San Francisco International Film Festival Week 2 Roundup

Wooooooooo-WEE. Wow. Holy frijoles. Hahahaha, what have I done to myself? I’m losing my mind. It’s Week 2 of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and in order to try and fit in as many movies as possible, it turns out I seriously backloaded my schedule. Not only did the second half of the fest see me biking all over creation to make ever tighter start times, but the films I saw in the past week by and large demand a good deal of mental energy. I’ve been thinking A LOT about these films, but with so many to consider I wonder how effectively I’m able to parse them. What I do know is after feeling a little listless during Week 1, Week 2 has given me four of my top five movies so far this year.

In an effort to conserve what I could of my brain functioning, I did away with the tiresome chore of instagram story-ing and stopped taking notes during or after films, so this is all off the dome. Or just extended versions of tweets. Either way. It all has to take energy right? Look, I’m no big city brain scientist, I’m just a simple film critic. Clearly it had no effect, as evidenced by everything I’ve written here so far.

Before I continue, I do have to share something I forgot to mention from my screening of City of the Sun, which took home the festival’s Special Jury Prize for documentaries. Before the film started the man sitting next to me busted out a bag of kettle chips, and the woman sitting next to him immediately asked that he not eat chips during the movie, to which he begrudgingly acquiesced. The no-chipper left halfway into the movie, at which point the guy IMMEDIATELY took out the bag of chips that had been denied him the whole time. He then slowly but determinedly raise a single chip to his mouth and took the loudest bite ever recorded, which for this quiet work of slow-core nonfiction was distracting to everyone around. No sooner than he took the bag out had he resigned himself to putting the chips back from whence they came. The whole thing was very stressful for me, but I’m a better person for having lived through it.

The first screening of my second week was late and in Berkeley, which afforded me the opportunity to go home after work and cook myself dinner for the first time since the festival started. Refueled and refreshed, I hopped onto my bike only to be immediately inundated by some very cold and unpleasant rain, which followed me all the way up Adeline and onto Shattuck.

The Other Side of Everything (Mila Turajilić)

Mila Turajilić‘s new documentary takes for its subject the director’s mother, Srbijanka Turajilić, a major figure in Serbia’s opposition movements. The film mostly stays confined to the Turajilić‘s apartment, which includes a door that hasn’t been opened in decades, and in doing so provides an engrossing micro/macro account of Serbia’s tumultuous political history, as well as that of the family. There are plenty of parallels to be drawn between the cultish rise of Slobodan Milošević and the populist movements rising up in Western democracies, but the film is strongest in its many quiet moments looking out the window, the vantage point from which Turajilić has reflected on her country for years.

If you think it’s annoying when someone starts looking at their phone during a screening, try someone busting out a FOLDABLE FAN and vigorously whipping it back and forth in front of their face, catching the reflection of the screen each time. It wasn’t even hot!!

The next day I also only had one screening, but it was the centerpiece film of the festival, Sorry To Bother You. It was the first time there would be a cross-bay premiere and the first year the festival was doing any screenings at the legendary Grand Lake Theater, so I was sure to make room in my schedule to attend.

Before the screening there was a reception sponsored by Hennessy with free c*cktails named after the short documentary they were presenting, called Major. It seemed like I was the only non-festival person in attendance, yet they kept taking promotional pictures. But the c*cktail was great and I had a few to put something in my stomach. The short told the story of Marshall “Major” Taylor, who was one of the best cyclists of his time, which was the 1890s, so as a black man you can imagine that he may not have gone over too well with everyone. At 7-minutes it stayed pretty presentational, but I appreciated learning about this pioneering athlete as well as the plentiful black and white velodrome footage.

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)

An explosive directorial debut from hip-hop and Oakland legend Boots Riley, this film is not afraid at all to go all they way out on the ledge and set up a nice new home there. A hyper-satire that creeps steadily from the mundane to the insane, Sorry to Bother You felt to me like a scathing critique of the so-called “gig” economy, born right across the bay in San Francisco, which has leeched out internationally decimating hard-fought labor rights and dehumanizing the workforce for the profit of venture capitalists. I could nitpick here or there, particularly the ornamentalization of Tessa Thompson‘s character, but overall I found it to be a fun and engaging popcorn film that doesn’t insult your intelligence. Hopefully Riley is given a blank check to do whatever he wants next.

After the screening the director and some members of the cast took the stage for a Q & A. There was an uncomfortable lull when the moderator asked if there were any questions so I shot my hand up with the first thing I thought of so that silence wouldn’t creep in and remind us all of our mortality. I don’t think I can actually say what it was here for the sake of spoilers, but it was a good answer.

The Judge (Erika Cohn)

Local filmmaker Erika Cohn has crafted a beautiful film that is alternately inspiring and frustrating; inspiring because it depicts a seismic shift in societal gender norms in Palestine, and frustrating because it also depicts the inherent limitations of trying to change institutions of oppression from within. In documenting the work of Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first female Shari’a court judge, Cohn encapsulates the ongoing push and pull of progress when your progress is in the hands of entrenched gatekeepers. Despite her dubious circumstances, Al-Faqih is a strong documentary subject who is likely to be a major historical figure for womens’ rights in the Muslim world.

I spent much of this screening stressed about potentially losing the keys to my office, so I’ll be honest that was a bit distracting. Turned out they were safe and sound back on my desk.

Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)

If you love to cringe (and boy do I love a good cringe), then do I have the film for you! Bo Burnham‘s debut is a moving and hilarious portrait of one of life’s most uncomfortably awkward transitory periods. The film owes its success entirely to the strength of its lead, Elsie Fisher, whose portrayal of Kayla is full of subtlety, nuance, and an understanding of humanity that belies her age, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s recognized by the Academy next year. I usually find coming of age films to be formulaic and unimaginative, but Eighth Grade had me hook, line, and sinker the whole time.

Right before the film started news broke that the US was launching a missile strike against Syria, which sent me into a sudden depression that the film would soon help me forget. But at that moment where it was unclear what the scale of the attack would be, I wanted to turn to my neighbor (who I think was also press, as she was taking notes during the film, but wasn’t wearing her press badge. This made me very self-conscious about wearing it at screenings. I still did sometimes.) and share my wallowing. Instead, I turned to her and said “this whole time I thought Bo Burnham was Bill Burr, but that guy clearly is someone else”, which was true, as the director stood on the stage.

I was about the only person who seemed to leave before the Q & A started, but I had a date with one of my most anticipated films of the festival.

Minding the Gap (Bing Liu)

How can a film ostensibly about suburban skater boys be one of the most moving portraits of life in contemporary America? Bing Liu‘s debut, a semi-autobiographical documentary, was years in the making, evolving from run of the mill skate videos to a verité looks at those on top of the boards, Keire and Zack. As troubling issues come up, I was grateful that Liu had the wherewithal to extend the film’s scope to Zack’s girlfriend Nina, and in doing so opened the film up to an exploration of masculinity and emotional honesty that I felt privileged to witness.

The next day would be my most ambitious, fitting in four films with two trips between Berkeley and the city.

Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene)

This film could easily have been a Ken Burns-style look back doc, but director Robert Greene manages to tell a 100-year old story in a way that’s immediate, alive, and entirely riveting. Throughout the film, past and present are constantly layered on top of each other like some translucent ghost onion, with layers being continually peeled back and reapplied, all the while insisting on exposing the artifice of the film’s construction. The story it tells has clear allegorical implications for the current moment, and in using current residents of Bisbee to recreate the most shameful event in its history, hopefully it insures that nothing like it will ever happen again.

RBG (Betsy West & Julie Cohen)

This movie made me feel dumb for how little I knew of one of the most important figures in American politics. Betsy West & Julie Cohen‘s profile of the Supreme Court’s most recognizable judge works because it prioritizes theme over chronology in building its structure. I guess it should be obvious that someone who rises to the position of Supreme Court Justice would have left a long list of major accomplishments behind them, but the volume and magnitude of Ginsberg’s legal work prior to her time on the court was marvelous; I came out of the movie just feeling grateful for her.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross)

This movie. Is so. AMAZING! I’m honestly not sure exactly how to talk about it; I’ve been describing it to friends as “an avant-garde Hoop Dreams” for convenient shorthand, but that doesn’t really do this film justice. First-time director RaMell Ross is a seasoned photographer whose framing skills are on full display here, crafting beautiful, powerful images that evoke and are in a conversation with a whole history outside of the immediate scope of the film. Shot over five years, the sequences Ross selected for inclusion also speak to an immense patience from which any documentarian could draw inspiration. Everyone see this.

I asked the director about these observations after the screening. He said that though Hoop Dreams is one of the greatest documentaries of all time, he was very conscious about specifically not retreading the territory James, Gilbert, and Marx covered over 20 years ago. As far as his patience, he explained that the camera he used took a while to set up, and the image would come in upside down. So it took time to compose and interpret what he saw, and in the process of that sometimes he would be fortunate enough to catch unexpected moments.

Shirkers (Sandi Tan)

Part auto-biographry, part film history, part mystery, Sandi Tan‘s captivating documentary utilizes possibly one of the most thematically compelling combinations of archival material and voice over in recent memory. A look back at perhaps the greatest Singaporean film that never was, Shirkers is a painful meditation on the nature and acceptance of loss, and the creation that can rise from destruction. The film is a reminder of the fragility of art and life, and that society functions based on the assumption that people will generally act as they should; all it takes is one psychopath to screw it all up.

At this point I had seen four of the most formally daring and emotionally resonant films of the year, with pieces of all of them swirling around in my head. I feel like to do them each justice one would need to watch maybe one a week to allow them to fully gestate in their own space, which I look forward to doing upon their theatrical (or streaming) releases.

Then it was back to Berkeley for some pita and ice cream before…

The Cleaners (Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck)

The first film from the German team of Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck (loving all the first time documentarians at this festival btw), The Cleaners is an inside look one of the many wizards behind the curtain of our daily social media use. Only these wizards are halfway across the world and get paid $1/hour to remove all of the worst videos and images you can imagine. The film is ambitious in its scope, but would have benefited from removing the rationalizations and explanations of techies and experts in favor of focusing more on the cleaners themselves, their lives, and the effects of this horrendous work on them and those they hold close. In the end, the film left me feeling that none of this is worth it, we were all just fine before, but it seems as though Pandora’s box has been irreversibly opened.

The next day the festival presented the George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award to Bay Area stalwarts Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. B. Ruby Rich joined the formidable filmmaking team on stage to moderate an overview of their impressive career, which definitely instilled in me a desire to rewatch much of it and seek out their fiction work. The discussion was followed by a screening of End Game.

End Game (Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman)

Their new short is a meditation on end of life care, and the different manifestations that can take. The film is full of moving individual moments and is worthwhile for the intimacy it is able to capture of a family during one of their most personal experiences. But when it was over I almost felt cut off, and that by featuring a myriad of patients, family members, and health care professionals over its short run time, there was a depth left unexplored. Keep an eye on this one, though, as it’s the type of doc short the Academy loves to nominate come winter. Those interested in a deeper dive on this difficult subject would do well to check out Allan King‘s Dying at Grace.

Inventing Tomorrow (Laura Nix)

Can the next generation save humanity? Laura Nix‘s new documentary seems to take it as a given, following the entrants from four different countries in the prestigious Intel ISEF (a giant, international science fair) as they conduct and present their research. The film is valuable for showing the passion with which these young scientists embark upon their projects, as well as the social and familial contexts in which they exist. However as much as I enjoyed the film and was encouraged by a convention center full of people trying to help the world, I couldn’t help thinking of last week’s screening of First Reformed, which presented a good deal of hopeless towards this problem in the face of an abundance of “tipping point” statistics. I guess we still have to try, though.

The next film of the evening was added to the program after the schedule had been announced, so I figured it had to be something special so I took a screener for another film and got my ticket for…

This One’s For the Ladies (Gene Graham)

Oh my goodness, I do believe I’ve caught a case of the vapors! Depicting a community in Newark, NJ united by male erotic dancers, Gene Graham‘s This One’s For the Ladies looks at the families and lives of both sides of the stripper/tipper dynamic. There is plenty in it to satisfy any prurient interest one might have, but it also manages to get a lot of mileage from examining the perhaps surprisingly healthy lives of its subjects, refreshingly eschewing the common narratives of broken homes and drug addiction leading to a life in a sex-adjacent field. All of the participants are very well defined given their volume, and audiences are sure to find their favorites. See me, I’m a Fever man (as was most of our theater), though you can’t count out the p-funk fashion of twins Raw Dawg and Tygar.

Carcasse (Clémentine Roy & Gustav Geir Bollason)

At first when you watch Clémentine Roy and Gustav Geir Bollason‘s Carcasse you’re not really sure what you’re watching. Is this a documentary survey of some idiosyncratic off-the-griders? Or am I on some kind of Zulawski‘s On the Silver Globe type shit? Featuring very quiet people utilizing makeshift tools cobbled together from the remnants of (perhaps) a lost society, dotting stark, snowy hellscapes, the film seems to be a depiction of a world that may yet come to exist. One of the most honest visions of our seemingly inevitable future dystopia, Carcasse is either an artistic plea for a reality to avoid at all costs, or a training manual for when we get there.

I watched this one via a screener at my office, after which I head towards Panchita’s for some pre-film pupusas. Afterwards I headed to the Roxie for Ravenous, had my ticket scanned, found a seat and got to work on a box of buncha crunch. I was thinking to myself how much I appreciated how brazen people always are bringing full burritos in then, when festival programmer Rod Armstrong thanked us for coming the screening of Alex Strangelove. This was confusing to me. I checked with the guy next to me if we were seeing the movie that was printed on the ticket I was holding up, and realized right before he said it that this is the Roxie, not the Victoria.

In my shock and embarrassment I darted up and started to make my way out of the aisle, but promptly proceeded to trip over the man to whom I was just speaking and his boyfriend, launching buncha crunch everywhere, and fully splaying myself across their laps. It took more than it should have to get back up, and I left as quick as I could apologizing all the way while trying not to look anyone in the eye. Luckily the Victoria is only two blocks down 16th, so I made it with time to spare, but no question the festival has only hindered my cognitive abilities.

Ravenous (Robin Aubert)

I’ve always been a fan of zombie films, but kind of checked out entirely in the post 28 Days Later era. But when I saw there was one programmed in the festival, I knew I wanted to try and find time for it. The Québécois horror film spares us the tired rise of the zombies, dropping us right into the middle of the epidemic. Robin Aubert peppers the film with some nice weird touches that contradict the traditional notion of zombies as mindless instinct machines. Throw in a healthy amount of deadpan humor and Ravenous becomes an enjoyable and quirky deviation from your usual living dead fare.

Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle (Gustavo Salmerón)

Gustavo Salmerón‘s elevated home movie cleverly uses two narrative lynchpins as the grounding for a free form character study about change and loss. We meet matriarch Julita, who exists in a space somewhere between Little Edie and Jackie Segal, in the midst of a major transition for herself and her family as she muses on her life and anything that pops into her mind. With a firm foundation to return to, Salmerón is able to craft a moving tribute to his mother that feels neither forced nor sentimental; it’s unusually objective for a partly autobiographical piece, probably due in part to the size of the family. If I have one complaint, though, not nearly enough monkey.

Concluding the San Francisco International Film Festival

And now I’m here, thirty films wiser and brimming with delirium. The programming for this festival is so robust, with at least a few things for everyone, that it’s no wonder why it’s the longest running film fest in the US. It was interesting to be here with the Cannes/Netflix discourse getting more and more heated, but I have to say that by and large the participation of the streaming giant can only be seen as a benefit here, providing both financial sponsorship and a selection of quality documentaries. And maybe fiction films too (probably, right?).

Speaking of which I would have to give my coveted best narrative feature prize to Eighth Grade. I imagine critics will be talking a lot about its depiction of social media, but it is such a human film, highlighting for those that grew up without smartphones that however much we might rag on the younger generation (and let’s be honest, it’s a national pastime), their experience truly is no different than our own.

My best Documentary (and naturally best of the fest) goes to Hale County This Morning, This Evening. I don’t even want to talk about it, it’s just too good to write about, it can only be discussed effectively using faces; every emotion we know is contained somewhere in this film. It touches on nearly every element of life, and is sure to go on to be a seminal American text.

Now I am free. (proceeds to evaporate into the wind)