San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

[Chris Knipp]

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


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


LOOKING AT "THE OTHER SIDE"

[Chris Knipp]

ANNEMARIE JACIR: WAJIB (2017)


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.

[Chris Knipp]

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


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.


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

[Chris Knipp]

BING LIU: MINDING THE GAP (2017)


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

[Chris Knipp]

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


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

[Chris Knipp]

JULIE COHEN, BETSY WEST: RBG (2018)


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

[Chris Knipp]

AMY ADRION: HALF THE PICTURE (2018)


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