San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

[Chris Knipp]

GARY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE (Sasha Waters Freyer 2018)

Not the ultimate word on this premier American street photographer of the Sixties and Seventies, but a word long overdue. Part of the PBS American Masters series

MINDING THE GAP (Bing Liu 2018)

Bing Liu's participatory five-year film project becomes a triple coming-of-age story about three guys with parental abuse in their pasts who skateboarded away the pain. Filmed in failing blue collar town Rockford, IL. Well received at Sunance and SXSW, sponsored by Steve James and Kartemquin Films, this seems scattered at times but winds up feeling healing and true. Part of the PBS POV series.

[Chris Knipp]

GODARD MON AMOUR/LE REDOUTABLE (Michel Hazanavicius 2017)

Hazanavicius is good at pastiches and this is a series of them with Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin as Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky in May 1968. A mildly amusing passive-aggressive homage that's surprisingly bland and uninteresting for such a topic. Godard is still alive and making radical films. If anybody needed to make this - which is, however, doubtful - it would have been him.

See Armond White's comment on this film which he calls "appalling and entertaining." He says: "Even a bad film about Godard, as this one is, introduces people to his genius."

[Chris Knipp]

Ones that got away.

San Francisco 2018 film festival films that might have been cool to see but I missed.



Boom for Real
It's no secret that I am a huge fan of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88). In fact I did see the show at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (21 Sept. '17-28 Jan. '18) which presumably this doc was made to go with, and watched some of it there. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sara Driver, USA


Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982). Photograph: Jean-Michel Basquiat/Barbican



A Kid Named Jake

The Opening Night Film of the festival, and I got invited to it, but I didn't go. Don't know that I'll like it, but its transgender and class themes make it relevant to today. Coming June 1. A Kid Like Jake, Silas Howard, USA



Makala, Emmanuel Gras, France A documentary about an African guy who struggles to make charcoal to sell. I've now missed it twice; it was included in a day of ND/NF last month that I missed, and was in the SFIFF too.



Tully, Jason Reitman, USA

A new movie starring Charlize Theron. She was the honored actor at this year's festival and the premiere of this new movie starring Charlize crowned the celebration of her career. Which ain't over yet, for sure!

القاضية

The Judge, Erika Cohn, USA / Palestine

Doc about Kholoud Al-Faqih, a Palestinian trailblazer as the first woman judge on the Shari’a (Islamic law) court in the Middle East.

More to come....

[Chris Knipp]

RBG (Julie Cohen, Betsy West 2018)

An admiring documentary portrait of the life and achievement (not over) of Supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, now 84 but still not retired. With the heavily conservative court since Bush's two appointments, she represents a further to the left element and must write many dissenting decisions. She has become a liberal pop icon, known as "The Notorious RBG."

[Chris Knipp]

HALF THE PICTURE (Amy Adrion 2018)

Half the picture, women think, should be women. Hollywood is a very sexist community, more than most. The percentage of women actually directing films in Hollywood is minuscule, and it starts with a lot of women in film school studying to be directors. They get filtered out, and by the time you get to the top there are virtually none. Ava DuVernay was the first woman to get to make a $100 million movie. It didn't turn out to be very good,, but how many men have gotten to make lousy $100 million movies? Hundreds? Thousands? A talking heads picture. The EEOC has looked into this lately. They have brought charges against all the major studios for discrimination against women.

[Chris Knipp]

TIGRE (Ulises Guardiola, Silvina Schnicer 2017)

A heady tropical debut from Argentina. As island estate, family squabbles, burgeoning sexuality. Boom!

[Chris Knipp]

THE WHITE GIRL (Jenny Suen, Christopher Doyle 2017)

Famous Wong Kar-wai cinematographer Doyle may draw festival attention to this return-to-Hong Kong film, but frankly it's a non-starter. A wan mood piece about a girl who must hide from the sun, a street boy who sells mosquito coils and lives with a mute Buddhist priest who makes Rube Goldberg machines, and a Japanese pop Star who lives in an empty tower.