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    San Francisco International Film Festival 2015

    San Francisco International Film Festival 2015



    - SFIFF 2015 FULL PROGRAM (PDF file)
    - FILM FINDER
    - SFIFF 58 WEBSITE
    - Filmleaf's General Forum SFIFF 2015 links and comments thread


    Links to reviews:

    Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火/Bai ri yan huo (Diao Yinan 2014)
    A Borrowed Identity/Dancing Arabs (Eran Kiiplis 2014)
    Court (Chaitanya Tamhane 2014)
    El Cordero (Juan Francisco Olea 2014)
    Dearest (Peter Ho-sun Chan 2014)
    Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve 2014)
    Entertainment (Rick Alverson 2015)
    Fidelio, Alice's Odyssey/Fidelio, l'odysée d'Alice (Lucie Borleteau 2014)
    German Youth, A (Jean-Gabriel Périot 2015)
    Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz 2014)
    Hill of Freedom 자유의 언덕/Jayuui Eondeok (Hong Sang-soo 2014)
    Iris (Albert Maysles 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary
    Jauja (Lisandro Alonso 2014)
    The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid 2014)
    Screening with: Why? (Nadav Lapid 2015, 5 mins.)

    Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley 214)
    Murder in Pacot/Meurtre à Pacot (Raoul Peck 2014)
    Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello 2014)
    Sand Dollars/Dólares de arena (Ísrael Cárdenas, Laura Amelia Guzmán 2014)
    Sunday Ball/Campo de jogo (Eryk Rocha 2014)
    Sworn Virgin (Laura Bispuri 2015)
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Tsui Hark 2014)
    Time Out of Mind (Owen Moverman 2014)
    The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (2014)
    Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos (Martin Rejtman 2014)
    Very Semi-Serious (Leah Wolchok 2015)
    Vincent (Thomas Salvador 2014)
    Wonders, The/Le meraviglie (Alice Rohrwacher 2014)



    GASPARD ULLIEL IN BERTRAND BONELLO'S SAINT LAURENT
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-07-2015 at 10:06 AM.

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    SFIFF 2015 Opening, Centerpiece, and Closing films

    ...................1.....................------------------------------------------.2............--------------------------------.........3.

    The opening, closing, and centerpiece films for the fall festival:

    OPENING NIGHT: Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (Alex Gibney) (1)
    CENTERPIECE: The End of the Tour (James Ponsoldt) (2)
    CLOSING NIGHT: Experimenter (Michael Almereyda) (3)


    (See a discussion of these three highlighted films of the festival by Michael Hawley on The Evening Class.)

    The San Francisco International Film Festival 2015 full program was announced March 31, 2015 at the opening press conference at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Members only tickets on sale from noon 31 March; on sale to the public starting noon 3 April. There will be tributes during the festival to Guillermo del Toro and Richard Gere, and events by Miranda July and the Kronos Quartet.

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    THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN (Tsui Hark 2014)

    TSUI HARK: THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN (2014)


    Zhang Hanyu in The Taking of Tiger Mountain

    Civil war and wild CGI in the frozen Chinese north

    The Hong Kong master of the Chinese blockbuster presents a middling example of his art in this remake of a Cultural Revolution patriotic tale starring Tony Leung Ka Fai. It's not his best but it has some new wrinkles, particularly in the period and the locations. Conspicuously designed with in-your-face effects for its big set pieces in 3D for the Chinese market, it has been released in 2D in the US. The gritty post-WWII Chinese civil war action adventure extravaganza is framed by the brief bookend of a young Chinese student in New York -- he's at a Chinatown karaoke club with pals as the movie opens -- who goes home for Christmas vacation inspired by a '70's movie adaptation he's glimpsed on TV of the Cultural revolution patriotic opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The bulk of the film, with its period military costumes and shivering renegades, is this young man's flashback imaginings based on the film he's seen. Its basic premise of fighters helping villagers could be seen as a nod to the plot of Seven Samurai.

    So the main action starts out like this, as summarized by Derek Elley, the Asian film reviewer who knows the history inside and out: "Northeast China, Heilongjiang province, Jan 1946. Following the resumption of the Chinese civil war after the surrender of the Japanese, bandit groups have been rampaging throughout the area, partly in collusion with KMT forces who use them to halt the PLA. In snow-covered forests near the Mudan (Peony) River, a starving PLA troop commanded by Captain Shao Jianbo, codename '203' (Lin Gengxin), is battling to wipe out the bandits. It takes on a group of renegades, loyal to local warlord Lord Hawk (Tony Leung Ka-fai), from which two manage to escape alive." See the rest of Elley's detailed summary on Film Business Asia. Besides retailing the plot meticulously, Elley understands the context of renewed civil war in China after the defeat of Japan better than I do.

    There are a lot of plot elements, but what we need to grasp is that bandits are rampaging in the post-war situation here in the frozen north, and the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese nationalist party troops, are using these scruffy micreants to block the PLA, the communist People's Liberation Army. We begin with scenes in the bosom of a starving unit of the PLA commanded by (handsome) Captain Shao Jianbo, secret code name "203." These PLA troops will take on bandits headed by local warlord Lord Hawk. Early on, at a desolate train station, the PLA group is joined by Yang Zirong (Zhang Hanyu), an experienced (and handsome and bearded) scout from the PLA's political division, and a (sweet and pretty) field nurse, Bai Ru (Tong Liya). Loudly in evidence also is Jiang Shuanzi (Su Yiming), a wild (later cute and adorable) boy with unruly, Struwwelpeter hair, a survivor of recent bandit attacks on his village. There is much ado about a certain Advance Map giving locations of thousands of fighters stationed all around in the north, which the KMT want to use to get Lord Hawk's cooperation.

    Lord Hawk is an extravagant character with a beaky prosthetic nose who first prances onto the scene bearing aloft his live emblematic bird of prey. Leung Ka Fai, who plays this dramatic villain, also played Detective Dee in Tsui's more elaborate and energetic [URLf="http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1787"]Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame[/URL], which I saw in Paris in 2011. That one refers to remote Chinese history, its unique female ruler. Perhaps it can better get away with its utterly fantastic action because it all takes place so very long ago. The action in Tiger Mountain seems more preposterous because Hark's wild imagination is applied to the relatively contemporary 1940's. In his AV Club review Ignatiy Vishnevetsky points out how cartoonish the baddies are in this movie, how far-out its 3D-emphatic set pieces are. He calls Tiger's CGI "gelatinous" and notes the special effects are "compellingly imaginative without being remotely convincing." Interestingly. Elley thinks the opposite: that the modern setting gives this movie a "more grounded feel" than other Tsui costume dramas, and authentic local flavor. In fact the wintry, mountainous locations are striking, and local cast members are employed (plus a couple of South Koreans doing key production work). Even Elley admits some things are far-fetched, such as an over-the-top battle between Yang and a supersized animatronic Siberian tiger (way less good than Ang Lee's Life of Pi), a spectacular and gravity-defying 3D-designed covert raid on skis on Lord Hawk's mountain lair, and a no-holds-barred finale, not to mention an "alternative finale" (Tsui's original version rejected by the Chinese censors) slipped in halfway through the lengthy end titles. Anyway, whereas with Phantom Flame the look was fiery and sparkling, here winter dominates, troops starve and shiver, bullets fly and blood spurts, darkness hovers, and men seem garbed in heavy burlap.

    Tsui is reworking corny twentieth-century political pseudo-folklore just for the fun of the extravagant set pieces, and the emotion and sentimentality are pasted on. Most of the cast are mainland except the grotesuely made up Tony Leong Ka Fai. Yang is the hero, going under cover to gain access to the Tiger Mountain lair where he outwits enemy Lord Hawk. Sometimes a mini-narrative element is suddenly dropped; it's hard to tell how we get from one scene to the next. The fun isn't in the plot but in the little details like picking up scraps of food off the ground, the Mad Max-ish wigs, shaved heads, fur eye patches, etc., the clouds of steam from mouths and other signs of extreme cold, the amusingly obvious humanizing efforts like the nurse and little boy. Unfortunately plot is important, and we can't survive on mise-en-scène and colorful characters alone, no matter how good. Or can one? Here, from minute to minute, one almost can. Tsui Hark puts on quite a show. But the whole is less than the parts.

    The Taking of Tiger Mountain, 141 mins., debuted in China 23 Dec. 2014, opened in NYC 2 Jan. 2015; it has been in the Hong Kong film festival and was screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival, where it plays 26 and 30 April. See SFIFF 2015 schedule.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 04-11-2015 at 11:35 PM.

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    VINCENT (Thomas Salvador 2014)

    THOMAS SALVADOR: VINCENT/VINCENT N'AS PAS D'ÉCAILLES (2014)



    Quiet superhero

    Vincent is the kind of original little film they can make in France because there is funding. Thomas Salvador, who was well established with the French audience for his shorts, goes entirely his own way in this low-keyed super-powers tale; in fact in this first feature he both directs and plays the eponymous main character. Vincent is in most ways an ordinary man , almost below ordinary, slightly inept and virtually non-verbal. He's no more adept at ping pong than he is speedy at his little construction site jobs. But when he enters the water, or is doused with it, he has ten times the strength of an ordinary man. In the water he can swim as fast as a speedboat, leap up into the air like a dolphin, or shoot straight up out of a pool onto the land. These are the few moments when special effects are used, and there is no music save for a lighthearted song at the end that suggests that while there is real magic here, we need not take it too seriously.

    Magic is most magical when it comes swathed in ordinariness. I've always said that the supernatural seems potentially more real in low budget films. That fancy CGI just reminds us we're at the cineplex. When, on the other hand, the impossible is faked in a quiet, low keyed and low budget and crabwise manner, that's when it grabs you and makes you think: what would it be like if this really happened?

    If this is a superhero in the making, he's in the earliest stages. He doesn't really know what to do with his powers, other than enjoy the special feeling it gives him to be wet and magically powerful. He longs for it so much on one memorable occasion he rushes to the water on a bike and plunges into it, bike and all, without removing his shoes.

    Thomas Salvador has a slightly seedy look; not that of a conventional movie star. But he's also lean and lithe and young looking. He's hard to categorize. He speaks so little, Buster Keaton has been mentioned. This wordlessness also points to the strange power he has. What's the use of talking? He can't explain himself, and he dare not try. He seems to have become aware of it only recently himself.

    It's summertime in the south of France, Vincent's current job is near a lake, and swimming is something everybody's doing. But he goes for his swims privately; among other bathers he seems afraid of slipping into behavior that will seem freakish or scary. His reserve is a little strange. He doesn't exactly lack confidence, but he's very shy, and the social skills aren't there. His whole manner is that of a mime.

    Vincent's new girlfriend finds him, rather than he her. As Lucie, the up-and-comer Vimala Pons has a wildness and vivacity that's a good match for Vincent's superpowers. Watch her long naked caress in bed, when she slides the length of Vincent's body and slips toward the floor. After a bit he reveals his talents to her; it's a measure both of her spirit and her caring for him that she takes it quietly in stride. Driss (Youssef Haji), Vincent's pal and coworker, doesn't know about his aquatic transformations. Not, that is, till mistreatment of Driss by a coworker leads Vincent to come to his defense in a way involving a cement mixer. (He douses himself with a big bucket of water to get the strength for this.)

    What follows is an precipitous chase where, in Keystone Cops style, Vincent stays just a hundred meters ahead of men of the Gendarmes in frantic pursuit in boats and on foot. Where is he going? far across the water? Wherever it is, Alexis Kavyrchine's nice photography makes the forest scenery sing. But just as Salvador has begun his film with no origin story, he lets his exciting finale fizzle away. Luckily, the action in the middle is fresh and oddly real.

    Vincent/Vincent n'a pas d'écailles ("Vincent doesn't have scales"), 78 mins., debuted at San Sebastian September 2014 and has played at nine other mostly European festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, May 2015, May 1, 4, and 7; see schedule. It opened theatrically in France 18 February 2015 and fared extremely will with the critics: AlloCiné press rating 3.9, with top marks from the hippest (and often non-unanimous) Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrockuptibles, a good sign that this is original stuff. The French like a director who flies by the seat of his pants, as here. They call it pure cinema.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 04-11-2015 at 11:34 PM.

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    A BORROWED IDENTITY (Eran Kiplis 2014)

    ERAN KIPLIS: A BORROWED IDENTITY (2014)


    TAWFEEK BARHOM, DANIEL KITSIS IN A BORROWED IDENTITY

    PREVIEW. Full review will come with US release.

    Growing up on both sides of the fence in Israel

    Conventional in style, obvious in its contrasts, overly-fanciful in its latter part, Erin Riklis' recent film Dancing Arabs, aka A Borrowed Identity, nonetheless (as Jay Weissberg says in Variety) is one of his more complex efforts, dealing as it does with the tricky identity problems involved in the coming of age of a bright Israeli Palestinian Arab who winds up leaving his little Israeli Arab village to attend an elite Hebrew boarding school in Jerusalem with an attractive Jewish girlfriend and a world of confusion. Things are helped considerably by the lead performance of Tewfeek Barhom, with a sensitive face and a personal background that, in his words, was "tailor-made" for this role, which replays conflicts he himself has experienced as a linguistically assimilated Israeli Arab. He even has the same last name as the protagonist he plays, Eyad Barhom. Tawfeek is both charismatic and subtle in the role, despite a script that, while interesting (and dealing with incredibly fraught subject matter) relies a little too much on stereotypes and wish-fulfillment.

    A Borrowed Identity, original title Dancing Arabs, 104 mins., in Arabic and Hebrew,debuted at Jerusalem (though fears of rockets caused a opening night cancellation); and at, Locarno internationally, Telluride in the US in July and August 2014. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, May 26 z(Kabuki), 28 (Kabuki) and 30 (PFA), 2015. See schedule. It opened in France with the title Mon fils ("My Son"), with good reviews (AlloCiné press rating of 3.5). A NYC theatrical release 26 June 2015.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-04-2015 at 10:48 PM.

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    BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (Diao Yinan 2014)

    DIAO YINAN: BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (2014)



    LIAO FAN, GWEI LUN MEI IN BLACK COAL, THIN ICE

    Dodgy, dingily gorgeous Chinese neo-noir delights the eye and numbs the mind

    If you love the genre and appreciate original filmmaking it'll be hard not to be seduced by Diao's stylish, moody neo-noir -- Black Coal, Thin Ice in the English title; the equivalent of Daylight Fireworks in the Chinese one. It's nice that the Berlinale rewarded it with the Golden Bear: noir doesn't always get a seat in first class. But this isn't going to mean the film will have an audience beyond festivals and genre fans, at least outside China. Bear in mind that it's a Chinese neo-noir, which specifically means the set designer and cinematographer have collaborated using locations evoking China circa 1999 and 2004, hence at earlier stages of the country's production explosion, to provide a series of deliciously shabby-chic, about-to-be-remodeled-or-demolished locations, so gorgeous one Letterbox reviewer had to keep rewinding to admire them. There are also references to rampant Chinese government corruption and indifference to the value of human life. But while there is interesting complexity in the main characters as well as subtle beauty in the visuals, the action is somewhat stagnant and muddled.

    With a sense of tactile sensuality, Diao delivers a hot and sweaty summertime green-and-black opening section to make us more keenly aware, as if plunged into an ice-water bath, of the much longer, snowy, wintry, blue-gray last part, which makes great use of ice and snow and chilly winds that almost sweep people away. Locations and visuals set throughout in Manchuria (Northeastern China) indeed are a triumph of atmosphere and aesthetic gratification in Diao's movie.

    Note that the Letterbox online reviewer wasn't going back over scenes to try to figure out the plot, because one never really can. Yet at the same time one kind of knows what's going on. The reject police detective, Zhang (Liao Fan), fired or resigned after a terribly botched arrest five years earlier, is half in love with what you don't have to be a genius to know is the chief suspect in this ongoing serial killer case, laundry employee Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun Mei). A familiar trope: see Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love (1989), or a couple of years ago Gabriel Byrne and Charlotte Rampling in I, Anna, to name only two. Noir detectives just tend to fall for suspicious people (ladies), much as friend Joseph Cotton didn't want to suspect his old pal Orson Welles of unspeakable wartime evil in The Third Man. A tense late scene in Black Coal set high up in on a ferris wheel seems to allude to the Carol Reed Classic, and Diao refers to Jules et Jim too. He's a little drunk on his forebears.

    The action plunges quickly into contemporary gruesomeness when odd, long packages start to appear in shipments of coal all over the country. They turn out to contain body parts -- there's a severed hand and wrist showing atop one freight load -- evidently dropped onto open train cars that were sent from a central location. Zhang is involved in an arrest of two armed punks in a seedy hair salon reminiscent of early Wong Kar Wai. Incredibly, in a flash two cops are killed, and one punk gets away. Next thing you know it's five years later and Zhang is slumped over, very drunk, by his motorcycle in an underpass. He wakes up just enough to see his motorcycle swapped for a cheap Chinese Mobylette. He's a security guard lately, and so often drunk his boss is ready to fire him. Somehow he's around when another serial killing with the same elongated body part packages turns up. Zhang starts following Wu, widow of the 1999 coal plant victim. He's so clumsy she spots him and tells him to stop, and they become a sort of couple.

    As Zhang, Lio Fan is a mixture of loser and hero like many noir protagonists. He gets dumped by his wife at the beginning after an oddball, sexy, upside down lovemaking scene, in those hot and steamy 1999 days when he was leaner and cleaner and younger-looking. In his 2004 state of decline, he sports a droopy, semi-comical, semi-handsome Fu Manchu mustache. Older looking, perhaps chubbier, he is perpetually wearing a heavy leather jacket and a big scarf. He has them on even in a late scene when he does a wild interpretive dance, a vague allusion to Denis' Beau Travail, in one of the best of many pleasingly trashy locations, a big, splendidly decayed dance hall.

    As Wu Zhizhen, the object of Zhang's attractions-suspicions, Gwei Lun Mei is similarly ambiguous, more drab and dull-eyed than a femme fatale ought to be at first, but more handsome-looking and seductively mysterious as time goes on. She definitely qualifies as a vagina dentata type, a la Linda Fiorentino in John Dahl's Last Seduction, and one feels Zhang's borderline self-defeating fascination.

    Noir plots can be pretty simple, like those of Dahl's debut trifecta of rigorously genre zingers Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, and The Last Seduction. Or they can be famously incomprehensible, like The Big Sleep's, which the filmmakers themselves said they were baffled by. In very rare and wonderful cases, as in perhaps the greatest neo-noir of all, Roman Polanski's Chinatown, they can have plots that are both complex and layered, and yet ultimately make perfect sense. That took a lot of thought and revision and a brilliant screenwriter like Robert Towne to carry off. Some French noirs also are puzzlers, like Melville's Le Doulos. Which brings us to the point that in noir, mood and style and atmosphere are so important they can make up for a plot's inadequacies, almost. Diao does some wonderful things with transitions and surprises. The flashy, yet realistic, finale to which the Chinese title refers comes out of left field, but it's a surprise that's drenched in possible irony rich in political and social implications, which may help explain how this is compared with the abrupt shifts of Jia's A Touch of Sin.

    The trouble with Diao's movie is that it goes by fits and starts, and gets pretty sluggish at times, Zhang's ambivalence coming across just as inertia. The ending of the film is a dazzler, but can't hide the fact that Diao has just dropped and moved on from the plot rather than resolved it. But that is not to say this is a slog like something by Béla Tarr or Nuri Bilge Ceylon. It just doesn't zip along, or deliver a fully satisfying narrative.

    Black Coal, Thin Ice/白日焰火 ("Daylight Fireworks"), Diao Yinan's third feature, 106 mins., in Mandarin, debuted 17 Feb. 2014 at Berlin, winning the top prize. Several dozen other international festivals and several dozen country theatrical releases, including France 11 Jun. 2014. French reviews were excellent: AlloCiné press rating 4.0 ("Ça, c'est du cinéma" - Le Nouvel Observateur). Screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival, 23 Apr.-7 May, showing in Berkeley 25 April (Pacific Film Archive), and twice in San Francisco, 27 April (Landmark Clay), and 29 April (Sundance Kabuki). See SFIFF schedule.


    POSTER FOR BLACK COAL THIN ICE:
    LOVE, AESTHETICS, NOIR - AND ICE
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 04-11-2015 at 11:37 PM.

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