San Francisco International Film Festival 2017

[Chris Knipp]

Comments on SFIFF venues and first looks at some films.


Interior Dolby theater 1275 Market St., San Francisco

About the new Dolby theater on Market Street. The whole venue is suave, spacious, and quietly posh. It has big solid light grey leather seats. They look expensive and seem unusually comfortable. The banked theater is curved and the screen is curved (why do they do that? Don't they know it makes the images look wobbly?). You are not allowed to bring in food or drinks and the seats of course have no hooks for them. This is nice I guess; I like that in Paris people don't take food into cinemas much. They have class, the Parisian cinema goers, and it's nice to focus on the film and not the sound of crunching popcorn. But for film festival-goers, it's not comfortable to be unable to have food. You've got to eat. This is a nice thing about the Walter Reade at Lincoln Center: you can bring food and drink in. In the Dolby Theater, there here are 230 seats. The men's room has one toilet and one urinal. That's it, for 230 seats. There will be a few of the festival films at this theater the first week. Only a few. A rep of the festival told me we were lucky to come to this venue. No doubt. But the men's, however posh, is too small.

For many years most SFIFF films were shown at Sundance Kabuki Cinema (and were before it was part of the Sundance chain), a large, comfortable cineplex in San Francisco's Japantown. Now, alas, that is no longer the case and the festival screenings are dispersed over many smaller venues. Perhaps this has happened because the Sundance chain was bought by the Carmike chain which has been bought by the AMC chain. The Kabuki is not what it was. It's been a while since the Sundance makeover and it's beginning to go to seed (and has no more drinks in theaters or validated parking). Or is it actually getting better? The site is up in the air right now. That area was, for drivers, a good location; the new focus on South of Market may be better for users of public transportation. The large historic Castro Theater (1,400 seats) is still a SFIFF venue, as before, and more so.

First looks.


Maliglutit (Searchers), Zacharias Kunuk

I will be requesting some screeners, and here are my first five choices and some comments:

Family Life, Alicia Scherson, Cristián Jiménez, Chile, 81 min.
Maliglutit ( Searchers ), Zacharias Kunuk, Canada, 94 min.
The Ornithologist, João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal/France/Brazil, 118 min.
Sieranevada, Cristi Puiu, Romania, 173 min.
The Student, Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia, 118 min

Scherson's 2005 Play was one of my favorite films of the 2006 SFIFF, the first one I covered for Filmleaf. Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjurat was a fascinatingly intense ethnic exploration about Inuit people. This new one, inspired by John Ford's classic Western The Searchers, promises to be good too. There has been buzz about The Ornithologist, which debuted at Locarno. Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the first film shown to press at my first NYFF, in 2005, so it has a special place in my memory. The Student sounds like a film of both intellectual and emotional power. Variety calls it "A stormy, swoon-inducingly shot bout of Russian moral wrestling that hits as hard and heavily as a nastoyka hangover." The Guardian calls it "elegantly choreographed" and "forceful and provocative." Okay?

I've gone over all the films listed in the stapled provisional program and I've seen about 15 of the films at other places - in Paris cinemas, at the Rendez-Vous and New Directors/New Films press screenings and at NYC commercial press screenings. That still leaves a lot I haven't seen.