SF FILM FESTIVAL LAST DAY/LAST FILM: APRIL 23 HAIL SATAN?

Hail Satan?

The final film of the festival. It seemed appropriate in a city that says F.U. to the conservative right would have this real yet humorous documentary on a salacious topic. What other film festival would dare to highlight it and tell the audience it seems like a pretty cool group to join. The film was sold out and people were turned away it was so well received. There were plenty of Satanists in the crowd and a good cheer of Hail Satan when the movie began and afterwards outside. A group of them walked past me to sit in the front middle of the theater in their all black outfits, long coats and kind of punk styling with tattoos. It was incredible that Penny Lane, the director, got the interviews that she did. In an interview I heard they have rejected tons of requests for a documentary or reality show. This was done with dignity. They aren't believers in a little red devil more so a radical voice of the opposition of the mix of religion and government. They also like the theater of it and heavy metal music. I heard the director joined the group midway through filming the documentary.

Program Description

Hail Satan?

Penny Lane, USA 2019, 95 min

If Aleister Crowley and Rosemary's Baby (1968) are what come to mind when you hear about a group called The Satanic Temple, this playful and unexpectedly inspirational new documentary from Penny Lane (NUTS!, Festival 2016) will set you straight. The group's relationship to Satanism, the beliefs and tenets that drive them, and the incendiary actions of co-founder Lucien Greaves and other members are serious business, and Lane engages with the issues that occupy the group while simultaneously capturing the humor of their approach, whether shopping for costumes or designing a monument to Baphomet. 

Meghan Kelly interviewing Lucien Greaves the co-founder of The Satanic Temple. It was a funny clip as she couldn't wrap her head around any of his concepts and he was very well spoken.

Click here for official trailer

Click here for Filmschoolradio.com story and interview with Director Penny Lane and subject Lucien Greaves

p.s. After thinking about the documentary for some time, I changed my mind a little about it and don't think it was a well-rounded documentary. She only showed the positive things that Satanists are doing. I'm sure there have been things that have been done in the name of Satan that aren't good. Also, in one scene when their rally was cancelled by the city of Boston. A guy is interviewed saying that of course they cancelled it because the city defends the priests there that are child molesters. We're the good guys. Kind of a leap and I'm sure there were other concerns. In general, if the director converts to the group she is covering in a documentary this is going to happen and there won't be a fair and balanced approach to the subject. 

SF FILM FESTIVAL THURSDAY: APRIL 18 THE FAREWELL

The Farewell

This entry is a few days past the day I saw it because I had to drive home that night to be with my family. They cleared the SF Film Festival website which I usually copy for this blog so I won't have a lot of information to copy for the last two films. 

The Festival chose this as The Centerpiece film of the festival because they believe Lulu Wang the director is an up and coming director to take note of. I wish I had written right after the screening because I was so excited about this film. The whole concept was great. A Chinese-American girl from New York doing a film about her family and extended family where they go on a trip to Shanghai to meet for a wedding/last chance to see Grandma. Also, she filmed it in Chinese! I thought that was brilliant. Lulu Wong had a New Yorker wit that she could step back and see the absurdity of situations and film them so you could get her angle. It was funny and heart-warming. The main character has a special connection with her grandmother and after talking to the audience we see Lulu has made this movie a special homage to her. It made me nostalgic for the the close relationship I had with my grandmother.  I was also fascinated to see an upper middle class family's lifestyle in modern Shanghai, China. 

Program Description

(Which I painfully have to transcribe from the program) 

The Farewell

Lulu Wang, USA/China 2019, 98 min.

An ebullient tale that both celebrates and gently satirizes Chinese cultural traditions, The Farewell is impossible to resist for many reasons. Chief among them is the irrepressible Awkwafina (a breakthrough in Crazy Rich Asians, 2018), a broke Asian-American artist off to China to join her family to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. Except no one is willing to tell grandma she is sick - and to complete the ruse they force her male cousin to get married to a bewildered Japanese woman to explain why this zany family is getting back together at all. 

Lulu Wang's twitter. A picture at an SF after-party for her film.

I was sitting too far away from the stage to take a decent picture. She did a good interview after the film and said that it has been 6 years since her nai-nai's diagnosis and she is still alive. They have also not told her that she has cancer as per the cultural tradition.

Trailer: The movie comes out in July 2019 and there is still no trailer but these are some good interviews. I hope I remember to add the trailer later. 

Click here for Awkwafina/Lulu Wang Interview on movie

Click here for another Awkwafina/Lulu Wang interview

Sundance interview with Awkwafina and Lulu Wang

SF FILM FESTIVAL WEDNESDAY : Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg

I'm so glad I took a chance on this movie. I just put my faith in the film board of selectors when they said this would be a film highlight. This director/screenwriter has won best director/screenwriter for the last two Hong Kong Film Festivals. This also won best picture. I told myself when the plot got obvious or boring I was going to go get a soda. It had great editing and moved very quickly it was smooth like butter in terms of the story-line and editing. It was a great thriller and love story with some nice twists at the end. I enjoyed the aspiring artists story-line.

Description

Kinetic action and a mind-bending plot highlight this star-studded film about a counterfeiting network directed by Infernal Affairs (2002) writer Felix Chong. The film begins in the mid-’90s as detectives extradite Lee Man (Aaron Kwok) from a Thai prison. They believe he can assist in their search for his rumored associate, a mysterious mastermind named Painter (Chow Yun-fat). Unfolding in vivid flashbacks, Project Gutenberg unveils Lee’s history with the expert counterfeiter and their quest to make a perfect replica of the $100 bill, up to the breathtaking reveal of Painter’s final and most masterful forgery.

“Chow Yun-fat channels some of his most iconic screen work as a suave, sophisticated, sharp-dressed gentleman criminal, and Aaron Kwok continues his mid-career creativity with another vaguely unsavory character in Felix Chong’s throwback crime thriller Project Gutenberg.” – Elizabeth Kerr, The Hollywood Reporter

Click here for trailer of Project Gutenberg

Director

Felix Chong

Felix Chong made his mark as a screenwriter before turning to directing, sharing a Hong Kong Film Award with Alan Mak for their screenplay for Infernal Affairs (2002) and writing other acclaimed scripts, including two sequels to Infernal Affairs, Confession of Pain (2006), and Overheard (2009). Chang made his directing debut in another collaboration with Mak in 2005 with Moonlight in Tokyo. Once a Gangster (2010) was his first solo feature, for which he won a second Hong Kong Film Award for Best New Director

P.S. I had to scour the internet for a picture of the female lead.

Every poster had macho action shots although the love story of the

struggling artists is just as big of a part.

SF FILM FESTIVAL TUESDAY APRIL 16: TEHRAN: CITY OF LOVE

I walked into this film oblivious of what life would be like in present-day Iran, especially in the big city of Tehran. It was a film that interwove three different lives of people looking for love and succeeding, then losing it.

The tribute to the city was beautiful with modern cafes and restaurants. The locations he picked were lovely - as if you were in any other major large city in the world. Except for the fact that men and women are separated in most public areas like the mosque or different gyms.  The protagonists were all about my age and had good jobs in the city and nice apartments. They went out for dinner or cafes with friends. It was interesting to get a vignette of life on the other side of the world. The director said he was influenced by Jim Jarmusch - which makes a lot of sense. The cinematography was excellent in getting nice close-up and symmetrically framed shots.

The director was a little insulted when someone asked how he was able to get a visa to come here from Iran. He bristled and said that he wouldn't have been able to come except he had a passport from a different country. That was also a theme in the movie. A lot of people were applying for visas to leave Iran and move to Australia for example. He said that is common.

Description
Three Tehran residents, unlucky in love, make attempts to change their solo status in this wistful and poignant film. A bodybuilder, a funeral singer, and a woman who works in a beauty clinic – each character finds that the pursuit of their respective dreams puts them in sight of a real emotional connection, yet something intervenes. By examining the circumstances that derail his protagonists within the larger context that Tehran’s title implies, writer/director Jaberansari provides a pointed take on contemporary Iranian society.

“A revolution, an ensuing eight-year war, a theocratic government, the harsh divide between the private and the public and religious rules and customs have all made social realism the cornerstone of popular contemporary Iranian films in recent years, especially those that have been internationally successful.

“While socio-political issues remain at the heart of the Iranian way of life, I am fortunate enough to hold a slightly different perspective. Having lived outside of Iran for a number of years while still maintaining strong ties to my country, has afforded me the liberty to retain a certain amount of distance from the harsh realities of life in Iran. This in turn has enabled me to have a darkly humorous point of view that runs at the core of this film and dictates my style as a filmmaker.

“Lonely and disenchanted, the characters in my film are estranged from themselves and the society at large. Failing in their attempts to find meaningful relationships and truly connect to those around them, they face rejections they are not equipped to handle and are forced to find ways to persevere in a city that does not embrace them. While their predicaments may serve as the perfect context for a gritty social drama, I wanted to convey the hilarity and absurdity of their respective situations while still allowing the audience to identify with them.

“My goal in making this film was to tell an emotionally engaging story, however minimal and absurdist, with a different slant on the modern Iranian society.” – Ali Jaberansari, Director’s Statement

Click here for official trailer of the movie

Click for another trailer a little bit longer.
Guests Expected
Director Ali Jaberansari is expected to attend all screenings.

Director
Ali Jaberansari
Ali Jaberansari began his career making short films, including Aman (2011), which won awards at the Angers European First Film Festival and the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival. His debut feature, Falling Leaves (2013), won the Federico Fellini Award at the Tiburon International Film Festival. He also served as an assistant director on Babak Jalali’s Bay Area-set Radio Dreams (Festival 2016).

SF FILM FESTIVAL SATURDAY APRIL 13, 2019

RED JOAN AND KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE

Saturday afternoon at the Castro. I don't usually see movies that will be widely distributed but I was invited to be my friend Jim Shaw's guest for Red Joan and the Academy Award Nomination for one of his film was there afterwards for discussion. 

Red Joan and the Real Star "Leo"

Description

Legendary theater director Trevor Nunn and the incomparable Judi Dench combine their efforts to tell a riveting espionage thriller with the ethics of science at its core. Dench plays Joan, arrested late in life for her activities as a spy during Britain’s quest to become an atomic power. Once a promising scientist brought into the nation’s war efforts, young Joan (played by Kingsman’s Sophie Cookson) is horrified by the information she inadvertently absorbs and is ultimately swayed by a German Communist rake and his magnetic sister into passing along secrets to the Soviet Union.

“A good old-fashioned British spy thriller in the scientific mold of Enigma (2001), with a bewitching female heroine (or anti-heroine, if you will) played by the excellent actresses Judi Dench and (as her younger self) Sophie Cookson, Red Joan revisits the incredible real-life spy case of Melita Norwood … Zac Nicholson’s cinematography is warm and involving like production designer Cristina Casali’s quaint woody laboratories, as behooves the sub-genre of British spy yarns. George Fenton’s romantic score and Charlotte Walter’s charming costumes well describe the mood of the time.” – Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter

Produced in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the conversation following the April 13 screening of Red Joan will allow members of the filmmaking team and special guests, including David Holloway, Professor of International History at Stanford University and expert on the international history of nuclear weapons to discuss the historical context of the film and the ethics of pursuing scientific discoveries that will have incredible consequence to our collective health and survival.

Director Trevor Nunn of Red Joan

Click here for trailer of Red Joan

KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE

5 minute standing ovation. Pictured two other candidates from the film and the director

 Rachel Lears on the right. 

This film won the two highest awards at the Sundance Film Festival Best Documentary and Festival Favorite. It'll debut on May 1st on Netflix and I think it will win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The director/cinematographer/producer and her husband/editor/producer were able to follow Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from the beginning of her congressional run. Even when she turned in the 10,000 signatures to put herself on the ballot. It follows up to the end of the journey at her campaign headquarters when she finds out she won and the first images of the look on her face and her supporters. Brilliant, fabulous film. 

Description
“We met a machine with a movement,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14th District), and thank goodness director Rachel Lears was there to capture it. Profiling four women (including AOC) of disparate backgrounds running grassroots political campaigns against established male incumbents, Lears depicts a fundamental moment when these (and other) remarkable women reminded the country that people really do have the power. Unforgettably depicting the candidates’ unflagging energy and commitment, Knock Down the House is an important and ebullient documentary about reclaiming democracy one seat at a time.

“It’s entirely possible that director Rachel Lears’ decision to follow around bartender-turned-candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as one of four subjects for a film she was making about outsiders challenging Democratic incumbents in the 2018 midterms will go down in film history as one of the most fortuitous, right-time, right-subject, and right-filmmaker combos ever. Because the result, documentary Knock Down the House, is a pretty extraordinary cinematic artifact. It’s not just that it takes a snapshot of the left’s fastest-rising star at the moment she went interstellar. It also limns, both through AOC’s story and those of the other three progressive challengers tracked here — Cori Bush, Amy Vilela, and Paula Jean Swearengin — an extraordinary juncture in American politics when the landscape terraformed in a way that we still haven’t finished mapping.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter

Click here for interview with director Rachel Lears

Click here - interview with Rachel Lears and A Ocasio-Cortez

Director
Rachel Lears
Rachel Lears has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Culture and Media from NYU. She made her feature documentary directing debut with Aves de paso (2009) and co-directed The Hand That Feeds (2014), winner of Audience Awards at DOC NYC and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and a nominee for a News & Documentary Emmy. Says she of Knock Down the House, “After the 2016 election, I wanted to tell a big story about people changing American politics in big ways and about power — how it works and how to achieve it. I wanted to tell a story about people working to build solidarity across social divides, and about the intersections of economics and injustice based on race, gender, and other aspects of identity.”

CLAIRE DENIS : TRIBUTE + "HIGH LIFE"

My First Night & Wow!

She was just beautiful, emotional and eloquent. 

The interviewer looked like Adam Driver

I've been a longstanding fan of Claire Denis. This had a Claire Denis Film Festival 1 or 2 years ago at the SFMOMA that I attended. I thought she was larger than life and too high a level of filmmaker to come to the SF Film Festival. I couldn't believe I was seeing her. 

She was interviewed for 1 hour by a writer I believe they said from New York. She was gentle as she delved into her emotions and feelings a lot about working with people and her films. 

She was asked by Rob Pattinson to be in her film. She was asked why she agreed. She said, sometimes people smile to you as you walk on the street and you smile back; It felt like that. She wanted Patricia Arquette for this role instead of Juliet Binoche. I loved it with Juliet Binoche but I kept trying to picture Patricia in that role and yes! it would have been nice. 

This was her first English language film and also Sci-Fi genre film. It didn't feel Sci-Fi it had more of an art house film as her usual films - sensual, sensitive and beautiful artistically. She said she felt like it was more of a prison picture not Sci-Fi. She did talk a lot about how wonderful it is that there are pictures of the black hole just a few days ago. I'll have to review my recording to see what she said about it. This film is centered around a black hole in the universe coincidentally.  I recorded the full hour - I just don't know how to load that size of a file from my phone to a website. 

Click here for the full Interview with Claire Denis!!!! Amazing

(Juliette Binoche - a mad scientist raping Robert Pattinson in a space ship)

Program Description: 

“For me,” says master filmmaker Claire Denis, “Cinema is not made to give a psychological explanation; for me cinema is montage.” Those who have experienced works like Beau Travail (Festival 2000), Friday Night (2003), The Intruder (Festival 2005), or her debut feature Chocolat (1988), know the singularity of Denis’ work. None of her films resembles one another, and yet there’s no one else on earth who could have made them. This very special tribute to a filmmaker long beloved by SFFILM audiences will feature a highlights reel from her career, an onstage discussion, and a presentation of her astonishing new film High Life. When asked about her new film’s look and design, Denis commented, “My aesthetic was simple: it’s a jail. I wanted the interior of the spaceship to look like a prison. That was my only radical beginning in terms of aesthetics.”

This tribute to Claire Denis includes a conversation with the director and a screening of High Life.

High Life

Claire Denis, France/USA/UK/Poland, 2018

Anyone familiar with her work knows that a Claire Denis sci-fi film will not be like any other sci-fi film, but High Life is even stranger, bolder, and more sexual than expected. Set aboard a ship populated with death row inmates employed in dangerous space exploration, this masterwork is more concerned with internal galaxies and the black holes of man than interstellar wonders. Starring Robert Pattinson, André Benjamin, and a magnificently tressed Juliette Binoche, High Life also features a mesmerizing score by Denis’ frequent collaborator Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks.

Click for High Life Trailer

Click for New York Times Review

Click for NPR review

Click for Sy Fy Wire review - funny

  A Special gift from Claire Denis

As a special attendance gift we received this art piece. A Zine with themes about seeds and space as an accompaniment to the film. I will always treasure this.  

April 11, 2019

2019 San Francisco International Film Festival

I'm excited about my picks this year for the Film Festival. As a San Francisco Film Society member, I was able to go to the member preview. They had clips of Festival highlights and Film Programming staff top picks. 

Click Here for Film Festival Preview