San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

San Francisco International Film Festival April 4-17 2018

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

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Links to the reviews
Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu 2017)
Big Bad Fox & Other Tales, The/Le grand renard méchant & autres contes (Patrick Imbert, Benjamin Renner 2017)
City of the Sun (Rati Oneli 2017)
Civilizations: How Do We Look? (Episode 2) (Matt Hill 2018)
Claire’s Camera/La caméra de Claire (Hong Sangsoo 2017)
The Cleaners (Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck 2018)
Dogs (The Distant Barking of Dogs) (Simon Lereng Wilmont 2018)
Djon África (João Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis 2018) (ND/NF)
Godard Mon Amour (Michel Hazanavicius 2017)
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross 2018) (ND/NF)
Half the Picture (Amy Adrion 2018)
Hal (Amy Scott 2018)
Human Element, The (Matthew Testa 2018)
I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni 2017)
Judge, The (Erika Cohn 2017)
Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle/Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo (Gustavo Salmerón 2017)
Minding the Gap (Bing Liu 2017)
My Life with James Dean/Ma vie avec James Dean (Dominique Choisy 2017)
No Date, No Signature (Vahid Jalilvand 2017)
The Other Side of Everything/Druga strana svega (Mila Turajlić 2017)
The Pushouts (Katie Galloway 2018)
Ravens/Korparna (Jens Assur 2017)
RBG (Julie Cohen, Betsy West 2018)
Rescue List, The (Alyssa Fedele, Zachary Fink 2017)
The Rider (Chloé Zhao 2017) (NYFF 2017)
Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze 2017) (ND/NF)
Sower, The/Le semeur (Marine Francen 2017) (R-V)
★ (Star) (Johann Lurf 2017)
Suleiman Mountain/Suleiman Too (Elizaveta Stishova 2017)
The Third Murder/三度目の殺人 (Sandome no satsujin) (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2017)
Those Who Are Fine/Dene wos guet gei (Cyril Schäublin 2017) (ND/NF)
Tigre (Ulises Porra Guardiola, Silvina Schnicer 2017)
Tre Maison Dasan (Denali Tiller 2017)
Wajib (Annemarie Jacir 2017)
The White Girl (Jenny Suen, Christopher Doyle 2017)
Winter Brothers/Vinterbrødre (Hlynur Pálmason 2017) (ND/NF)
The Workshop/L'Atelier (Laurent Cantet 2017) (R-V)
Wrestle (Suzannah Herbert, Lauren Belfer 2018)

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VIVIAN QU: ANGELS WEAR WHITE/JIA NIAN HUA (2017)

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ZHOU MEIJUN IN ANGELS WEAR WHITE

Vulnerable women in China

The images in Angels Wear White are pretty and at the center of it is a quartet of delicate young Chinese girls. The scene is a motel, one that's modern and spacious and where the rooms aren't cheap, at a seaside location with large dunes like sculptures - and a giant sculpture of Marilyn Monroe that runs symbolically through the film. Two of the four are very young schoolgirls, twelve years old. Another, Mia (Vicky Chen), is a teenager and a working girl, doing menial chores at the motel. The last is a bit older and more sophisticated, Lili (Peng Jing), a clerk at the motel. Through a surveillance camera Mia sees foul play in a room one night and records the camera information on her cell phone, but she hides what she knows. Lili's wily ways infect her.

The central event is an ugly one, the sexual exploitation of a young girl, perhaps two, by a middle-aged man, who's never seen directly. Lili and Mia cover this up when an investigation takes place.

A desultory police investigation proceeds off and on, while the camera follows around the exploited young girl and the teenager. There surely is a good story here somewhere. But it doesn't seem the filmmaker, Vivian Qu, knows quite how to structure her tale. Though never anything but watchable, this film meanders and runs off on tangents, never quite gaining momentum. It is too diffuse.

Boyd van Hoeij commented in Hollywood Reporter at Angels' Venice debut that it's "Luminously filmed but restrained to a fault," and though its final shot packs "an impressive punch," Qu's drama wants to suggest something about the precarious position of women in China, but exactly what "is harder to pin down." That may also have been true of Qu's first film, Trap Street (reviewed on Filmleaf in 2014 ND/NF coverage). That was in Venice's Critic Week, while this feature made it into the main competition on the Lido and later to Toronto; she is making steady progress. The texture of her films is satisfying even if their thrust is vague.

In some ways Trap Street may have succeeded better with its more complicated, less focused material, which contained many similar elements - hotel rooms, pretty young girls, surveillance cameras, with the added attractions of youthful romance and richer mystery. Angels Wear White touches on today's awareness of sexual harassment and is beautiful to look at.

Angels Wear White 嘉年华 (Jiā Nián Huá), 107 mins., debuted in competition at Venice 2017 and has played or will play in a total of at least 34 international festivals, including the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 2018, where it was screened for this review.

DOMINIQUE CHOISY: MY LIFE WITH JAMES DEAN/MA VIE AVEC JAMES DEAN (2017)

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MICKAËL PELISSIER, NATHALIE RICHARD, AND JOHNNY RASSE IN MY LIFE WITH JAMES DEAN

Cinema and romance on the Norman coast with a light gay touch

My LIfe with James Dean is a charming French gay film about love and cinema whose central figure is an attractive young director, Géraud Champreux (actor and birdsong immitaer Johnny Rasse). Géraud - not Gérard; people keep getting it wrong - goes to the Norman coast for a series of showings of his eponymous new film in Calais and several other coastal towns. Not many show up, as is not surprising given the provincial settings and the movie theme, which Variety describes as "a frank Jean Genet-ish LGBT tale of carnal passion" - and Géraud seems all at sea anyway. But he's ready to go with the flow, and things happen.

At the first showing, in a cinema attached to a casino, only one person shows up. But the cute, young, very tall projectionist, Balthazar (Mickaël Pelissier), falls for him and wants to make him his first gay experience.

Géraud has left his laptop at home and a kid has stolen his cellphone on the train. He borrows phones and calls the star of his film, Ludwig (Tancredi Volpert), leaving messages in which he promises he's looking for a salle de musculation (a workout room) "to maintain that body you like." Géraud (that is Johnny Rasse) is indeed attractively muscular in his thin, open-collared shirts; his expression is abstracted, a little sad, perhaps missing Ludwig, whose interest in him may have faded.

Ludwig, at least, is not there. But he does eventually show up, to the disappointment of Balthazar. The sponsor of the first screening, Sylvia van den Rood (Nathalie Richard), wholly misses the screening, because her lover, a married woman, has broken up with her and she is a mess. At the Hotel de Calais, where Géraud is put up by Silvia, the perpetual clerk is Gladys (Juliette Damiens). Is she in love with Géraud? No, there is someone else; but she has memorized Chekhov's Seagull - which seems not inappropriate - and wants to be cast in Géraud's next film.

Géraud gets a cahier in a bookstore, and, freed no doubt by the lack of computers or cellphones, and, while among people, starts jotting notes in it for his next film, whose title becomes The Maharajah and the Seagulls. It's a Bollywood-Normandy production of which we see the title song in the closing credits.

No scenes in Choisy's film seem more typical than those where all the main characters are following each other, one after the other, around the town streets, compelled by romantic confusion. They create intertwining intrigues and infatuations, led by Balthazar. Him, Géraud gently rebuffs, saying he is "a child." But when he takes off his clothes, he is not. We meet Géraud's mother, and Balthazar's father. Later some of the principals run off in a van, hiding a handsome, dark young fugitive.

The thing Choisy's good hearted, airy, film has and never loses is the essential quality Calvino defined, leggerezza in Italian - lightness. Something of that comes from being made away from the responsibility and pretension of Paris, France's cultural and cinematic capital whose weight of tradition and responsibility to be sophisticated and elegant could weigh on a cinéast whose material is as evanescent as this. Choisy

Born in 1959, Dominique Choisy has worked as an editor for French television, in addition to teaching at the Université d’Amiens in the north of France. After helming a number of short films, Choisy directed his first feature, Modern Comforts in 2000. Also starring Nathalie Richard, Modern Comforts won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. He returned to the director’s chair in 2011 with Les fraises des bois. My Life with James Dean is his third feature.

My LIfe with James Dean/Me vie avec James Dean, 108 mins., debuted in Paris at the Cheries-Cheris Film Festival (MK2 Beaubourg) and continued at Montreal, Brussels, Toulouse, Tours, and Lyon. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Theatrical releases in France and Germany are scheduled.

Showing at the same same time in Boston (Cambridge) at the Wicked Queen Festival Apr. 6, 7:30 pm at the Brattle Theater.
SFIFF showings:
Thurs. Apr. 5 8:30 Roxie Theater
Fri. apr. 6 3 pm Creativity Theater
Sun. Apr. 8 j8:30 pm Vitoria Theater

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THE POSTER FOR THE FILM

SIMON LERENG WILMONT: THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS (2017)

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OLEG AFANASYEV

Lions at home in danger by a brave photographer


Danish documentarian Simon Lereng Wilmont went to Hnltove, a mile from the front line of fighting between Ukraine forces and pro-Russian separatists four years ago and made this film focused on a boy of ten whose father chose not to flee the fighting. Like many a great documentary this one starts with extraordinary access. Wilmont's fly-on-the-wall technique means he is present at the most intimate moments but never noticed.

Not surprisingly, the film Loreng made won top honors in IDFA's "First Appearance" Competition. Just how dangerous this work was, if you wouldn't guess along the way, is shown at the very outset with footage from a car when there's a big explosion a couple vehicles forward of it, blowing everything away and driving the car the photographer is in off the road.

Oleg is a fifth-sixth grader, the age of openness, curiosity, good humor. He lives with his grandmother Alexandra, a big, tough-minded, warm woman. His father is gone, his mother died years earlier. His aunt Ayosha falls for a soldier who'll take her to a safer place along with her son Yarik, robbing Oleg of his companion for pillow fights and leaving Alexandra and Oleg alone - the more so because most of the village is also gone. There are a few classroom scenes were there were other children - classes on mines and how to be wary of them, what to do if disaster strikes. War is the ever-present thing, with memories of a neighbor who had his head blown off, leaving his wife wandering outside speechless. Alexandra quotes a saying, "Every dog is a lion in its own home." So they are lions who hear howitzers and the distant barking of dogs.

With the older teenager Kostya Oleg goes swimming in the dark, with firing roaring in the distance, and they make a fire. Wilmont must have pledged, "If they go, I go." He threw in his lot with them to make this film. It reminds me of the old Life Magazine. A great Life photographer focused on the most human of human interest stories, weeding out anything trivial, unless, in its triviality, it was tremendous. He took me as a boy to far other worlds I could escape into. But this world I only wish did not exist. Yarik comes back for some reason, and Oleg has his company again. But the situation is wearing everyone down, us too, the viewers, the mood grows darker, and when Kostya brings a pistol, it's dangerous. Oleg gets a gash in the ankle from a ricocheting bullet, then they cruelly shoot frogs in a pool, but Wilmont quietly forbears and observes.

It was quiet and lovely for a while, then the fighting started up again. It is not over.

The Distant Barking of Dogs, 90 mins., debuted at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA). Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 2018. See the review at IDFA by Neil Young in Hollywood Reporter for further details.

SFIFF April 6.

MATTHEW HILL: CIVILIZATIONS: HOW DO WE LOOK? (EPISODE 2) (2018)

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A glossy update, in a retro documentary style, minus the dominant voice

According to Vanessa Thorpe in the Guardian, the makers of the ambitious BBC arts series "Civilizations" faced "major hurdles" in filming, with tourists, bureaucrats, security staff and "cultural sensitivities" all "standing in their way." They believe they faced greater obstacles than the 1969 series they were commissioned to update. I looked at one episode shown as part of the SF film festival, number 2, which is about the representation of the human figure from its earliest days till now.

The question title, "How Do We Look?" is misleading in its suggestion of a personal, self-conscious sense of the culture of the visual. Actually, the representations of human form through history come from sources we mostly know very little about, other than what we see. Did ancient Egyptians really see themselves as stiff and upright, or were they just waiting for artists to come up with another way of drawing, like the fascinating, and engaging Roman funerary portraits on top of Egyptian-style coffins in the Fayum Mummy Portraits? This is a rapid survey, not a deep delving, but it could have delved deeper.

Just as we still owe a lot to the beautiful idealized forms devised by the Greeks and the Romans and their incorporation into modern sculpture promoted by the influential 18th-century archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, so this glossy, handsomely realized documentary hour owes an awful lot to the traditional ceremonial style of the docs it's updating. In fact it comes on initially very much like the "Encyclopedia Britannica films" shown in US schools in the Fifties, which droned on in a singsong fashion so we'd know we were being lectured about important things, and could zone out.

In the effort to keep us from doing that, a string of impressive and appropriate experts are shown, British whenever possible, with nicely lit, sharply focused sculptures. Toward the end, the film skips from classical style modern sculpture to an African American painter who does updates of people found on the street in a style adopted from "high art" he's viewed at the Met. Particularly noticeable, and amusing, is chief "presenter" (one of three in the series) Cambridge professor Mary Beard, resplendent in a big orange scarf (to unify multiple appearances over time, perhaps), whose toothy, over-emphatic style of delivery, striving for a sense of dramatic revelation, has been compared, not without reason, to Margaret Rutherford, as Vanessa Thorpe notes.

Starting with Mexican Olmec sculpture, none of the usual highlights are missed in a survey that privileges western classical art because, it shows, the world has done so. Something new to me is the information that even traditional Buddhist sculpture was influenced by the Greco-Roman (along with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington).

One thing that's missing here is a defining individual voice. What made the 1969 series so memorable was the aristocratic, establishment tones of its ever-present showpiece spokesman, Sir Kenneth Clark. That assurance Clark had, his regal authority, is lacking here. So is this really an update, or a dusting off, with something important, the unifying element of a strong sensibility, missing? The old one, note, dared to call itself "Civilization." Now it's safely pluralistic, not one but many "Civilizations." Timid and PC, but you can't get away with a white male presenting mostly western art as "civilization" anymore, you need females, people of color, and a bIt more exotic stuff. (Still slighted: Africa, which remains largely invisible.)

Of course there have been some new discoveries, which are incorporated, and these are always of immense value. One thing undoubtedly new is the more recently discovered Chinese Han dynasty tomb figures, with a representative of the beautiful new Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to talk about them, its Director Jay Xu. But they do not seriously alter our understanding. Is it surprising that sculptures were made by and to celebrate the rich and the powerful? One was hoping for some more pungent observations and keener insights. Perhaps a more overt critique of Sir Kenneth's version would have helped us see the value of an update.

Civilizations,"How Do We Look?", 64 mins., debuted 24 Apr. 2018, no. 2 of nine one-hour episodes, BBC Two, PBS, presented by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, a series of documentary films on the history of art. Viewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival on a PBS Press Room video (of which the sound fell out in the last ten minutes).

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AMY SCOTT: HAL (2018)

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A director's biography

[Capsule review]

Hal Ashby is less of a household word among the iconic Seventies "New Hollywood" directors than Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese or Coppola but also important. Amy Scott has made a documentary re-introduction. His key work of the period, often created in non-stop stoned editing sessions, includes The Landlord, In the Heat of the Night, Harold and Maude, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Being There and Coming Home, movies all made in the nine years from 1970 to 1979. He died at only 59, of pancreatic cancer. Some said the studios killed him by their opposition. L.A.-based Scott was trained in Oklahoma, became an editor, and was head digital archivist and assistant to Studs Terkel in Chicago. Owen Gleiberman has reviewed her documentary for Variety suggesting it has more clues to his work than his life. For an avaluation of his work read Pauline Kael's review of Coming Home in The New Yorker.

Hal, 90 mins., debuted Jan. 2018at Sundance, screened for this review as part of the April 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

HONG SANG-SOO: CLAIRE'S CAMERA/LA CAMÉRA DE CLAIRE (2017)

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ISABELLE HUPPERT IN CLAIRE'S CAMERA

Quick camerawork

[Capsule review]

Whether you think Claire's Camera (not her knee, eh?) is a dashed-off sketch or a succinct masterpiece, it's another of Hong Sang-soo's characteristic sequences of two- or three-way dialogues - à la Rohmer, the similarity more obvious with a film shot at Cannes and including a major French star. And it's typically about a boozy, womanizing Korean movie director, a long-time gf, and a beautiful young fling who's Wong's own serious new flame, Kim Min-hee. Things go round, and aphorisms are uttered. There is more than this light-hearted, Rohmer-esque entertainment might reveal at first, though the run-time is too short for Hong's usual lengthy, boozy arguments and elaborate overlapping time-schemes.

Claire's Camera/La Caméra de Claire 클레어의 카메라, 69 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017; 14 other festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Metascore 80%.

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 7, 2018 at3:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room
Monday, April 9, 2018 at 4:00 p.m. at SFMOMA
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room

MATTHEW TESTA: THE HUMAN ELEMENT (2018)

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"I became a photographer to be an eye witness to the beauty of nature but I quickly realized there was a more complex story going on in the world about the collision between people and nature, and I felt a great sense of urgency to bear witness to that…Imbalance in one element leads to an imbalance in another. People are the only element that can choose to restore balance." – James Balog

For me the most convincing and important climate change documentary was Jeff Orlovski's Chasing Ice. It records National Geographic photographer James Balog's work recording the melting of glaciers using multiple time release cameras that provide the information over years of what is happening to the ice at the ends of the planet. This is where the sea rises.

This is the clearest, simplest, and most disturbing visual proof that the frozen parts of the planet are rapidly eroding, causing the sea levels to rise.

With Matthew Testa Balog simply has another guy recording his work as a photographer. This time he moves to the elements, water, air, fire, and earth, and he suggests that humans constitute a fifth element interacting with, changing and being changed by the four others. Needless to say, I do not agree with the citizen critic on "Letterboxd" who wrote: "In the last few months I've seen An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel, Chasing Ice, & Chasing Coral... This added nothing new." Here's what it's got that's new: this man's voice and personal camera. James Balog's information is always very visceral, personal, and clear. It doesn't feel like a survey but like reports from the front, this time, from multiple fronts, governed by the four elements.

The first element is water, rising sea water. Balog concentrates on the Chesapeake Bay region, particularly Tangier Island, a kind of canary in the coalmine of invading water levels. This little island community of "watermen" will need $100 million to build a seawall to protect its way of life from extinction. Where is this going to come from? New York City can afford the $180 billion or whatever it is it needs for a seawall, but Tangier Island is poor.

Burning fossil fuel has changed the air. Balog begins with a project to photograph the thin layer of breathable air to show how fragile it is. It's a simple project, using a balloon and several cameras, but it works. He then goes to visit a school and some kids in Denver where they have asthma and the air quality is bad. They cannot afford to move to another region. About half the US population lives in substandard air, the film says.

Fire: this is the most newsy and scary of the elements stories, as fresh as the fires in California. The "new normal" for forest fires is now 1000% percent increased. Balog covers with his camera a region in the Carmel Valley that was saved by a very large team at the cost of over $200 million, the most expensive firefighting project in US and perhaps world history. "The fire next time" is no poetic menace but a likely statement of the way things are going. A 5,000 acre fire in summer used to be exceptional. Now it's hardly noticed at all. As the film went to completion the big California fires were still raging. And while now it is no longer the custom just to "let fires burn" around property, because they are too powerful not to destroy all in their wake, it is also true that now there are fires that cannot be stopped at all. The film explains the multiple factors behind this exponential increase in fire. If you life in the american West or on the West Coast, no matter where you are the danger of fire could be real.

Water, air, and fire. Next comes earth. Here Balog returns to his family's origins in the coal mining country of Pennsylvania where his Russian grandfather worked in the mines. He expresses a new respect for what these men did, which was right at the time. It is also true that now, nothing can restore the economic viability of coal. A young man is shown who has gone to barber school and loves cutting hair even more than he loved the mines. Some of the mine owners are shown to have moved toward developing solar energy over the vast land area they own that was used for coal mining. So this looks like one of the more positive pictures. But we are reminded that the US announced its intention to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2010, , the only country to have done so - one of the chief indications of the terrible in which we are going.

The film ends with the March for Science of April 22, where Balog speaks, and also with a catalog of major natural disasters that have recently happened and their human toll. "Three hurricanes cost the US economy $265 billion. 251 people died." "Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, reached the highest levels in 800,000 years." We have an "inalienable right", Balog said at the March for Science, to stable elements on which we rely for life. We are the only ones who can achieve that.

The Human Element, 76 mins., was in post-production according to IMDb. It's a brand new film. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. This was the film's premiere, with multiple showtimes as below. Film crew, subject, and spokesman present for the screenings.

Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 1:30 PM -- Dolby Theatre/PREMIERE SCREENING
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 3:30 PM -- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 1:30 PM -- The Roxie Theatre
Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 12:00 PM -- The Roxie Theatre
In attendance wukk be Matthew Testa (Director/Writer), James Balog (Photographer/Film, Subject/Writer), Olivia Ahnemann (Producer), Daniel Wright (Co-Producer),Lyman Smith (Editor/Writer, Josh Salzman and Jim Hurst (Cinematographers), Chief Tony Howard (Film Subject, Cal Fire)

HIROKAZU KOREEDA: THE THIRD MURDER (2017)

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MASAHIRO FUKUYAMA, KÔJI YOKUSHO IN THE THIRD MURDER

A protracted examination of guilt and, as an afterthought, justice.

[Capsule review]

Max Shilling in Japan Times heralded The Third Murder as a welcome relief from popular Sherlock Holmes-style Japanese puzzle stories that is, instead, a serious treatment of motive that begins as a legal proceedural. It is this. The accused has killed the owner of a factory where he works. Was robbery the motive, or was he killing on instructions from the man's wife, or was it to protect and avenge the man's abused daughter, or something to do with the factory's devious practices? Did he even do the crime, which he initially confesses to? The trouble is that Misumi (Kôji Yakusho), the surprisingly pleasant and charming accused man, changes his story so many times one begins to lose any sense of a fixed sequence of events. There is fascination in the interactions of the legal team, and eventually between Misumi and chief lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama). But not really one of Korreda's very best efforts.

The Third Murder 三度目の殺人 (Sandome no satsujin), 124 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2017. 10 other fests including Toronto, Mumbai, and Vienna, and it was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival in Apr. 2018. Metascore 68%.

DENALI TILLER: TRE MAISON DASON (2018)

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MAISON TEIXEIRA AND HIS FATHER IN TRE MAISON DASON

Three boys with parents in jail fare differently

The film focuses on three boys whose parents are incarcerated. It shows their visits to them and spends time with them when elsewhere. At these Rhode Island facilities, fathers are allowed to spend two hours with their kids in an assigned space once a week. Tre Janson is 13, Maison Teixeira is 11, and Dason Lopes is 6.

Maison stands out at first. He is hyper, articulate, and smart. He gets diagnosed with Asperger's, but he seems remarkably sociable and wise with his dad. There is a session when he and his dad sit and ask each other questions that shows remarkable communication and, one feels compelled to say, sanity. Tre has gotten into trouble himself, barely escaping a felony and, violating probation, later facing jail time. He fights with his mom and talks tough. But when first seen visiting his dad, he weeps in his arms like a big baby, and we is like this again later. His mother's problems lead to her death. Dason is just a kid, and he and his cousin, like a sister to him, don't know his mom was in jail till she gets out, and she tells them - but she won't answer his repeated question about what she was in for, promising to tell him later.

Tre is in a group home when his mother dies of a drug overdose. Life seems continually hard for him. His father expresses tremendous shame at having failed his son but declares that he will never give up on the boy or cease to love him. How things are going to go for Tre is uncertain.

Maison's mother has long ago gone to live in California so he rarely sees her, but he chooses not to move there. His "Nana," his grandma, is there for him and a good support. RISE, an organization to aid children of incarcerated parents, provides him with a scholarship to go to a private middle school after he graduates with academic honors from his school. Tre becomes "T.J.," and, still a pothead and hanging with the brothers, he writes and records his own music; he is in a group home still, up for foster care; his father will be up for parole when he's 18. Dason shows immaturity camping as a Cub Scout but (perhaps the presence of his mother is no help in this situation) but at the film's end he has started guitar lessons - and outgrown his spiderman suit.

In this film, Tre is depicted in most detail, Dason the least. Maison's story is the most hopeful. Tiller points out that these kids represent one in fourteen kids in the United States who have an incarcerated parent. This is, of course, an example of how our mass incarceration system endangers the social fabric.


An extension of Denali Tiller’s thesis film at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Tre Maison Dason feels at first as if she has gotten in over her head. But if the sessions in the prison are limited, so are they for the family members,; and that doesn't stop them from being emotional and revealing. Teller has gotten good access, particularly for some of the heart-to-heart talks of the two older boys with their dads in prison sessions, but also for Tre's abrasive relations with his mom. We trust that the editing of many hours has delivered the right feeling of the people and situations. This is a worthwhile film.

Tre Maison Dason, 90 minutes, was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it is having its world premiere. Denali Tiller was an artist named one of Variety's 110 "filmmakers to watch" in 2015.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at Dolby Cinema
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 3:30 p.m. at Creativity Theater

SUZANNAH HERBERT: WRESTLE (2017)

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A dedicated young coach takes a failing high school to the state wrestling finals in Alabama

This crackerjack doc tells the life story of Huntsville, Alabama's J.O. Johnson High School wrestling team, especially wrestlers Jailen, Jamario, Teague, and Jaquan, with Chris Scribner, the coach. The school has been failing. The team has been dormant for years, but this season it seeks to make its way to the state championship. Scribner (Scrib), also a Social Studies teacher, is a strong motivator. They are hungry.

Jailen is highly motivated and defines himself by his medals. Jaquan's mother thought wrestling was a "white" sport; "I have a white son in a black body." Teague is white. He is on four meds but doesn't take them. Jamario (Mario) is hung up on his girlfriend. Their dramas mess him up and Scrib has to come and get him from his house for their first big tournament.

First big tournament is sketchy but Scrib says it's first time in 3 years he's felt he's coaching a real team and they're going all the way to state finals. Going into a match, they say the Serenity Prayer. Scrib is in recovery, he, like Teague, used drugs chronically when he was in high school. The boys fight big obstacles like emotional breakdowns, racial profiling by the police, teenage pregnancy, and the temptations of drugs.

They made it to the state finals. Two won, two lost. All went on to college but Teague, kicked out of rehab. Scrib coached another year, then went to Vanderbilt to law school. The high school, after years on the failing list, was shut down and turned into a training place for local police. So it goes.

The doc has a strong soulful soundtrack. The matches are exciting. This is a very well edited film with strong material, equally rich in the coming-of-age, personal, social, and sports aspects. It winds up being as much about coach Scrib as the boys, but the personal details are about the boys, not him.

Wrestle, 98 mins., had its World Premiere in the Global Visions section of the San Francisco International Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review.

SHOWTIMES:
Friday, April 6, 2018 at 8:30 PM -- Dolby Theatre/PREMIERE SCREENING
Monday, April 9, 2018 at 6:00 PM -- The Roxie Theatre
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 3:00 PM -- SFMOMA

Alabama news story about the film and the team.
News story about Scribner's starting of the team.

VAHID JALILVAND: NO DATE, NO SIGNATURE (2017)

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Wrong and wronger

No Date, No Signature is an almost unremittingly grim feature, that does some of the things the Iranians do extremely well in their movies, perhaps better than anybody else. Action begins with an unfortunate initial event. Following scenes carve away at that event, examining it from a hundred different angles, assembling troubling details that pose a disturbing and complex moral dilemma. These details are wonderfully conceived even though the way they pile up, or the reactions to them, eventually may come to seem in some aspects implausible. As they amass, so do the guilt and recrimination, other areas of strength in Iranian cinema, which often depicts a society where people seek to point responsibility away from themselves, with very mixed results. The acting here is first rate. So is the look, the images in unusually handsome black and white that manages to be elegant without ceasing to be grim. This film is a pleasure to watch, even if we may writhe uneasily as we enjoy.

It all begins with a sudden car accident, hastily - too hastily - dealt with. A driver is sideswiped and caused to in turn drive a motorcyclist off the road, who has his wife and daughter and young son in tow. The driver is Dr. Kaveh Nariman (Amir Aghaee). The motorcyclist is Moosa (Navid Mohammadzadeh), with his wife Leila (Zakiyeh Behbahani). She and their daughter are only a little bruised. But their 8-year-old son Amir Ali is more shaken, and may have a mild concussion.

Nariman is a doctor. He checks Amir Ali, who says he feels okay. The doctor wants to take them all to the hospital, but Moosa will only agree to to stop on his own at a nearby clinic to have the boy examined. Nariman gives him money. This is routine in Iran. Moosa really wants the police to be notified but Nariman won't agree to this, because his insurance has expired, and there would be trouble. All this is, of course, a matter also of class and economic status. Well-off doctors don't drive their families around on motorbikes. Those are things of the working classes.

As they drive away, Nariman sees Moosa drive by the clinic. He waves to him to stop, but he doesn't. And that is that. But that, of course, is not that at all. This early scene, however, is a model of the whole, patient, methodical, full of detail, troubling.

Nariman is a forensic examiner. A few days later, he hears the family name of Moosa. It is the boy. He is dead. This is where the complications begin. First there is Nariman's handsome, austere female colleague, Dr. Sayeh Behbahani (Hediyeh Tehrani of Ashghar Farhadi's Fireworks Wednesday). It is she who does the autopsy of the boy. She finds he is infected with botulism and believes that is the cause of death. But Nariman theorizes that it was a spinal injury's delayed action, making him responsible.

The film keeps the relationships complex and conflictual, Nariman-Sayeh, whose connection is clearly more than professional; Nariman-Moosa; and Moosa and his wife, Leila, through whose grief and anger we feel the tragic loss of the child.

But Moosa is responsible for the botulism, or rather an unscrupulous seller of chicken from a kind of packing plant where he bought it at a bargain price. The scene where Moosa in a rage confronts and attacks the chicken seller I am not the first to note has a kind of Shakespearean tragic grandeur. It is the reason why Mohammadzadeh received high honors at Iran's annual film awards, as No Date, No Signature got Best Film.

When Moosa is arrested for assaulting the chicken seller and ultimately charged with murder, the film's trajectory takes on the feel of Rossellini, of Italian neorealism. But the continual arguments between Sayah and Nariman maintain a strain that is unmistakably Iranian. Nariman's torment parallels Moosa's, as he pursues his own guilt, insisting on exhuming the corpse of the boy to do his own private autopsy.

This excellent film is not without flaws. Chief among them is the implausiblity of Nariman's insistence on incriminating himself when he has no need to so so and there is strong evidence that the boy dies from what he ate. Or, if not, he would have died from the botulism shortly thereafter. But maybe this situation is too complicated for its own good. And Sayeh's relationship with Nariman is kept too nebulous. There are other doubts. But as Jay Weissberg's Venice Variety review points out, the emotions remain strong and convincing throughout, however overcomplicated the plot details.

No Date, No Signature, 104 mins. بدون تاریخ، بدون امضاء (bidun tarikh, bidun imdha')
In 23 known international festivals, beginning with Fajr, Istanbul and Venice in Feb., Apr., and Sept., 2017, and screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Saturday, April 7, 2018 AT 5:45 p.m. at BAMPFA
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at Roxie Theater

JENS ASSUR: RAVENS/KORPARNA (2017)

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REINE BRYNOLFSSON IN RAVENS

The harsh demands of Swedish farm life

Just a typical rural Swedish farm in the Seventies, 1978, to be precise. In this film based on a novel by Tomas Bannerhed, the father, Agne (Reine Brynolfsson), finds his work a struggle. The early scenes of the film are completely wordless. Son Klas (Jacob Nordström), a bird watcher with pretty eyes, hangs (while he can) with Veronika (Saga Samuelsson), the new girl visiting from Stockholm, and has little interest in taking over the place. Gärd (Maria Heiskanen), wife and mother, tries to offer some warmth, but she gets hers sometimes from another man in town. The farm doesn't really belong to Agne, but he has little interest in local developers using a forest attached to the land, or even in adopting modern machinery, little interest in keeping the landowners pleased with him.

Jens Assur, whose feature debute as director-writer-producer this is, arrives as a photojournalist with a good eye: the starkness has an edge of beauty granted by the 35mm camerawork by dp Jonas Alarik. The drab grays have a glow of yellow and purple; the light often sings. And then there are those ravens, who cast interesting shadows across the barn wall. This is small compensation, against the doom-ridden score by Peter Von Poehl. The sound design is sometimes scary; so is the score. If you grew up on a Swedish farm, many seem to think, this will speak to you. Citizen critics on IMDb suggest Swedish farms atmospheres haven't changed so much in subsequent decades, only the size of the land and the machinery. If that's not your background, you may find Ravens a bit stingy in the story line, or just implausibly grim, though the wordless passages are interrupted, if only briefly, by exciting moments. This is Sweden, home of the mournful, and this film fits with local cinematic tradition. At least one of Klas's not-so-distant forebears has killed himself. What will happen to Klas? Or to Agne? Gradually, we find out.

When Agne does something creepy, you wonder if he is a monster or a villain? Stefan Dobroiu argues in Cineropa that, in the layered performance of the experienced Brynolfsson, he's a richly layered character, one of the year's most complex and compelling on film. At least he is not the simple grouch he may seem at first. Klas' idea of a great date night with Veronika is attending a slide lecture on scavenger birds (the speaker is entertaining). That's a droll thought. Ultimately however for some the longish run-time may feel stretched out, there is a sense of inevitability, and, curiously given the anguish, of resolution - and resignation.

Ravens/Koparna, 105 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2017; four other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

SFIFF SHOwTIMES:
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 3:15 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 6:15 p.m. at Roxie Theater

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JACOB NORDSTROM IN RAVENS

HANS BLACK, MORITZ RIESEWIECK: THE CLEANERS (2018)

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Social media are evil, is the true message of this little film

This documentary is more than it appears but much less than it should be. It's overburdened at only 85 minutes run-time. It has too much material to deal with, material that is new, complicated, and explosive. It starts out as "A look at the shadowy underworld of the Internet where questionable content is removed," as one summary states. This means the low-level employees, thousands, it is said, in the Philippines whose job is to "clean" the Internet, to view thousands of images that might be objectionable for people to look at and, on viewing them, to choose to allow or delete them. Actually the details of this work aren't really clear, and we don't get to see samples, but as - Nick Allen, Roger Ebert.com says in his review of this film, these "Cleaners" and this process are in themselves a complex subject that can't fully be dealt with in this film. This subject involves the plight of these employees whose work could be psychologically damaging. It also involves the way in which their decisions must be arbitrary, and in which they might not be able to judge taste or legality for viewers or users of other countries than their own country, the Philippines, and its culture. They make these decisions, incidentally, in a country governed by an insane leader known for his human rights violations.

But the film goes on to more important issues, which it can only begin to touch on. Primary among these is the pernicious effect of the social media, which so many users look upon as a boon. Google, Twitter, and Facebook - created in California by young white males - allow other countries like Turkey freely to censor what appears on social media in their regions. At the same time they allow the free flow of the most heinous material - misinformation, disinformation, hate. A prime example of that, cited in some small detail in the film, is the way Facebook has been used in Myanmar (former Burma) to foment hatred against the world's most oppressed minority, the predominantly Muslim Rohingyas who for centuries have lived in the Buddhist-majority country.

That's one example. On a wider scale, as a journalistic spokesman says earlier in the film, the social media have been creating the medium in which flows the politics that has produced Brexit and Trump - and no doubt the current general shift to the right and toward hate in world politics since Brexit and Trump. The "Cleaners" are not, in any political sense, cleaning, and they are certainly not clarifying. They are not filtering out false political claims or stupidity and hate, as the traditional world of good journalism we grew up with used to do. Nor are the powers that be in Silicon Valley doing so. Hate is good for business, it turns out. Nothing gets more hits in Myanmar than a vile attack on the Rohingyas.

A number of former employees of Google and Twitter appear as talking heads here expressing degrees of discomfort with what they did when in the fold and how the social media are operating now. Of course Mark Zuckerberg is in trouble for Facebook's lack of control of its myriad content. These things are Pandora's Boxes that have enveloped the world. Surely it would be idiotic for anybody now to say that Twitter, Google, or Facebook are forces for good in the world. They represent a marketplace that lacks the old checks and balances that kept discourse reasonable. Facebook is a major vehicle for the invasion of privacy. Good luck, Facebook users.

This is important material. But it's material for numerous documentary films, not one short one. The effect of The Cleaners is to give one the jitters. The material it only touches on is hard to pin down. It may leave you feeling like the unfortunate Filipino Internet filterers it starts out with, some of whom have committed suicide. This is a start, but we deserve better.

Having become convinced that an Apple cellphone salesman was a messianic guru making the world a better place, presumably it is easy for the public to start thinking a Harvard dropout who became an instant billionaire is a savior too. It is the opposite. The world of computers and the Internet has opened up humankind to vast stores of information - and vast new possibilities for stupidity and harm.

The Cleaners, 88 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018; also Rotterdam, DOX, and Hot Docs. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. at Victoria Theatre
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. at BAMPFA

KATIE GALLOWAY: THE PUSHOUTS (2018)

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KIDS IN THE WATTS PROGRAM SHOWN IN THE PUSHOUTS

Giving back

Bay Area filmmaker and two-time Golden Gate Award winner Katie Galloway’s documentary The Pushouts focuses on a former West Oakland, California drug dealer and gang member called Victor Rios who has become a university professor and now seeks to redirect young people at risk after leaving high school without graduating. He calls them "pushouts" rather than "dropouts," because he feels they are forced out of school, rather than leaving by choice. Now a professor at UC Santa Barbara, with a wife seeking tenure and three kids, Rios and his mentor dedicate their lives to motivating young Mexican and African-American teens to realize their potential.

This little film has a lot of heart and contains touching footage of the present as well as some surprising moments on film of Victor Rios' earlier life when he was in school. There was a teacher called Ms. Russ who believed in the students others thought were going nowhere. A group of teachers negotiated a gang-based dispute Rios had while in school and that helped turn him around. During the film, he is asked to go to lead a session in the program called Yo! Watts! in Watts, California. This seems to lead to an "existential crisis" (his words) because he questions how he can help when he there for only a little while, and then goes back to his nice house and nice life in Santa Barbara.

But footage of the Watts program, designed to help pushed back young people open up in a place of trust about their pains and self-doubts, and regain confidence through training sessions in journaling, algebra, and rope climbing. The film shows these intimate and brave and touching activities. The message is that someone like Rios, who has "made it out" of ghetto life to be a smart person doing well, is uniquely qualified to help young people whom the system is trying to reject and cause to fail. He himself realizes he can do this, and so he keeps in touch with his own past. "We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it," is Promise 3 in AA. It is an important message. This is a touching and enlightening little film.

The Pushouts, 56 mins., debuted at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC. It was screened for this review at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was shown in a free community screening.

Katie Galloway won the SFIFF Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Documentary Feature for The Return (2016). Her other films include Prison Town, USA (2007) and Better This World (SFIFF 2011), which won the GGA for Best Documentary Feature as well as the Writers Guild of America’s USA’s Best Documentary Screenplay prize.

SHOTIME, SFIFF:
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at6:00 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

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VICTOR RIOS IN THE PUSHOUTS

RUNGANO NYONI: I AM NOT A WITCH (2017)

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MARGARET MULUBWA IN I AM NOT A WITCH

Captive child

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Witches attached to long white ribbons, and a girl who wishes she had chosen to be a goat. It was shot in Ghana and concerns Zambian stories of witches confined to limited spaces, centered upon a nine-year-old.. The director, a woman, was born in Zambia and raised partly in Wales. The film combines satire and surrealism and has a mercurially expressive young star, Margaret Mulubwa. It was shot by David Gallego, dp of Embrace of the Serpent. This feature film debut introduces a vibrant new talent with a distinctive vision.

I Am Not a Witch, 92 mins., debuted at Directors Fortnight at Cannes 2917, and has been shown in nearly 40 international film festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018. Film Movement will release it.

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 8:15 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. at BAMPFA

MILA TURAJLIĆ: THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING/DRUGA STRANA SVEGA (2017)

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SRBIJANKA IN THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING

Personal and political

The Serbian filmmaker Mila Turajlić had good reason to turn her camera on her mother, Srbijanka. And on their Belgrade apartment. Both are full of modern Slavic history. Back in the day, it was a handsome, spacious place. But one day many years ago, during the long rule of Marshall Tito, when Srbijanka was only a child, a woman in leather representing the communist party came, and divided it up. The Party thought the bourgeoisie was taking up too much space. Srbijanka is a big woman in slacks with cropped hair and glasses. She has a husky smoker's voice and a cigarette is rarely out of her hands. She speaks fluently, with good humor. She is the welcome and articulate spokesman of this professional "home movie."

During the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Mila's great-grandfather had settled his family into a space of about twenty-six-hundred feet. It was posh, and located on the second floor of a building in the same part in the middle of Balgrade as embassies, the Supreme Court, and the Ministry of Defense. roughly 2,600-square-foot space on the second floor of a building in a Central Belgrade neighborhood that was also home to the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Court and foreign embassies. No wonder the communists didn't like this one family occupying so much space! The family knew when they were being observed from the other apartments by click sounds of spy holes.

They gave sections of the apartment to three or four other families that were sectioned off. This is the wall, these are the walls, that "everything" is on "the other side" of. The family managed to hold onto plans of the apartment, on which Srbijanka shows where the divisions were made. The remarkable thing is that the family remained in a central part of their apartment and remain there to this day. It still looks large. This is a family of dissidents. Srbijanka tells that her lawyer parents advised her not to go into the law to avoid being repressed. You're good at math, he said, so do that. And she married a married a professor of applied mathematics, studied electrical engineering and became a professor of physics. But she was still a dissident and she was still repressed. She want to Paris in '68 to participate in the student protests.

The university of Belgrade became a center for protests against Slobodan Milošević of which the Turajlić family and their apartment were a busy part. Mila weaves interviews with her mother and friends with archival films and photos to tell the story of the politics of the decades from Tito to today. Her mother was active in the Otpor! civic protest organization, and it becomes clear that she was a powerful orator, and speaks in public with authority even today. We get a glimpse of the time of Yugoslavia, and the events since, including the Serbian nationalism which Srbijanka, who has said it is her duty to remain in the country, is still vocal in opposing. An example of living history, this provides useful background on the Serbian civil war. Of course those on the other side won't approve, and there is a Citizen Review on IMDb that trashes this film. But it's an enjoyable film that will send those interested to the history books to fill in further background on Srbijanka's personal account.

The Other Side of Everything, 100 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2017, receiving more attention at IDFA in Amsterdam - the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. In about a half dozen other festivals, with numerous Best Documentary nominations. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it is a nominee for the Golden Gate Award.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 6:30 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 8:40 p.m. at BAMPFA
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 12:45 p.m. at Creativity Theater

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LOOKING AT "THE OTHER SIDE"

ANNEMARIE JACIR: WAJIB (2017)

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MOHAMMAD AND SALEH BAKRI IN WAJIB

Culture clash: Palestinian abroad vs. Palestinian at home

This film (whose title means "Duty" in Arabic) opened theatrically in France Feb. 2018 as Wajib: Invitation au mariage, receiving fair reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.5). Libération (Marcos Uzal) said : "The film's strongest element is the marginal one, its way of suggesting by little touches the deepest and most profound tensions." Indeed. Thus the overheard Arabic radio news in the opening frames, as a Palestinian father and son, the protagonists, head off in a car, the old family Volvo, in which we learn later the son learned to drive.

"Following complaints," the speaker says, "the Ministry of Transport has agreed to remove Arabic announcements from public buses."Luckily for Mohammad and Saleh, they have their own transportation. Later an announcement comes of lumber shipments cut off from Gaza, barring reconstruction after the latest siege. All just routine. Sounds of the city, of Palestinian life, but nothing original, and a bit heavy-handed.

The son, it appears, is taking the wheel of his father's car. Evidently he hasn't seen him for a while, asking him if he still fishes, and if he's been smoking. There is a distance of information, and of understanding. And yet there is intimacy, the intensity of a close, cherished culture that Saleh knows well but lives outside of now. He can be an idealist. His girlfriend's father was a member of the PLO. He refuses to take an invitation to an Israeli official of the school where his father teaches, who he says is a government spy, and controls the school's life. But his father has to get on with the system - and says this man is a "pal." If he's going to become headmaster, he must invite Robbie. It's a "duty," in his sense - one of the many things that must be done to survive and preserve the cohesion of the local society and of his life.

But this is just the beginning. This is a picture of restrictive Palestinian society, and a clash of generations, especially when the younger one has lived abroad, in Europe. Saleh, in Italy now, is only there for the wedding of his sister Amal (Maria Zriek), and it's Christmastime. (Most of the local community seen is Christian.) They are going around, "the Nazareth way," delivering the invitations by hand one by one, so this becomes a very local road trip. His father is a teacher, and might be promoted to headmaster, but he reinforces conservative customs at every turn.

Everything that could go wrong does, but very quietly. They hit a dog, and Mohammad rushes away. It's dangerous not to, especially if it's an Israeli dog. They park in someone's way, and the car is vandalized, with a nasty note. Some drivers get into a street fight and Mohammad jumps out to stop it, and Saleh rescues him. The mood seems ugly. People are testy with each other. There's no solidarity. Surely there is not, here, the gentle humor of Elia Suleiman, the Jacqaues Tati or Jean Renoir of Palestinian Cinema. Jacir comes off as a more bitter chronicler, though, being a woman, also a more homely one.

It turns out Saleh's mother ran off years ago to another country, for another man, and that man is now dying, so she may not be able to come for the wedding - another humiliation for the family. It turns out the invitations have been misprinted, with the right date but wrong day of the week, and the printer refuses to reprint them. They must correct them all by hand.

To a certain extent this is about Saleh, and his discomfort becomes ours. He is the reactive one. And his reactions are almost continually, to various degrees, uncomfortable. There are things he misses, the food, the warmth, maybe even the language, but he could never really live here now. People want Saleh to come back and get married here and his father pretends to all they meet that this is a possibility. It's not going to happen, but they don't want to see that. This is part of Saleh's discomfort, that his point of view is simply not accepted or listened to. Even his look isn't acceptable. He has long hair tied back in a man bun, rose pants, and a pink shirt. He's a designer. Or is he an architect? But his father has told one relative, a doctor, that Saleh went into medicine, lying to please him with the thought that he was an influence, and still doesn't correct this lie. Anyway, nobody understands. Most assume Saleh has gone to America. One woman when he says it's Italy smiles and says, "Ah! You know languages!"

Now, there's a question if the wedding will even take place. Deep down Mohammad disapproves of it being in the winter and would like to postpone it till his wife's husband, who he detests unseen, dies, and till the summer, "when normal people get married." Well, things turn out alright, sort of.

The film's weakness and limitation is that it focuses on the clashes between father and son to the exclusion of much else. But these two actors, Mohammad and Saleh Bakri, who really are father and son, and these finicky details, ending in a grand argument between the two men, may be conventional and obvious, but still can be enlightening, and sometimes even heartbreaking. By defining the differences between a Palestinian who has stayed at home and one who has gone to live abroad, the film, written as well as directed by Annemarie Jacir, may define what Palestinian life is as well as any film you're likely to see.

واجب WAJIB 96 mins., debuted at Locarno 5 Aug. 2017, and was in at least 40 other international festivals in 2017 and 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018. Pyramide International is the distributor. Full review posted 5 Aug. 2018, the one-year anniversary of the film's Locarno debut.

SASHA WATERS FREYER: GARY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE (2018)

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GARY WINOGRAND

American eye

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Gary Winogrand was the preeminent New York "street photographer" of the years from midcentury to the Eighties. He was fast, prolific, and messy, and such is his extraordinary work. In this short film we get a sumptuous feast of his photographs (not necessarily organized to best show off their compositions and themes or to illustrate the best of them), with many opinions and recollections from gallerists, museum people, and a few (perhaps not enough) photographers, plus a couple of ex-wives. Not the best introduction, perhaps, but something, and long overdue, since he died in 1984, at 56.

Gary Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, 87 mins., debuted at SxSW and won the Jury Prize there. Included in the US public TV American Masters series, it was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

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AN ICONIC PHOTO BY GARY WINOGRAND

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. at SFMOMA
AT RUSH
Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. at BAMPFA
AT RUSH

BING LIU: MINDING THE GAP (2017)

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KIERE IN MINDING THE GAP

Filming best mates: skateboarding and open heart conversations

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Three guys growing up in the failing blue collar town of Rockford, Illinois are Bing Liu, Asian, who is the filmmaker, following for five years himself and his two best friends, fellow skateboarders Zack, who's white, and Kiere, who's black. All seem to have had abusive fathers, and find in each other and skateboarding family that was lacking. Sometimes, skillfully filmed, they skateboard away the pain. Bing must get his mother to talk on camera about how his stepdad beat both of them as he grew up. Zack marries Nina and has a kid called Eliot, is a roofer who drinks and parties too much, turning abusive. Kiere's father dies, which breaks him up, and he works as a dishwasher, wondering about having white friends and feeling trapped in this dead end town.

With this limited raw material Bing fashions something that is a portrait of skate passion, father-son issues, male irresponsibility, a disadvantaged community, and intimate film-making as therapy, among other things. The film is raw and scattered and yet somehow healing, touching, and brave.

Minding the Gap, 93 mins. Mentored by Steve James and distributed by Kartemquin Films, was created at Sundance for the PBS POV series. It debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018 and showed in six other festivals. It as screened for this capsule review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018. Longer revivews will be found in Roger Ebert.com, Indiewire, Hollywood Reporter, and Village Voice.

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 3:00 p.m. at BAMPFA
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 8:45 p.m. at Roxie Theater

MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS: GODARD MON AMOUR/LE REDOUTABLE (2017)

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LOUIS GARREL, STACY MARTIN IN GODARD MON AMOUR

A film not clever enough for its subject

Michel Hazanavicius is noted for his pastiches of films - the one made up of reimagined bits of old silents, The Artist, did very well - though his earlier pastiches of a French James Bond, "OSS 117" never made it to anglophone audiences and his stab at seriousness, a story about Chechnya, The Search, bombed.

This time he's back to the semi-serious mode with a film about Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky, the very young actress he was briefly married to in 1968, based on Wiazemsky's memoir about this experience. Godard, with Anne, participates in the May Paris student strikes and they go to the Cannes Festival, which is cancelled. The young demonstrators scoff at the director, and he eventually breaks up with Anne. Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin look great and are quite adequate as Godard and Anne.

What is Hazanavicius trying to do here? Well, pastiches again, this time of the stylistic devices of Godard's most brilliant early pictures, and of course of his mannerisms and looks. Garrel is a good sport, and gets a slight chance to show off his gift for comedy, being uglied-up to look like Godard, and imitating his odd way of speaking. A mildly amusing tone of passive-aggressive homage is maintained. But it is surprising how uninteresting a movie about such people and such a time could be. Hazanavicius is good at pastiches and there are plenty of those . But that's all there is. There was a great deal more to this man and this time than what gets into Hazanavicius' film. What's glaringly absent is the brilliance of his subjct and the importance of the times.

Godard is still alive, and when he said this film was "a stupid, stupid idea," he was not far wrong. Assuming (which is doubtful) this film needed making, Godard himself would have been the one to do it.

Godard Mon Amour/Le Redoutable, 107 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017; 19 other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. US theatrical release 20 Apr. Metascore 67%. Released in France Sept. 2017, AlloCiné press rating a fair 3.5,lacking favorable comments from any of the hip journals.

Maybe the always contrarian critic Armond White had a point in his review in saying that for younger people who don't know Godard, this, though a bad movie, will at least have the virtue of arousing their interest in his genius. That's exactly what he says in his <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/movie-review-godard-mon-amour-terrible-but-important/">National Review piece</a>. The film came to US theaters (Quad Cinema in NYC) 20 Apr. 2018 and will tour Landmark Cinemas. It comes to the UK 11 May.

Originally reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Quoted from A.O. Scott by Mike D'Angelo on Letterboxd: "Godard, for better and for worse, is a cinematic thinker, someone who has tried, over the course of a prolific and contentious career, to locate the philosophical potential and the intellectual essence of the medium, to make it a vessel for ideas and arguments as well as for stories, pictures and emotions. Mr. Hazanavicius is the opposite: an unmistakably skilled maker and manipulator of images and styles with nothing much to say and no conviction that anything needs to be said at all."


​SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. at Victoria Theatre
Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 8:15 p.m. at BAMPFA

JULIE COHEN, BETSY WEST: RBG (2018)

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RUTH BADER GINSBURG IN RBG

Dynamo

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

While you're waiting to see this film you can watch the hour-long interview with RBG by Nina Totenberg at Sundance in January: click.

An extraordinary woman, Brooklyn daughter of working class immigrants, for 25 years a Justice of the US Supreme Court, appointed by Bill Clinton. Her husband, Marty Ginsburg, met in law school at Cornell, was everything to her, and her greatest support and inspiration. In her early years as a lawyer, after law school with a small child, brilliant and ferociously hard working, she achieved milestone decisions before the Supreme Court, defining equal rights for the sexes. This is an admiring homage and review of her career. Notable: her warm friendship with the extreme right wing Justice Scalia, showing a capacity to ignore politics person to person and promote the collegiality of the Court. Now, at 84, criticized by some for not retiring during Obama's Presidency so a young liberalreplacement could be appointed, she affirms she will keep her pledge to work as long as she is able. AT the age of 84, Ginsburg has created a breathtaking legal legacy for feminism and equal rights.

RBG, 97 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018, nine other US film festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. In US theaters from May 4, 2018. Current Metacritic rating 81%.

SHOWTIME SFIFF:
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. at Castro Theatre
AT RUSH

AMY ADRION: HALF THE PICTURE (2018)

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AVA DUVERNAY IN HALF THE PICTURE

Report from a sexist, misogynistic industry - that governs the culture

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

A documentary that considers the question of why there are so few women movie directors working in Hollywood. It emerges that they they have taken their cas to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and that it has, after considering the matter, brought charges against all the major studios. This film is nothing but a string of talking heads - all women, or at least no men - and they tell many of their stories of internalized prejudice and external obstacles. Sexual harassment (rape, sexual coercion) is a relatively minor issue for them. These are directors. They have encountered such a level of prejudice that, though some of the best directors are clearly women, only a miniscule percentage of the skin in the game is from women.

Half the Picture, 95 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018, also at SxSW. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018

SOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 12:45 p.m. at SFMOMA
Monday, April 9, 2018 at 5:45 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

ULISES PORRA GUARDIOLA, SILVINA SCHNICER: TIGRE (2017)

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Tropical decadence

Compared, for good reason, to Lucrecia Martel - but the Latin Americans in general have a knack for decadent atmosphere - this debut film by the couple, Ulises Guardiola and Silvina Schnicer, delivers a heady, sensuous but surreal gabble of people and place. The scene is a boarded-up island family estate in the semi-tropical Argentinian Tigre Delta, a musty house revisited by three generations, there to decide whether or not to sell the property. Or, in the case of the young, to hang out, to flirt, and to play strange, menacing sexual-ish games. The roar and hum of developers, it it said, can be heard upriver. Unfortunately, as you can clearly tell in the first five minutes, there's going to be more mood than plot. This is a bit strange, because the issue of whether they must sell, and if they can do so advantageously, is such a clear-cut one. But the tropical heat makes people lazy, and obstreperous, and the wine flows, as well as the whisky.

As the family navigates their relationship to their home and local kids engage in forbidden games, various interpersonal conflicts that arise lead to a powerful crescendo that will make up for all the meandering: the filmmakers have admitted they have thrown together multiple stories, evidently with an aim to create a pleasing complexity, the mystery of the real, with resolution far from anybody's mind most of the way (which fits Martel's Zama rather well too).

I refer the reader to Jessica Kiang's Variety review from San Sebastián, an impressive effort in which she describes Tigre in lush and appreciative detail. The main thing is that the film sketches in the separate action of the matriarch and younger women, her quietly adversarial, covertly hostile son (he wants to sell the property, she insists it "non se vende," is not for sale), while the younger people meander around playing their jeux interdits. The frazzle-haired Rina (Marilú Marini) is sixtyish, but there's life in the dame yet. She tells her friend Elena (María Ucedo) about a recent mating she's staged in a motel, though it didn't go well, and she ditched the app, and lost or broke the phone, it's not clear which. The son is Facundo (Agustín Rittano), whom Kiang calls "middle-aged," though he doesn't look that old; no doubt he's still a player too. His and Rina's conversations are clear, but always at cross-purposes. Elena's daugher Sabrina (Magalí Fernández) is around, with best friend Meli (Ornella D’Elia) and the gawky but cute Estebán (Tomás Raimondi). As a contemporary note, some of the young people have tattoos and piercings. Here in the wilds, these play-tribal markings look more serious.

As Variety points out, a local boatman's preteen daughter is the center of attraction for a gaggle of smaller younger boys, whom she dominates "with primal 'Lord of the Flies'-style wildness." But of course Lord of the Flies is all boys, and this whole scene, old to young, has sex in the air. Also menace, as Estebán finds a cache of weapons that used to belong to Facundo, including a brace of hand-crafted spears and a big powerful sling that he hastens to use to down some poor bird. A feral-seeming boy from the village covets them. And one boy apparently is becoming paralyzed. The varied, meandering population wallows in sensuality, while some menacing practical boom waits to be lowered, a decisive step to be taken, as in a play by Tennessee Williams.

Some of this celebration of sensuality seems borderline implausible. If this house is so remote and boarded up, how did they got all this food and drink in, a whole goose, free-flowing wine, and how come everything, such as the fridge, works so well? But the filmmakers weave the increasingly menacing atmosphere so well, and the dp Ivan Gierasinchuk uses sweaty closeups with such vivid effectiveness, we rarely stop to question, merely holding our breath, as things get tenser and crazier, as the owls hoot and the crickets whir, for the inevitable violence, from whence it will come, we know not. (There is rarely music, mostly a satisfying wealth of ambient sound.) In the end, the mood and plot catch up with each other, and this accomplished first film justifies its meandering with its richness.

Tigre, 91 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2017, also San Sebastián, Atlanta, Fribourg, Miami, East End and others, and screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018.

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SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at BAMPFA
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

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JENNY SUEN, CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: THE WHITE GIRL (2017)

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ANNGELA YUEN IN THE WHITE GIRL

Al allergy to vigorous filmmaking?

A girl who has always been told she is allergic to the rays of the sun.

"White Girl is a more focused and conventional film than Doyle’s Hong Kong Trilogy, which Suen produced, but it is still much more concerned with mood and vibe than crass plot points. Without doubt, we can see its aesthetic kinship with some of the classic Wong Kar-wai films he shot. It is a quiet, lulling film. . ." -J.B. Spins (Joe Bendel).

Lulling is right, as in putting to sleep. This is a misfire attempting to bring together misfits and present somewhat obvious allegories about Hong Kong, once a crowd of fishing villages, with its focus on a fishing village and a young woman who lonogs for her mother (the old UK connection, get it?). A young woman whose supposed sensitivity to sunlight keeps her sheltered except at night. One night she goes out and encounters a young Japanese man, Sakamoto (pop star Joe Odagiri) who is living in an abandoned historic tower "which houses a camera obscura that captures village life and projects it onto a decaying wall" (Screen Daily).

Also wandering round is a street kid called Ho Zai (Jeff Yiu) who sells mosquito coils with a singsong chant. He lives with a mute Buddhist monk with the hobby of fashioning Rube Goldberg devices. It is all shot in pale foggy blue. Those who think the visuals at times evoke Doye's cinematography for Wong Kar-wai in the great days of their Nineties collaborations are imagining things, though of course, Doyle is incapable of making uninteresting images. It's just the nonexistent, meandering story and terminally low-keyed quirkiness that are a bore. It is strange that Suen and Doyle returned to Hong Kong after both being long away only to produce such an anemic effort

Conversation with Jenny and Chris: click.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 6:15 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

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JENNY SUEN AND CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

PATRICK IMBERT, BENJAMIN RENNER: THE BIG BAD FOX & OTHER TALES/LE GRAND RENARD MÉCHANT & AUTRES CONTES (2017)

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[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Whoever thinks that the countryside is calm and peaceful is mistaken. In it we find especially agitated animals, a Fox that thinks it's a chicken, a Rabbit that acts like a stork, and a Duck who wants to replace Father Christmas. If you want to take a vacation, keep driving past this place. French hand-drawn animated doesn't really bring anything too negative into the picture. It's notable for its lightheartedness and intentional simplicity.

The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales/Le grand renard méchant & autres contes, 83 mins., debuted as a work-in-progress at Annecy; about a dozen other international festivals, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was screened for this review.

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SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. at Castro Theatre

RATI ONELI: CITY OF THE SUN/ბერლინი) (2017) მზის ქალაქი

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A fading mining town in Georgia poetically examined

Oneli lived in New York for years, then came here to Georgia, made this cool, elegiac documentary, and has remained. The city of Chiatura once was a major supplier of the world's manganese; no more. It is a big empty shell. The film moves around with a cool eye following a few people. Much distinctive use is made by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan of middle-distance and long-distance shots, and editing where camera position changes but continuity of sound and dialogue is never lost. This craftsmanship belies an editing style that shifts subjects with ironic randomness.

Some What do they do in the mine? How many buildings are empty, abandoned? men are still working in the mine. From a toast declared, they are still dying there. One miner performs in a local amateur theater. A music teacher, frustrated with his ten or twelve year old boys, performs songs for adults, and the rest of his time tears up a building to get the metal wiring that he sells to support himself. A phone call shows it keeps getting stolen. Two girls train as distance runners for the Olympics. They are promising athletes, but money needs to be raised to feed them: they are getting only one meal a day.

The camera observes these things, and dreary celebrations in partly abandoned buildings, with a distant, patient eye.

In one particularly fine shot the camera is twenty or thirty feet away from a large square window. Inside we see young girls at a party, dancing back and forth, perfectly framed. Sometimes the camera, still, simply observes a landscape, an overgrown mine hillside, or a crossroads in a sudden heavy rain. Or people traveling on what seems rickety public transport. It follows the music teacher to a former "Ministry of Communications" that is now just a shabby hall, where men and women, dressed up a bit, or the women anyway, joke, eat, drink and dance and get drunk, while he sings for them a song of his own composition, which they ignore. They say loud goodnights outside, and inside, the musician sits at the big table and consumes their leftovers. You can't make things like this up, and normally, you can't capture them on film.

See the discussion in Cinevue, and a live interview with Oneli (not as revealing as it might have been) in Fred. This film may feel stingy or disjointed to the casual viewer, but it contains the fruits of extraordinary patience and a distinctive vision. A dreamlike adventure in a nowhere wonderland of bygone mysteries. Stay around for the men drinking in an abandoned mine place by the golden light of an open fire toward the end clinking glasses to a "Grey world, grey century, grey town. Amen."

The title comes from an early utopian work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, written in Italian in 1602, shortly after Campanella's imprisonment for heresy and sedition "A Poetical Dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese Sea-Captain, his guest." The closing end-quote it provides to the film is "They are rich because they want nothing, poor because they possess nothing, and consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them."

City of the Sun/მზის ქალაქი (Mzis kalaki), 104 mins., debuted at the Berlinale, and was shown in six other festivals, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. There, it received Special Jury Mention, McBaine Documentary Feature. The jury granted this mention to Oneli’s film 'for its stunning use of cinematography and sound design that immerses us in a place that is at once stark and stirring."

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ARUN BHATTARAI, DOROTTYA ZURBÓ: THE NEXT GUARDIAN (2017)

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GEMTO AND TASHI SHARE A LAUGH IN THE NEXT GUARDIAN

Family misfits at a Buddhist monastery in Bhutan

The filmmaker pair closely follow their subjects for a while, then leave them with all up in the air. We meet the goofy dad, blessing people for money with a giant phallus and dancing clumsily with a mask. He runs a family inherited Tibetan Buddhist temple-monastery in Bhutan and he and his wife have two grown kids. We see them, Gyemto, the son, and Tashi, the daughter, joyously playing and training in soccer ball-handling. They gossip together about girls, which both are interested in, and they are on Facebook.

Dad wants Gyemto to attend monk training and take over the temple with more religious education than he had time to get, but he must finish studying in English school too; his mother sagely advises that people need English now, and he would need it to take foreign visitors around. We follow Tashi, who, as dad says, has long had "the soul of a boy," to girls soccer camp where she expects to get chosen for the national team.

Tashi does not get chosen. Dad takes Gyemto to the monastery where he wants him to train. It sounds grim. At this point, Gyemto stops talking to his father. And the father rattles on in a sort of singsong voice, with many gestures. No pressure, but if you don't do this, our patrimony will be taken away from us by the Buddhists or the government. But do what you want. No wonder Gyemto doses off that evening, as the drone goes on. But while he shuts down, he does not actively rebel and has told Tashi that if told to go to the monastery, he will do so.

Gyemto and Tashi still are best mates, still look at girls together. She begs him not to go to the monastery because then she will be alone. But at film's end, it's all up in the air.

This is another example of a documentary where the filmmakers have done a skillful job, mostly, of completely concealing that they are there, or hidden from us how much they may have influenced events. Congrats to everybody for not looking into the camera. But one feels a little cheated in more ways than one, though the scenery and settings are colorful and beautiful and the siblings are cute. Often documentaries fall into more or different things happening than they bargained for. This time less seems to happen than might have been expected. In a way this is novel and it takes a certain courage for the filmmakers to sit with it. But maybe they should have sat longer.

The Next Guardian, 85 mins., debuted at IDFA, also playing at Five Flavours, Budapest International Documentary Festival, True/False and the SFIFF, as part of which it was screened for this review.

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GEYEMTO AND HIS FATHER IN THE NEXT GUARDIAN

ALYSSA FEDELE, ZACHARY FINK: THE RESCUE LIST (2017)

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Slavery still exists

Slavery is alive and well and practiced in various forms and venues. Studied here and vividly depicted by the recently formed San Francisco anthropologist-filmmaker team of Fedele and Fink is what happens on Lake Volta in Ghana, the largest man-made lake in the world. Boys are sold by poor families to work on fishing boats here, presumably short-term. But they often seem to disappear, and regularly remain slaves to their fisherman masters for years.

First we meet Kwame, a former slave himself, who goes around on the lake, by boat or to remote villages, demanding that boys be given up. Surprisingly, Villagers and fisherman
do listen to reason. Then Kwame takes the boy to a secret rehabilitation center called Challenging Heights were they live for a year with other boys and go to school, which whether they are 14 or 18, may be for the first time. The center searches for their families, who have to swear they will never let them go again, on pain of jail.

We meet several newly rescued boys. Edem longs for his friend Teye to be rescued too and it happens. Peter was sold at age three and not rescued till he was 18. Steven is sad and can't function. Kwame takes him to the water for a healing ritual. He seems to feel survivor guilt for another boy who died diving to untangle the fishing nets in the murky waters, a common occurrence. We can see the damage and hurt in these boys, their estrangement from normal life and from education.But we also see beautiful smiles, fresh faces, and health. The boys seem to thrive at Challenging Heights. It's like an orphanage whose members arrive with an unusually unified background experience. They eat plenty of food, play sports, watch TV, and, most of all, attend the center's school classes where they learn reading and writing and English.

After the time is up we see a boy reintegrated with his family or, in one case, taken in by the village chief, who offers him the choice of that or living with his mother. He chooses the chief over his mother.

Rarely has a film been so moving, simple, hopeful, and sad. Kwame and Challenging Heights are credited with rescuing 1,000 boys, but it's believed that 10,000 are currently slaves on the lake. It is a miserable life. They are beaten, worked and given no respite, and may drown.

The Rescue List 78 mins., debuted at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was screened online for this review. Also in the Full Frame, DocLands film festivals. See review by Dennis Harvey at San Francisco for Variety.

ELIZAVETA STISHOVA: SULEIMAN MOUNTAIN/SULEIMAN TOO (2017)

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PERIZAT ERMANBETOVA IN SULEIMAN MOUNTAIN

About a boy - or two

A rare film made by an outsider, Russian filmmaker Elizaveta Stishova, in Kyrgyzstan, about a boy and shifty parents who reclaim him from an orphanage, then go on a road trip enacting various con games. Uluk (Daniel Daiyrbekov), who has a dour, astonished face, is more circumspect than the gypsyish "family" he gets saddled with, but he knows he's fortunate too. He gets to travel, and they buy him a toy helicopter.

Uluk's father, Karabas (Asset Imangaliev), is a charmer in his floppy-haired way, tall, with mustachios, in need of a haircut when, after an exorcism, they're flush enough to buy him a nice suit (which he doesn't seem to pay for). He frightens and then awes Uluk, then smashes his helicopter, childishly playing with it by himself.

The boy also has to contend with two wives. His mother, Zhipara, is a middle-aged woman who looks plain but does flashy exorcisms and other rituals. The pretty young wife, Turganbyubyu (Turgunai Erkinbekova), is pregnant, and emotional. Zhipara is uneasy, and has to make sure Karabas stays hooked to her in more ways than one.

One incident or village scene follows another as they travel around in an ancient East German truck, scamming money that Karabas hastens to throw away. The incidents are full of authentic local color. But they don't have quite enough dramatic meat on them. Fellini or Emir Kusturica might have done more with this potentially rich material. Here, the characters don't matter enough, particularly not enough attention is given to the little boy. And Karabas isn't ever quite awful enough so that we can enjoy forgiving him. But the road trip flavor is captured.

Much of the action is shot on location in and around the mystic World Heritage Site of the Suleiman Mountain in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.

Suleiman Mountain, 101 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2017 in the Discovery section; also Palm Springs Jan. 2018; screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018. There was a meetup watch and hike for the Sat. date.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. at BAMPFA
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 2:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater

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DANIEL DAIYRBEKOV IN SULEIMAN MOUNTAIN

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ERIKA COHN: THE JUDGE (2017)

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KHOLOUD AL-FAKIH IN THE JUDGE

A female voice in female matters

This brief documentary tells the story of the first female judge of Palestine's sharia court, the first two, actually. Four have been appointed before the documentary ends in 2017, after a very different period of undermining, probably by corrupt methods, of their position. The Islamic sharia court: isn't that as conservative as you can get? Maybe not quite. At least this shows that in these times, a wedge has worked in to offset male domination. A man under this Islamic system can still have four wives. But he'll have a pretty hard time doing so if Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih is the authority consulted about it.

So what does this mean? And how did Al-Faqih and her fellow female sharia judge also appointed, Asmahan Al-Wahidi, get past conservative Islamic scholar Husam Al-Deen Afanah, who denounced the appointments, speaks disapprovingly to the camera of all this, and issued a fatwa when one woman was appointed? (A fatwa isn't normally a death threat, the Salman Rushdie case notwithstanding. It can merely just be a stern expression of disapproval by a religious authority.)

Well, we don't know all the details. We hear many on-the-street opinions, and there are a number that do favor women, perhaps more that are the reverse. (There is a dearth of sophisticated, educated opinions among those Cohn samples.) When we see and hear Kholoud, she is convincing. She is solidly authoritative, her comportment warm and pleasant, but firm and convincing. We don't hear anything from her colleague Asmahan Al-Wahidi. But we hear plenty from the Palestinian Chief Justice of the Sharia Court responsible for these first two female appointments, Sheikh Tayseer Al-Tamimi, whom Kholoud originally had petitioned to consider women sharia judges, arguing that the Hanafi school of Islam followed in Palestine does not forbid them, however revolutionary some authorities and members of the public considered it. Sheikh Al-Tamimi decided to let women compete for the post, via the necessary exams, which they passed, leading to their appointment in 2009.

We hear plenty from Kholoud, too, and see her young son and daughter when she is appointed, the son waving an iPad and declaring proudly (in Arabic: the only words in English in this film are the few spoken by Palestinian female diplomat Hanan Ashrawi), "Hey world! My mom's a judge! And my dad's a lawyer!" We also see her in action quickly deciding divorce and support and domestic violence cases - her purview - with good-natured firmness. We are surprised to learn that Chief Justice Al-Tamini has four wives and twelve children.

The trouble comes suddenly when, after several years of doing their jobs well, the two female sharia judges received a terrible blow. One year from his appointment o the two women, Chief Justice Al-Tamini was forced to resign in retaliation, and replaced by a Sheikh Yousef Al-Dais, an uninlightened figurehead of manipulators who immediately cancelled judicial qualifying exams for women, and transferred all small cases to the bigger sharia court in Rammallah, claiming that the female judges were in too much danger. The women were restricted to nothing bu administrative cases, rubber-stamping documents, not making judicial decisions. Kholoud says this was "hell."

She tried to get around the attempt to block a woman's divorce by ordering the husband to have a mental exam by public health authorities. They found him to be bipolar and dangerous. On that basis Kholoud could order him separated from his wife. Unfortuntely, this proved to be right, and when the higher Justice overruled it, and allowed the husband in a court together with his wife, he attacked and killed her - she died right in Kholoud's arms. Then in a TV court scene, Al-Tammam pledged to "punish" someone for this tragedy. Kholoud wrote to him that he was the one to blame.

It seems sharis chief justices in Palestine don't live forever like U.S. Supreme Court Justices, because in a few years Al-Youssef retired, and a new Chief Justice, Dr. Mahmoud Aa-Habbash was appointed. His first round of appointments were five men. But he allowed the smaller courts to carry out decisions again, and the two female judges were back in action. In 2015, Tahir Hammad was appointed first female In 2015 Tahir Hammad was appointed first Palestinian woman marriage officiant, a judicial rank. By 2017, the fourth Palestinian woman sharia judge was appointed, Sireen Anabousi.

So it's a slow back and forth process, but it's moving forward. And not really surprising. There have been Palestinian women judges for criminal cases since the Seventies, and Arab women lawyers. But the Islamic world is a place of machismo. And so these wedges, and the milestone represented by Kholoud Al-Fiqah as the pioneer woman sharia judge, are very important. It's a pity in Erika Cohn's effort to make Judge Al-Faqih into a kind of rock star of Islamic female authority figures, she blurs the details about the other women involved. This is a vivid film but not a subtle or thorough one.

The Judge, mins., 76 mins. (the Arabic title القاضية al-qādhiya is given), debuted Sept. 2017 at Toronto, also at DOC NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, CPX:DOX, several others, including San Francisco Apr. 2018. US theatrical release Apr. 13, 2018. Metascore 69%.
SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Friday, April 6, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Saturday, April 7, 2018 a 3:30 p.m. at BAMPFA
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 12:30 p.m. at YBCA Screening Room

GUSTAVO SALMERÓN: LOTS OF KIDS, A MONKEY AND A CASTLE/MUCHOS HIJOS, UN MONO Y
UN CASTILLO (2017)

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JULETA SALMERÓN IN LOTS OF KIDS, A MONKEY AND A CASTLE

She knew what would make her happy

The Spanish actor Gustavo Salmerón filmed his eccentric and buoyant mother, her husband, and her six children over 14 years on digital, super 8, and iPhone6 for this "home movie" whose extravagant eccentricity make it appealing to anyone and something essentially Spanish. The ability to survive, even enjoy, borderline crazy excess - notably an excess of possessions overflowing into a literal castle - somehow make one less afraid of ordinary problems. There is, also, plenty of action, despite the subject, Juleta Saleerón, rarely leaving the house, and sometimes holding forth from bed, a position in which she sometimes likes to give instructions as to what to do when she dies. (At the end, she is eighty.)

The title is no joke. These were the things Juleta from childhood dreamed of - and achieved. Six (living) children; for a while, a pet monkey (till it became too aggressive and had to be "given away." And, after a large inheritance fell her way, a real, huge castle, with grassy grounds, turrets, crenulated edges, and a suit of armor, along with beautiful objects, statues, paintings, and an excess of stored stuff, often in neatly labeled boxes.

This stuff, youngest son and filmmaker Gustavo and his other siblings (who all seem to be around - "that is the nice thing," Juleta says at one point. "They went away, and they came back") spend time sorting through. First just to point out the excess of it - which indeed is almost endlessly amusing, then in search of the vertebrae of her grandfather, executed by the communists in the civil war; then to move it all out, when, after the great financial crash of 2008, they are forced to give up the castle and move to their place in Madrid. Details of the rise and fall are not given, and don't matter. It is evident that Juleta's buoyancy isn't seriously dented by changes in circumstance, that her lively monogogues thrive on the prospects of adversity, that, anyway, she manages to have it pretty good much of her life.

"This is the best time of the day," she says, when she's biting into a crunchy piece of toast and sipping her milky mocha coffee. Her husband chides her for being increasingly "gorda" (fat), but she is not about to abandon any of her remaining creature comforts. And we enjoy her enjoyment.

She describes her husband, a quiet, elegant man who is deaf, and might be styled as "long-suffering," as having been a very spoiled rich boy. Bohh are conservatives. They are right wing, they are monarchists, and, in her case, they are obsessed with death. This sounds like Salvador Dalì, and it's all so Spanish it's not surprising that in the move-out from the castle, splendid pink bullfighting capes appear.

There is a literal skeleton that is rescued from the castle in the moving out. There is, by the way, her husband's (former) factory, a huge space that the family now uses as a warehouse for its endless accumulation of junk. This is where everything goes when the castle is emptied, which the family, in an economy move, seems to do most of the moving for themselves. Then later, the factory is robbed, and all the best stuff is stolen.

None of this somehow matters. Juleta remains eccentric, bubbly, glittering and glamorous. And planning her own death - but not just yet. I laughed a lot, and sat close to the screen, eager to see what would come next. The film ends with a review of early footage of the six children. They are very handsome.

Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle/Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo, 91 mins., debuted at Karlovy Vary Film documentary competition, July 2017, winning the top prize about two dozen fests including Toronto, London, DOC NYC, and (Apr. 2018) the San Francisco International Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review.