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April 11. A special show at the Castro Theater
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Blonde Redhead plays LIVE score of Ozu film 'I Was Born, But ...'
Wednesday, April 11 at 8:00 pm.
IT is a custom of the festival to provide some live accompaniment of silent films. This year the group Blind Redhead has composed a score to go with Yasujirô Ozu's 1932 silent comedy I Was Born, But...
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TRE MAISON DASON (Denali Tiller)
A doc that follows three young boys as they experience having a parent who is incarcerated. Set in Rhode Island, where a facility allows fathers two hours of free time with their kid per week in a designated space with attractive murals. Each kid has his special identity and issues. One is very small, one is having a hard time, one is hyper and smart. A fascinating film. World Premiere in the Global Visions section of the SFIFF.
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WRESTLE (Susannah Herbert 2018)
An intense young white coach leads a mostly black wrestling from a long-failing Alabama high school to compete in the state finals, and they don't do badly. Exciting and seamless doc with personal dramas and exciting matches. Maybe the energy flags a little bit in the middle but honestly, I was on the edge of my seat most of the way. A very well made film with great material. World Premiere in the Global Vision section of teh SFIFF.
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WRESTLE article shows its importance to the subjects
WRESTLE shows today and tomorrow at the SFIFF:
Monday, April 9, 2018
6:00 p.m.
Roxie Theater
BUY TICKETS
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
3:00 p.m.
SFMOMA
BUY TICKETS
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NO DATE, NO SIGNATURE/BIDUN TARIKH, BIDUN IMDHA' (Vahid Jalilvand 2017)
This film about an accident and resulting conflicts about guilt and responsiblity has the complexity of detail and moral examination contemporary Iranian cinema does so well. It also has matters of class, sex, and a sense of a whole society dodging the law and in deep trouble. Some implausible elements don't mar the emotional power, the terrific acting, and the great looking, elegant black and white images. You will writhe with pleasure if you like Iranian films.
بدون تاریخ، بدون امضاء
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Upcoming coverage.
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THE CLEANERS
RAVENS:
Swedish feature about a boy facing the harsh realities of agrarian life.
THE CLEANERS:
The people who trawl the Internet to save us from horrors - doc about a strange nether world.
THE PUSHOUTS:
Bay Area doc about high school dropouts and those who fight back.
All showing at the SFIFF in the next few days.
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RAVENS (Jens Assur 2017)
Grim life on a remote Swedish farm in 1978 relieved by a pretty girl from Stockholm and bird watching for young Klas - but will be have to take over the farm, after all? Debut feature for this photojournalist by trade has beautiful visuals.
THE CLEANERS (Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck 2018)
Benighted, shadowy drones in Manila are underpaid to edit out ugly images from social media, but the really ugly stuff goes unchecked in this short doc that takes on more than it can handle.
THE PUSHOUTS (Katie Galloway 2018)
Under-an-hour doc from award-winning local documentarian follows Victor Rios, a former drug dealer and gang member who became a UC Santa Barbara professor with a wife and kids, as he leads a SoCal program, Yo Watts!, to motivate and turn around kids who have left school, not as "dropouts" but as "pushouts" the system works to defeat.
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THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING (Mila Turajlić 2017)
Prizewinning documentary is an illustration of how the personal parallels the political as it follows filmmaker Mila Turajlić's mother Srbijanka's description of family and national history starting with the subdivision of their sumptuous apartment in downtown Belgrade in the time of Tito.
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2018 Golden Gate Awards Official Selections
Presented at the Festival since its inaugural year in 1957, the Golden Gate Awards (GGAs) are among the most significant honors for emerging global film artists in the United States. Prizes are awarded in 14 narrative, documentary, and short film categories and total nearly $40,000.
DOCUMENTARY FEATURES
McBaine Documentary Feature Prize winner winner will receive $10,000, and McBaine Bay Area Documentary Feature Prize winner will receive $5,000. Documentary films in competition include:
City of the Sun
Rati Oneli, Georgia/USA/Qatar/Netherlands
The Distant Barking of Dogs
Simon Lereng Wilmont, Denmark/Sweden/Finland
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
RaMell Ross, USA
The Judge (Bay Area)
Erika Cohn, USA/Palestine
Minding the Gap
Bing Liu, USA
The Next Guardian
Arun Bhattarai, Dorottya Zurbó, Hungary/Netherlands
The Other Side of Everything
Mila Turajlić, Serbia/France/Qatar
The Rescue List (Bay Area)
Alyssa Fedele, Zachary Fink, USA/Ghana
Shirkers
Sandi Tan, USA
Tre Maison Dasan
Denali Tiller, USA
NEW DIRECTORS PRIZE
The Golden Gate Award New Directors Prize of $10,000 will be given to a narrative first feature that exhibits a unique artistic sensibility and deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. This year, ten films are in contention for this award. Narrative films in competition include:
Djon África
João Miller Guerra, Felipa Reis, Portugal/Brazil/Cape Verde
I Am Not a Witch
Rungano Nyoni, UK/France/Zambia/Germany
Night Comes On
Jordana Spiro, USA
Ravens
Jens Assur, Sweden
Scary Mother
Ana Urushadze, Georgia/Estonia
The Sower
Marine Francen, France
Suleiman Mountain
Elizaveta Stishova, Kyrgyzstan/Russia
Those Who Are Fine
Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland
Tigre
Ulises Porra Guardiola, Silvina Schnicer, Argentina
Winter Brothers
Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark/Iceland
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GARY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE (Sasha Waters Freyer 2018)
Not the ultimate word on this premier American street photographer of the Sixties and Seventies, but a word long overdue. Part of the PBS American Masters series
MINDING THE GAP (Bing Liu 2018)
Bing Liu's participatory five-year film project becomes a triple coming-of-age story about three guys with parental abuse in their pasts who skateboarded away the pain. Filmed in failing blue collar town Rockford, IL. Well received at Sunance and SXSW, sponsored by Steve James and Kartemquin Films, this seems scattered at times but winds up feeling healing and true. Part of the PBS POV series.
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GODARD MON AMOUR/LE REDOUTABLE (Michel Hazanavicius 2017)
Hazanavicius is good at pastiches and this is a series of them with Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin as Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky in May 1968. A mildly amusing passive-aggressive homage that's surprisingly bland and uninteresting for such a topic. Godard is still alive and making radical films. If anybody needed to make this - which is, however, doubtful - it would have been him.
See Armond White's comment on this film which he calls "appalling and entertaining." He says: "Even a bad film about Godard, as this one is, introduces people to his genius."
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Ones that got away.
San Francisco 2018 film festival films that might have been cool to see but I missed.
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Boom for Real
It's no secret that I am a huge fan of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88). In fact I did see the show at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (21 Sept. '17-28 Jan. '18) which presumably this doc was made to go with, and watched some of it there. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sara Driver, USA
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Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982). Photograph: Jean-Michel Basquiat/Barbican
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A Kid Named Jake
The Opening Night Film of the festival, and I got invited to it, but I didn't go. Don't know that I'll like it, but its transgender and class themes make it relevant to today. Coming June 1. A Kid Like Jake, Silas Howard, USA
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Makala, Emmanuel Gras, France A documentary about an African guy who struggles to make charcoal to sell. I've now missed it twice; it was included in a day of ND/NF last month that I missed, and was in the SFIFF too.
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Tully, Jason Reitman, USA
A new movie starring Charlize Theron. She was the honored actor at this year's festival and the premiere of this new movie starring Charlize crowned the celebration of her career. Which ain't over yet, for sure!
القاضية
The Judge, Erika Cohn, USA / Palestine
Doc about Kholoud Al-Faqih, a Palestinian trailblazer as the first woman judge on the Shari’a (Islamic law) court in the Middle East.
More to come....
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RBG (Julie Cohen, Betsy West 2018)
An admiring documentary portrait of the life and achievement (not over) of Supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, now 84 but still not retired. With the heavily conservative court since Bush's two appointments, she represents a further to the left element and must write many dissenting decisions. She has become a liberal pop icon, known as "The Notorious RBG."
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HALF THE PICTURE (Amy Adrion 2018)
Half the picture, women think, should be women. Hollywood is a very sexist community, more than most. The percentage of women actually directing films in Hollywood is minuscule, and it starts with a lot of women in film school studying to be directors. They get filtered out, and by the time you get to the top there are virtually none. Ava DuVernay was the first woman to get to make a $100 million movie. It didn't turn out to be very good,, but how many men have gotten to make lousy $100 million movies? Hundreds? Thousands? A talking heads picture. The EEOC has looked into this lately. They have brought charges against all the major studios for discrimination against women.
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TIGRE (Ulises Guardiola, Silvina Schnicer 2017)
A heady tropical debut from Argentina. As island estate, family squabbles, burgeoning sexuality. Boom!
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