
Directed by Ritesh Batra
India | Fiction Feature | 108
Guests Expected:
This screening of Photograph will feature a special onstage conversation with actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, reflecting on his career to date and recent work in film and television.
Description:
This powerfully romantic and gently comedic film from India comes from the same director as the cult hit The Lunchbox (2013). It quietly traces the story of a street photographer who convinces an upper-class girl he meets at a tourist site to pose as his fiancée so that his earthy grandmother, soon to arrive from the countryside, stops pressuring him to get married. Director Ritesh Batra is reunited here with the magnetic actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, among the most interesting and intriguing presences in global cinema.
Knock Down the House
Directed by Rachel Lears
USA | Documentary | 86
Description:
“We met a machine with a movement,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14th District), and thank goodness director Rachel Lears was there to capture it. Profiling four women (including AOC) of disparate backgrounds running grassroots political campaigns against established male incumbents, Lears depicts a fundamental moment when these (and other) remarkable women reminded the country that people really do have the power. Unforgettably depicting the candidates’ unflagging energy and commitment, Knock Down the House is an important and ebullient documentary about reclaiming democracy one seat at a time.
Aquarela
Directed by Victor Kossakovsky
UK/Germany | Documentary | 90
Description:
The power of nature is captured with cutting-edge technology and cinematic virtuosity in this paean to water. Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, Festival 2012) takes us from Russia’s semi-frozen Lake Baikal to glacier calving in Greenland to the hurricane-tossed streets of Miami, forcefully conveying the raw power of water around the globe with 96 frames-per-second cinematography, waterproof cameras that delve and bob below the surface, and spectacular sound design. Through visual awe rather than expert narration or statistics, Aquarela delivers its ecological message loud and clear.
Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements
Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky
USA | Documentary | 90
Description:
Award-winning filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky’s latest work is an exquisite ode to family lineage and legacy. Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements is a personal and affecting portrait of Brodsky’s young son, Jonas, who is able to hear because of cochlear implants, and her deaf parents, especially her father Paul, who shares a unique and warm affinity with Jonas even as he’s diagnosed with early signs of dementia. Brodsky artfully weaves animation and Beethoven’s music to illustrate, as well as challenge, the perception of deafness as a disability.
Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly
Directed by Cheryl Haines
USA | Documentary | 76
Description:
Ai Weiwei, famous for his large-scale installation work and his dogged social justice advocacy, created a career-defining work in 2015 with @Large, mounted at Alcatraz, the emblematic site associated with egregious incarceration conditions and radical Native American protest. At the core of @Large were portraits of prisoners of conscience coupled with the opportunity to write letters of solidarity to the imprisoned. In her impassioned and powerful film, exhibition curator Cheryl Haines visits several current and former prisoners, including American whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and learns how these letters were vital to their survival.
Booksmart
Directed by Olivia Wilde
USA | Fiction Feature | 105
Guests Expected:
This screening will feature an in-depth onstage conversation with director Olivia Wilde.
Description:
On the eve of their high school graduation, driven students Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) realize they’ve excelled at academics and failed at fun. They plan to erase that mistake by stuffing four years of hijinks into one wild night. In her feature directing debut, actress Olivia Wilde offers a lively, uproarious, and fresh take on the teen comedy that balances hilarity with genuine heart.
Ask Dr. Ruth
Directed by Ryan White
USA | Documentary | 100
Description:
Petite sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer has made a name for herself dishing honest and upfront advice, promising the best sex you have ever had, if you just listen. But for a woman who is so open to others, she has been somewhat reserved about her own emotions and history. Exploring everything from the hardships she experienced as a child–including growing up during the Holocaust–to her career-defining time as a radio talk show host, Ask Dr. Ruth captures the joyous energy that she still exudes at 90.
Street Food
Series Creator: David Gelb
USA | Episodic | 60
Description:
Mouthwatering documentaries are David Gelb’s specialty. The man who brought the world Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) and the series Chef’s Table (2015- ) and Chef’s Table: France (2016) is back with a new show. After concentrating on high-end eateries with those earlier projects, he now turns his attention to food that is just as delicious, if humbler, with this luscious tour of Asian street food. These sublime episodes are sure to leave you hungry.
Hail Satan?
Directed by Penny Lane
USA | Documentary | 95
Description:
If Aleister Crowley and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) are what come to mind when you hear about a group called The Satanic Temple, this playful and unexpectedly inspirational new documentary from Penny Lane (NUTS!, Festival 2016) will set you straight. The group’s relationship to Satanism, the beliefs and tenets that drive them, and the incendiary actions of co-founder Lucien Greaves and other members are serious business, and Lane engages with the issues that occupy the group while simultaneously capturing the humor of their approach, whether shopping for costumes or designing a monument to Baphomet.
Grass Is Greener
Directed by Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy
USA | Documentary | 120
Description:
As more and more states join the push to legalize marijuana, hip-hop pioneer, graffiti artist, and filmmaker Fab 5 Freddy joins the conversation with this vape-worthy documentary. Grass Is Greener dives deep into the history of cannabis in America, particularly in relation to people of color. Freddy identifies marijuana first gaining popularity in parallel with the development of jazz and uses the history of popular music to set his time line. The story runs from those early jazz years to Snoop Dogg in an irresistible documentary that is certain to take you higher.
Halston
Directed by Frédéric Tcheng
USA | Documentary | 120
Collaborations:
We underline the historical importance of Halston with an extended conversation around his lasting impact, featuring San Francisco Chronicle Style reporter Tony Bravo, legendary supermodel (and Halston runway star) Pat Cleveland, and notable contemporary designer (and former Halston assistant) Naeem Khan, alongside the filmmakers themselves.
Description:
Not only was Halston among the most influential figures to appear in American fashion, he also helped define a Golden Age of hedonistic alternative culture alongside Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and the denizens of Studio 54. This fascinating look inside Halston’s rise and fall deploys rare and exciting archival footage from contemporaneous media sources and Halston’s own archive alongside interviews with the surviving members of his inner circle, including the Proctor & Gamble executives who brought him down.
The Elephant Queen
Directed by Mark Deeble, Victoria Stone
Kenya | Documentary | 96
Description:
When a long drought disrupts the Tsavo Region’s fragile ecosystem, a herd of elephants is forced to make a perilous migration to seek a sustainable water source. Their stirring adventure begins as the herd’s powerful leader, 50-year-old matriarch Athena, takes dramatic action to ensure the future of her cohort. Living and filming in Kenya for over four years, directors Stone and Deeble achieve a level of breathtaking intimacy with their subjects, placing the audience directly into the heart of this family of gentle giants.
Recommended for ages 8 and up. Content Advisory: Circle of life depicted.
Hala
Directed by Minhal Baig
USA | Fiction Feature | 94
Description:
Skateboarder and academic achiever, Hala, is a blossoming teen who doesn’t have many close relationships, other than with her father. When chemistry with her classmate Jesse (Jack Kilmer, Palo Alto, Festival 2014) sparks sexual desires, her strict Muslim upbringing–enforced by her mother who would prefer she have a pre-arranged marriage–creates friction at home, especially when family dynamics take a distressing turn. With fresh complexity brought to the coming-of-age genre, filmmaker Minhal Baig makes Hala both nuanced and relatable, elevated by an exquisite performance by Geraldine Viswanathan.
Recommended for ages 16 and up. Content advisory: brief sexual content.
The Great American Lie
Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom
USA | Documentary | 88
Collaborations:
We supplement the world premiere of The Great American Lie with an extended conversation on the decline and fall of the American Dream in collaboration with the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan forum for values-based leadership and the exchange of ideas founded in 1949 and the organization behind the Aspen Ideas Festival, among the world’s most important policy discussion forums.
Description:
The “American Dream”–a concept that grows ever more politically charged–is examined and critiqued in Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s (Miss Representation, Festival 2011; The Mask You Live In, 2015) gripping third film. Newsom weaves interviews with famous cultural critics, professors, and local thought leaders–Nicholas Kristof, Linda Darling Hammond, and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, among others – with on-the-ground activists, including Oakland-based principal Ruby De Tie, who are working every day to help those less fortunate and revealing the many ways in which Americans have been failed by the myth of social mobility.
Closely looking at the current political environment and the ways in which the greatness of America is called into question, Newsom expertly presents the case that many systems – education, prison, health care, minimum wage – are broken and questions how they can be fixed. Ascribing both “masculine” and “feminine” terms to how the government speaks for and about these systems and its citizens, The Great American Lie becomes the timely third installment that blends elements from her previous work to unpack bigger and pressing issues that affect us all.
Masters
American Factory
Directed by Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert
USA | Documentary | 110
Description:
Working-class anxiety about global trade—perhaps the dominant political anxiety of our time—gets a sophisticated and intimate treatment in master documentarians Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s newest film. Chinese company Fuyao, a manufacturer of glass for cars, moves into a defunct GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, providing jobs and hope to a town that had been hit hard by the recession. Focusing on daily life in the plant, the film masterfully exposes a truly “lost in translation” moment as Chinese and American workforces both mix and collide, with humor and friction in abundance.
First Night Nerves
Directed by Stanley Kwan
Hong Kong | Fiction Feature | 100
Description:
Festival favorite Stanley Kwan is one of cinema’s great directors of women, and his deliriously entertaining new film offers an almost entirely female cast. When transsexual playwright An hires two feuding actresses to star in her latest work, she has little idea of the battles for center stage that will ensue. Starring Cantopop queen Sammi Cheng as Xuling and Gigi Leung as the younger and hipper Yuwen, First Night Nerves flips effortlessly between play rehearsals and the behind-the-curtain heartbreaks and secret affairs of the squabbling stars, offering glorious melodrama throughout.
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Directed by Stanley Nelson
USA | Documentary | 115
Description:
Only iconic filmmaker and Festival favorite Stanley Nelson, could create a documentary that matches the artistry and dynamism of Miles Davis, who defined and embodied “cool” through his music, casual demeanor, and chiseled good looks. Featuring a voice-over from actor Carl Lumbly who eerily captures Davis’s quintessential rasp, Birth of the Cool skillfully weaves together Davis’s classic jazz performances, rare recordings, archival photos, and interviews with Quincy Jones, Carlos Santana, and Juliette Gréco to present a dimensional and complex portrait of an artist’s life.
Loro
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Italy | Fiction Feature | 150
Description:
Director Paolo Sorrentino and actor Toni Servillo (Il Divo, 2008; The Great Beauty, 2013) continue their rich cinematic collaboration and imaginative evisceration of current Italian politics and society with this fictionalized portrait of Silvio Berlusconi. Set in the late 2000s, the film follows an ambitious hustler with political aspirations from his provincial city to Sardinia where he hopes to catch the attention of the media mogul and former Prime Minister. Servillo is mesmerizing as a man shaded with self-loathing but determined to maintain both his marriage and political power.
Midnight Cowboy: 50th Anniversary Screening
Directed by John Schlesinger
USA | Fiction Feature | 113
Description: The streets of New York have rarely looked as gritty as in this evocative, still provocative drama in which a naïve Texan (Jon Voight) seeking his fortune as a hustler strikes up a surprising friendship with a seedy conman (Dustin Hoffman). Nominated for seven Oscars, it won three, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and despite an initial X rating, Best Picture. This 50th-anniversary presentation screens in a new 4K restoration. Acclaimed photographer Michael Childers, director John Schleslinger’s life partner and assistant on Midnight Cowboy, will be on hand to talk about this modern classic.
Meeting Gorbachev
Directed by Werner Herzog, André Singer
UK | Documentary | 91
Description:
The USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, steps back into the limelight in this riveting documentary focused on a life that changed history. Now 87 and in precarious health, Gorbachev nevertheless possesses a mind as sharp as ever as he parries with Werner Herzog (SFFILM’s Directing Award, 2006) in a series of interviews. Gorbachev tells his story his way, immune to Herzog’s conversational gambits. Archival footage and interviews with Gorbachev contemporaries, including Poland’s Lech Walesa and former Secretary of State George Shultz, help fill in the portrait, but it is Gorbachev’s own words that form the core of this fascinating portrait.
Special Events
We Are the Radical Monarchs
Directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton
USA | Documentary | 96
Description:
The Radical Monarchs are an Oakland-based leadership development troop, specifically for girls of color, that doesn’t award badges for cookie sales but rather for social justice, activism, and “allyship.” Following the two moms, Anyavette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest, who founded the troop, and the girls through a season of badges, growing pains, and reactions to the current political climate, We Are the Radical Monarchs shows that with groups like these, the future is indeed female and ready to take action.
United Shades of America: Season 4 Premiere
USA | Episodic | 42
Description:
Over three seasons in his endlessly fascinating, Emmy Award-winning CNN Original Series on life in the 21st century US, Bay Area cultural commentator, comedian, and author W. Kamau Bell has visited a vivid cross-section of American humanity from Ku Klux Klansmen to Alaskan Inuits to Portland hipsters to Appalachian coal miners to South Carolina Gullah. In this indelible episode from the show’s fourth season, Bell travels to Mississippi where he meets with activists, providers, and others on the front lines in the fight for reproductive justice and reproductive rights for women in a state where those rights are severely limited. A conversation with Bell follows the screening.
Night and Day
Directed by Anthony Wall, Emma Matthews
UK | 540
Description:
This year’s Mel Novikoff Award winner, the BBC series Arena, celebrated its 40th anniversary of arts programming in 2015, with Night and Day. Co-created and directed by Anthony Wall, the series’ longtime executive producer, the film is a distillation of four decades of filmmaking into a 24-hour “visual experience,” broadcast in real time, encompassing an entire day from morning to night. This special presentation of Night and Day is not simply a more condensed version of the original exhibition – it runs nine hours – but will include footage unique to its San Francisco premiere. Viewers choose when to arrive and how long to stay, designing their own individual experience. SFFILM is pleased to present this stunning work, as a free exhibition in the YBCA Lobby Gallery as a complement to the screening of James Marsh’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) that will accompany the April 20th Novikoff Award presentation. The longest-running arts series of its kind, the winner of nine BAFTAs, Arena has produced hundreds of hours of programming over the years, a wide-ranging survey of the arts that encompasses Frank Sinatra to the Sex Pistols to Brian Eno; Charles Dickens to Dylan Thomas to Salman Rushdie; and Orson Welles to Clint Eastwood to Akira Kurosawa.
This is a free gallery program. Viewers may come and go throughout the day.
Vanguard
The Grand Bizarre
Directed by Jodie Mack
USA | 61
Description:
A tantalizing, textile overload, experimental animator Jodie Mack’s feature debut vibrates with color, sound, and place. Shot on 16mm and guided by a playful and pulsating soundtrack, The Grand Bizarre is a visual delight of texture and fabric. While playfully placing objects near and far in the frame and animating them among contrasting landscapes in different parts of the world, Mack examines the global connection between these patterns and the spaces they occupy, making for a kaleidoscopic viewing experience that necessitates big-screen appreciation.
Screens with Accidence (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Canada 2018, 10 min)
Lapü
Directed by César Alejandro Jaimes, Juan Pablo Polanco
Colombia | 75
Description:
Doris is a young Wayuú woman who dreams of a reunion with her deceased cousin. After seeking advice from her grandmother, she learns that this vision obligates her to exhume her cousin’s remains from her grave and lead a “second burial,” which will allow her relative to rest in peace. Mirroring the Wayuú traditional belief that the dead coexist with the living, filmmakers César Alejandro Jaimes and Juan Pablo Polanco present an eerie, dreamlike, and beautifully framed examination of tradition, ritual, and superstition.
Minute Bodies: The Intimate Lives of F. Percy Smith
Directed by Stuart A. Staples
UK | 63
Description:
Scientist F. Percy Smith pioneered “micro-cinema”—building his own equipment for time-lapse photography and other techniques to film plants and organisms at a microscopic level. Weaving together Smith’s black-and-white found footage from the 1920s and ’30s, with the accompaniment of a new score by Tindersticks, director (and Tindersticks frontman) Stuart A. Staples crafts a hypnotic ode to the beauty of nature, with Smith’s respect and admiration for science at its core.
Screens with Passerine in Time (Laurids Andersen Sonne, Denmark/USA 2018, 8 mins).
The 62nd SFFILM Festival takes place between April 10–23 at venues across San Francisco and the East Bay.