DOCUMENTARIES
International Nonfiction Features
About People, Places, Issues and Ideas
In Competition for
Golden Gate Awards
140
144
145
146
147
148
149
153
158
159
160
163
Better This World
Cinema Komunisto
Crime After Crime
Detroit Wild City
Foreign Parts
The Good Life
The Green Wave
Marathon Boy
The Pipe
Position Among the Stars
The Redemption of General
Butt Naked
The Tiniest Place
OUT OF COMPETITION
American Teacher
The Arbor
The Autobiography of
Nicolae Ceausescu
139 The Ballad of Genesis and
Lady Jaye
141 The Black Power Mixtape
1967–1975
142 Cave of Forgotten Dreams
143 Children of the Princess
of Cleves
150 Hot Coffee
151 The Last Buffalo Hunt
152 Let the Wind Carry Me
154 Miss Representation
155 Nostalgia for the Light
156 Page One: A Year Inside the
New York Times
157 Pink Saris
161 Something Ventured
162Tabloid
164 !Women Art Revolution
165 Yves Saint Laurent l’Amour Fou
136
137
138
135
American Teacher
World Premiere
USA
2011
81 min
DIR Vanessa Roth
PROD Nínive Calegari, Dave Eggers,
Vanessa Roth
ED Brian McGinn
PRINT SOURCE The Teacher Salary Project,
3864 23rd Street, San Francisco CA 94114.
EMAIL: ninive@theteachersalaryproject.org.
WEB: bigyearprods.com.
documentaries
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
As the debate over the state of America’s public school
system rages on, one thing everyone (including President
Obama) agrees on is the need for great teachers. Yet,
while research proves that teachers are the most important
factor in a child’s future success, America’s teachers are
so woefully underpaid that almost half must divide their
time between a second job in order to make a living.
Chronicling the stories of four teachers in different areas
of the country, American Teacher reveals the frustrating
realities of today’s educators, the difficulty of attracting
talented new teachers and why so many of our best
teachers choose to leave the profession altogether. The
only African American teacher at Leadership High School
in San Francisco, Jonathan Dearman, loved his job, and
his students adored him. But his inability to support his
family led him to pursue a new career and left his students
devastated by his departure. An elementary school
teacher in New Jersey, Rhena is fresh out of Harvard and
personifies the smart, young teacher anyone would want
for their kids. But even her youthful commitment ultimately
crumbles when weighed against her own financial needs.
Their stories are disheartening, but this wake-up call to
our system’s failings also looks at possibilities for reform.
Can we re-value teaching in the United States and turn
it into a prestigious, financially attractive and competitive
profession? With almost half of American teachers leaving
the field in the next five years, now is the time to find out.
Vanessa Roth
Vanessa Roth has been making social-issue documentaries for
more than a decade. Her award-winning films include the PBS
special Taken In: The Lives of America’s Foster Children,
Close to Home, Aging Out and The Third Monday in October
(SFIFF 2007). As a producer, her film Freeheld won the
Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 2008. She holds
a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, and
before making films worked as a child advocate in family courts
and public schools in New York and California.
—Joanne Parsont
TUE
THU
136
MAY 3
MAY 5
6:30
3:45
KABUKI
KABUKI
The Arbor
England
2010
94 min
DIR Clio Barnard
PROD Tracy O’Riordan
CAM Ole Birkeland
ED Nick Fenton, Daniel Goddard
MUS Harry Escott, Molly Nyman
WITH Manjinder VIrk, Christine Bottomley,
Neil Dudgeon, Monica Dolan, Jimi Mistry
PRINT SOURCE Strand Releasing, 6140
W. Washington Boulevard, Culver City CA
90232. FAX: 310-836-7510. EMAIL: david@
strandreleasing.com.
Clio Barnard
Born in Santa Barbara, California in 1965, Clio Barnard is a
British artist and filmmaker whose work has appeared in film
festivals, on Britain’s Channel 4 at the Tate Modern and the New
York Museum of Modern Art. She has also worked as a director
and producer for MTV Europe. For The Arbor, her debut feature,
Barnard won the Best British Newcomer Award at the 2010 BFI
London Film Festival.
documentaries
British playwright Andrea Dunbar (1961–1990) didn’t
come “out of nowhere,” as a familiar formula might have
it. Both she and her art hailed from a precise place:
Brafferton Arbor, a poor row of council estates in Bradford,
West Yorkshire, the tangible setting for this moody,
exquisitely crafted film portrait. Nevertheless, Dunbar’s
arrival at London’s Royal Court Theatre at age 17 was
hardly expected. When she died of a brain hemorrhage
at 29, she vanished as suddenly as she had arrived.
Dunbar left a complex legacy, entwined in several sexually
precocious, uncompromisingly gritty and very funny
plays—including Rita, Sue, and Bob Too!, made into a
celebrated film by Alan Clarke in 1986 (SFIFF 1993)—and
three children with three different men. Barnard delves
into this bounding yet brooding history with inspired
invention. Marshaling the techniques of documentary
theater, she mixes archival footage with scenes from
Dunbar’s seminal play, The Arbor, staged outdoors
on Brafferton Arbor itself. Meanwhile, actors lip-synch
extensive audio interviews with family, neighbors and
intimates—performances so deft you could easily miss the
conceit, but adding subtly to the narrative’s hypnotic pull.
As Dunbar’s tenacity, ambivalence and depression emerge
from the Arbor, so too does the story of Lorraine (a quietly
haunted Manjinder Virk), her half-Pakistani child who
descended into addiction, prostitution and finally prison. Art
and life intermingle in prolific ways as absorbing accounts
by Lorraine, her siblings and others reverberate with, and
respond to, the brutal, beautiful career of a working-class
artist.
—Robert Avila
SUN APR 24
SUN MAY 1
WED MAY 4
8:45
7:15
7:15
PFA
KABUKI
KABUKI
137
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceausescu
Romania
2010
187 min
DIR Andrei Ujica
PROD Velvet Moraru
SCR Andrei Ujica
ED Dana Bunescu
PRINT SOURCE Mandragora International,
29 rue des Pyramides, Paris 75001, France.
FAX: 33-1-42-86-02-24. EMAIL: jennifer@
mandragorasales.com. WEB: the-autobiography.
com.
documentaries
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu opens
with footage of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu at their
trial in 1989, just before their execution. The couple is
exhausted but defiant. “I will only answer to the Grand
Assembly,” Ceausescu says, “whatever your masquerade
is.” “It was your masquerade for 25 years,” his unseen
questioner retorts. Andrei Ujica’s biting film documents
that masquerade. In this collage of clips from Ceausescu’s
official filmed record, there is no sign of Romania’s mass
poverty or the countless sick and abandoned children
who were the product of Ceausescu’s laws against
contraception. Instead there are cheering crowds,
grandiose building projects, meetings with international
figures like Charles de Gaulle and Jimmy Carter, and
Ceausescu’s obvious fascination with the obsequious
political theater of Mao’s China and Kim ll Sung’s North
Korea. At moments, the happy veneer wears thin. The
audio from a live broadcast of the 1977 earthquake
records the collapse of a crowded concert theater.
A courageous Communist official refuses to vote for
Ceausescu’s reelection to the 12th Romanian Congress.
For most of the film, however, the viewer will detect
smaller fractures of the myth in the managed footage. A
crowd of young people clowns around rather than listen
to a Ceausescu speech. Workers in a store applaud
mechanically beside goods that were shipped in so
that Ceausescu could be filmed inspecting them. Ujica
chillingly reveals, without comment, the manner in which a
dictator constructs, and comes to believe in, his own cult
of personality.
Andrei Ujica
Andrei Ujica was born in Timisoara, Romania, in 1951. He
codirected Videograms of a Revolution (1992) with Harun
Farocki and directed the acclaimed Out of the Present (1995),
a documentary about cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, aboard the
Mir space station at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ujica currently lives in Berlin, where he teaches literature, film
and media theory.
—Pamela Troy
SAT
SUN
SUN
138
APR 23
APR 24
MAY 1
12:45
5:15
1:30
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
PFA
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
USA
2011
72 min
DIR Marie Losier
PROD Marie Losier, Steve Holmgren
CAM Marie Losier, Benjamin Kasulke
ED Marie Losier
PRINT SOURCE Marie Losier. EMAIL: info@
balladofgenesisandladyjaye.com.
Marie Losier
Marie Losier, born in France in 1972, is a filmmaker based in
New York. She has been a film curator at the Alliance Française
in Manhattan since 2000, and programs experimental films at
various venues in Europe and throughout the United States. Her
own films, including idiosyncratic portraits of George and Mike
Kuchar, Richard Foreman and Guy Maddin, frequently screen at
art and film festivals and museums. Recipient of many awards
and grants for her filmmaking, she was included in the 2006
Whitney Biennial. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is her
first feature film.
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After many inventive short works, Marie Losier’s first
feature film is an intimate and poignant portrait of Genesis
P-Orridge, the industrial music, performance art and body
mod pioneer (and onetime SF resident). Shot on HD and
16mm, with sound floated in as if from outer space, the
film combines Losier’s home movie–style cinematography
with whimsical set pieces and amazing archival footage
to collage P-Orridge’s mercurial career with her deep love
for late muse and other half, the lovely Lady Jaye. More
specifically, it explores the pair’s primary art project: their
merging into a single “pandrogyne” through plastic surgery
and various practices of oneness. The debatable success
of this project makes it no less interesting though also,
at times, somewhat sorrowful. For all its playfulness and
provocation—and there’s plenty: It opens with P-Orridge
looking like Carol Channing in a diaphanous bird suit,
chirping mellifluously, and tracks her vanguard work with
COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV—
the film has a tweaked melancholy. It is as much an elegy
as a ballad, not only for the loss of a loved one but also for
something that not everyone cares about or even believes
in: the late 20th-century avant-garde. If, by chance, you do
believe in this—if, Burners and friends, you believe in a vital
sociopoetical underground bent on world liberation—then
this singularly magical little film will give you plenty of
ideas to swipe and heartfelt permission to go further; as
well as, perhaps, a hatful of blues to sort through.
—Graham Leggat
WED APR 27
THU MAY 5
9:15
6:30
KABUKI
KABUKI
139
Better This World
USA
2011
94 min
DIR Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway
PROD Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway
CAM David Layton
ED Greg O’Toole
MUS Paul Brill
PRINT SOURCE Loteria Films, 1613 Eighth
Street, Berkeley CA 94710.
EMAIL: kelly.a.duane@gmail.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
documentaries
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
Passionate young activists and authorities clash in
Minneapolis in events surrounding the protests at the
2008 Republican National Convention. As arrests are
made and accusations fly, the truth recedes behind a
desperate and strained justice system abetted by the
opportunism of chameleon-like activist Brandon Darby,
a cofounder of Common Ground Relief. Darby’s cult of
personality spins a nasty web that entangles the lives
of two young protesters, childhood friends who had
regarded Darby as their mentor and were eager to show
him the genuineness of their political convictions. As
the filmmakers follow the twists and turns of their legal
defense, the young men confront a divisive moral dilemma
that pits shared ideals against practical decisions, with
immediate consequences for themselves and their families.
From this tense situation, a poignant portrait emerges of
the activists, their friends and loved ones. Intimate phone
conversations, found footage, photographs and court
transcripts merge with artful reenactments, while onscreen
interviews include FBI officials and the federal prosecutor
handling the case. Documentarians Kelly Duane de la
Vega and Katie Galloway present a story that deals not
only with problems of power and authority, freedom and
democracy but also with the ultimate power of forgiveness
and love.
Kelly Duane de la Vega
Katie Galloway
Kelly Duane de la Vega is a 2010 HBO Documentary Film/
Film Independent Fellow and 2010 Sundance Fellow. Her
documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, the Documentary
Channel and Discovery Channel and have screened at numerous
international film festivals. She has recently produced a television
series for IFC.
Katie Galloway is an award-winning documentarian who has
produced works for Frontline, POV and PBS and is a 2010
Sundance Fellow. She now teaches Media Studies at UC
Berkeley and is filmmaker in residence at the Journalism
School’s Investigative Reporting Program.
—Sean Diggins
SAT
TUE
FRI
140
APR 23
APR 26
APR 29
6:00
6:30
9:30
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The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975
Sweden/USA
2011
96 min
DIR Göran Hugo Olsson
PROD Annika Rogell
SCR Göran Hugo Olsson
ED Göran Hugo Olsson, Hanna Lejonqvist
MUS Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson,
Om’Mas Keith
PRINT SOURCE IFC, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th Floor,
New York NY 10001. FAX: 646-273-7250.
EMAIL: ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com.
WEB: blackpowermixtape.com.
Special support for this program generously
provided by Dale Djerassi.
Göran Hugo Olsson
Göran Hugo Olsson is a Swedish documentary filmmaker and
cinematographer who has been making films for television for
over two decades. He was a consultant at the Swedish Film
Institute during 2000–02 and is a member of the editorial
board of Ikon South Africa, a platform for innovative South
African documentaries. Olsson is also the cofounder of the
production company Story AB, where he has made other daring
documentaries like Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much (1998)
and Am I Black Enough for You (2009).
documentaries
In English and Swedish with subtitles.
Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating
documentary, coproduced by longtime activist and
acclaimed actor Danny Glover, juxtaposes recently
discovered Swedish archival material chronicling the Black
Power movement in the United States from 1967 to 1975
with new commentary by prominent African American
voices in cultural and political spheres. Set to an evocative
soundtrack with original music by Questlove (DJ and
drummer of the hip-hop group the Roots) and Om’Mas
Keith, the outcome is a dynamic audiovisual collage about
being Black in America in the ’60s and ’70s, through the
curious and at times naive eyes of Swedish journalists.
Unique coverage of iconic African American activists such
as Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton,
Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale is contextualized with
reference to the struggles of the Black community in
places like South Florida and Harlem. Special attention
is given to the Black Panther Party’s activities in Oakland
as well as the views of other radical Americans, criticizing
the government and the situation for African Americans
at the time. Mixtape is a striking reminder that many of
the problems discussed here endure in today’s society.
This is emphasized by the insightful commentary from
activists and artists such as Kathleen Cleaver, Sonia
Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli
and Harry Belafonte. Apart from taking a refreshingly
honest look at the Black Power movement’s evolution,
this montage of rare cinematic gems offers universally
relevant observations about racial stratification and political
empowerment.
—Erica Hand
SAT
TUE
APR 30
MAY 3
9:00
6:00
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
141
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
USA
2010
95 min
DIR Werner Herzog
PROD Erik Nelson, Adrienee Ciuffo
CAM Peter Zeitlinger
ED Joe Bini, Maya Hawke
MUS Ernst Reijseger
PRINT SOURCE IFC, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th Floor,
New York NY 10001. FAX: 646-273-7250.
EMAIL: ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com.
This is a World Cinema Spotlight film.
documentaries
The surprise resurgence of 3-D has prompted everything
from blanket claims that it’s the future of cinema to
dismissals that it will again exhaust public patience
through indiscriminate application to inappropriate films.
But this process too often associated with routine genre
films and cheesy FX can be surprisingly apt for some
auteurs. Who better to adopt the form than Werner
Herzog, our veteran guide to landscapes and mindscapes
dislocative yet immersive? Eternally attracted to the
spectacular, mystic and strange, he’s forever plunging
head-first into exotica his bemused point-of-view renders
gently inviting. There’s scarcely a Herzog feature—
from Even Dwarves Started Small (1970) to recent
Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the
World—whose outré content, personalities and imagery
wouldn’t make perfect sense in the stereoscopic form.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about southern France’s
Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caverns, discovered in 1994. An Ice
Age landslide had hidden (and preserved) prehistoric art
dating back as far as 32,000 years ago, the oldest such
expressions known today. Herzog was given exclusive
access to this publicly sealed-off site of human prehistory.
Its spectacular wall drawings from a near-unimaginable
distant past are no less photogenic than the deep-focus
vistas of limestone-stalagmite caverns à la Carlsbad.
As ever, Herzog proves a wry, philosophically inclined,
idiosyncratically personal guide to the extraordinary. Cave
of Forgotten Dreams is like no 3-D movie you’ve seen: It
thrusts out not to show off but to ponder more deeply the
“humanness” of human life over millennia.
Werner Herzog
Bavaria-raised director Werner Herzog has been a globetrotting,
internationally acknowledged master of the medium since
making his feature debut in 1967 with Signs of Life.
Subsequent narrative films include Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1975), Nosferatu the
Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Rescue Dawn (2006)
and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). His
documentaries include Lessons of Darkness (SFIFF 1993),
Bells from the Deep (SFIFF 1993), Little Dieter Needs to Fly
(1998), Grizzly Man (2005) and The Wild Blue Yonder (2006).
Herzog received SFIFF’s Founder’s Directing Award in 2006.
—Dennis Harvey
MON APR 25
TUE APR 26
142
7:00
9:30
KABUKI
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Children of the Princess of Cleves
Nous, princesses de Clèves
North American Premiere
France
2009
69 min
DIR Régis Sauder
PROD Sylvie Randonneix
SCR Régis Sauder
CAM Régis Sauder
ED Florent Mangeot
PRINT SOURCE RamondaParis, 91 rue de
Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris, France.
EMAIL: pramonda@gmail.com.
Régis Sauder
After completing a master’s degree in neuroscience and a
brief career as a science journalist, Régis Sauder became a
filmmaker by chance. Over the last several years he has directed
a number of documentaries including Passeurs de vie (2003),
Le lotissement, à la recherche du bonheur (2006), L’année
prochaine à Jérusalem (2008) and Je t’emmène à Alger
(2009). He is currently in production on a documentary about
the mental health of prisoners, filmed in a Marseille prison.
documentaries
Total running time 89 min.
Ah, the high school English class, where works of great
literature are foisted upon students as required reading.
Those great tomes filled with heady prose and characters
from another era are supposed to be vitally important to
every young person’s education, but how relevant are they
to the realities of daily angst-ridden teenage existence? In
a refreshing and inspired look at the lives of contemporary
youth, director Régis Sauder attempts to make that elusive
connection between classic literature and contemporary
teenage life through the authentic voices and emotions
of one Marseille high school class studying the 17th
century French novel La princesse de Clèves. A tale of
love and duty in the 16th century court of King Henri II,
this classic text has been taught in French classrooms
for decades. But Sauder gives it a new spin, juxtaposing
its narrative with the lives of the students themselves, a
diverse population of teens from predominantly workingclass and immigrant families. As they gradually begin
the stressful preparation for their baccalaureate exams,
the students recite assorted passages from the book
and speak candidly about their hopes and dreams, love
and heartbreak, family and friends and their own place in
today’s French society.
Aglaée
After he loses a bet, Benoît’s friends dare him to ask the
disabled girl in their class to go out with him, sparking a range
of teen emotions, insecurities, expectations, hormones and
ever-present peer pressure. (Rudi Rosenberg, France 2010,
20 min)
—Joanne Parsont
SUN APR 24
MON APR 25
SAT APR 30
4:15
2:00
4:15
PFA
KABUKI
KABUKI
143
Cinema Komunisto
Serbia
2010
101 min
DIR Mila Turajlic
PROD Dragan Pesikan
SCR Mila Turajlic
CAM Goran Kovacevic
ED Aleksandra Milovanovic
MUS Nemanja Mosurovic
PRINT SOURCE Dribbling Pictures, Bitoljaska
2/II, 11030 Belgrade, Serbia. FAX: 381-112391369. EMAIL: info@dribblingpictures.com.
WEB: cinemakomunisto.com.
documentaries
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
More than a history of the Yugoslavian film industry, this
account of a once-illustrious Belgrade studio chronicles
how a national cinema was used to create and revise
the narrative of a country with an ever-murky identity.
Complete with heroes and legends, the fiction did not
always cleave to reality. When the studio collapsed
with the country around it, a new generation was left to
struggle with reinterpreting the self-made myths. Spurred
by a movie-mad populace that included cinephile-inchief President Josip Broz Tito, who screened nearly
9,000 feature films during his tenure and was often
deeply involved in the productions, Yugoslavia allocated
tremendous resources to making films. Scores of
triumphant war films that extolled the nation’s founding
gave way to large international coproductions featuring
stars like Sophia Loren, Anthony Hopkins and Orson
Welles, culminating in an Oscar-nominated epic about
a seminal battle of World War II. Told through the proud
recollections of the industry’s aging craftsmen and newly
restored archival clips from dozens of forgotten films,
Cinema Komunisto offers a glimpse into the wild frontier
days of a studio where the answer to every challenge, no
matter how great, was “no problem.” The film’s charming
subjects including Tito’s personal projectionist, reverently
remember the era, while acknowledging the disconnect
between the way things were and the way they were
proclaimed to be. Director Mila Turajlic’s fleet-footed debut
is a nostalgic tale of a golden age, with cheerful clips and
bright music rendered bittersweet in light of the harsh
realities that were to come.
Mila Turajlic
After graduating from the London School of Economics with a
degree in politics and international relations and competing in
numerous debate tournaments, Mila Turajlic decided to channel
her political engagement into filmmaking. She earned a degree
in film production at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade
and went on to study documentary filmmaking at La Femis
in Paris. She worked as an assistant director and production
coordinator in New York and London before going on to develop
Cinema Komunisto, her first feature documentary.
—Jesse Dubus
SAT APR 30
TUE MAY 3
WED MAY 4
144
3:15
6:30
3:15
KABUKI
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Crime After Crime
USA
2011
93 min
DIR Yoav Potash
PROD Yoav Potash
CAM Ben Ferrer, Yoav Potash
ED Yoav Potash, Frank Giraffe
MUS Jaymee Carpenter
WITH Deborah Peagler, Joshua Safran,
Nadia Costa, Natasha Wilson, Bobby Buechler
PRINT SOURCE Life Sentence Films LLC, 1375
Santa Rosa Drive, Santa Fe NM 87505. EMAIL:
info@crimeaftercrime.com.
WEB: crimeaftercrime.com.
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
Support for this program generously provided by
Visionary Circle member Lynn Kirshbaum.
Yoav Potash
Yoav Potash, a 2008 San Francisco Film Society FilmHouse
resident, recently codirected the documentary Food Stamped
(2010) in collaboration with his wife, nutrition educator Shira
Potash. His documentary Life on the Inside, about the nation’s
largest women’s prison, began airing on PBS in 2007. His short
Minute Matrimony earned a Golden Gate Award at SFIFF in
2002 and a Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Video & Film
Festival. Other films include Criminal Justice, on racial profiling,
and From the Ground Up (2000), about a group of Berkeley
students who helped rebuild burned-down African American
churches in Alabama. Crime After Crime is his first featurelength film.
documentaries
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
Yoav Potash’s moving documentary takes us inside the
case of Deborah Peagler, a woman serving 25 yearsto-life for her involvement in the murder of the man who
abused her. This intimate portrait includes the pro bono
legal team of Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa, young
attorneys who upon meeting Peagler—already more than
20 years into a life sentence—became inspired to fight
relentlessly for her release. In the wake of a new California
law offering abused women the opportunity to reopen
their defense cases, Safran and Costa were convinced
they would prevail. Shot over a five-and-a-half year period,
Crime After Crime is a fascinating and penetrating
look at a skewed justice system from the vantage of
a remarkable and committed triumvirate taking on the
powerful Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The film also offers a rare glimpse into life behind bars at
the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the
state’s largest women’s prison. Myriad twists and surprises
unfold for the audience as they did for the director, making
for an emotional roller coaster ride with pressing social
content.
—Andrea Carla Michaels
SUN APR 24
WED APR 27
MON MAY 2
6:00
6:30
9:00
KABUKI
PFA
KABUKI
145
Detroit Wild City
Detroit ville sauvage
France/USA
2010
80 min
DIR Florent Tillon
PROD Bernard Bouthier, Pierre-Emmanuel
Fleurantin
CAM Florent Tillon
ED Florent Tillon, Claire Atherton
MUS Winter Family, William Basinski
PRINT SOURCE Festival Agency, 89 New Bond
Street, London, W1S 1DA, England.
EMAIL: office@thefestivalagency.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
documentaries
In English.
Florent Tillon’s film begins with familiar but inevitably
arresting images of Detroit’s decay into postapocalyptic
pastoralism, but doesn’t end there. While most cinematic
pilgrims have portrayed the Motor City as a giant canvas
onto which they project their outsider fantasies, Tillon
has greater ambitions and greater respect. The obligatory
urban tour of empty factories and the abandoned Michigan
Central station quickly gives way to a contemplative,
nuanced discussion of what futures might actually be
possible. As we visit with a variety of Detroiters, we realize
that most of what we think we know about Detroit is
superficial, and begin to question easy assumptions about
urban agriculture, urban pioneering and Detroit’s reversion
to a “natural” state. While urban farmer Shirley Robinson
suggests “a lot of people would go back to a simple life
if they had a choice,” outsider historian/pundit Black
Monk questions the long-term effect of today’s urban
pioneering movement. “Urban pioneers find the edge, but
don’t occupy it,” he tells us. “Cities are built by settlers, not
pioneers.” Tavern proprietor Larry Mongo, on the other
hand, likens today’s young inbound migrants to those who
originally settled Detroit 300 years ago. A minimalist but
intelligent travelogue that resists sensationalism, Detroit
Wild City focuses on people rather than ruins. It suggests
that while macronarratives may help us understand the
past, micronarratives will describe the future, and Detroit’s
destiny will be the product of many individual, small-group
and localized efforts.
Florent Tillon
Florent Tillon’s films focus on landscape and the continuum
between nature and culture. Other works include Rond-point
de la Porte Maillot (2008), observing biodiversity in a traffic
roundabout, and Las Vegas Meditation (2009). This is his first
feature film.
—Rick Prelinger
FRI
APR 29
SUN MAY 1
WED MAY 4
146
7:00
2:45
8:40
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
PFA
Foreign Parts
USA/France
2010
80 min
DIR/ PROD/ CAM/ ED Véréna Paravel, J.P.
Sniadecki
PRINT SOURCE Véréna Paravel, EMAIL:
paravel@mit.edu. WEB: foreignpartsfilm.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
In English, Spanish and Hebrew with subtitles.
Véréna Paravel
J.P. Sniadecki
Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki are both associated with the
Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab. Paravel received
her PhD in anthropology in France and began making films in
2008 at Harvard, producing 7 Queens (2008) and five video
shorts grouped as the Interface Series (2009).
J.P. Sniadecki is completing his doctorate in Harvard’s Media
Anthropology program. He has produced several films while
based in Beijing, including Songhua (2007), the award-winning
Demolition (Chaiqian) 2008) and The Yellow Bank (2010).
documentaries
Anthropological in scope, sensuous in detail and
emotionally resonant throughout, Véréna Paravel and
J.P. Sniadecki’s Foreign Parts is an exemplary social
record—one which harkens back to the unsentimental
poetry of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men as well as the ground-up advocacy
work of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. The film takes a local interest in the
Willets Point neighborhood in Queens, New York, an
industrial enclave where cars are scrapped, salvaged and
repaired. Enmeshed in a symphony of radios, drill bits,
overhead plane traffic and much scraping and pounding
(Sweetgrass sound editor Ernst Karel again works
wonders here), we find an eclectic citizenry at work and
leisure. Whether listening to a middleman bark orders
for windshield glass, a Hasidic Jew explain how to wrap
tefillen or a disillusioned young man’s monologue on the
lures of drag racing, Foreign Parts is a potent trove of
talk. The observational camera threads the yard’s pocked
grounds on the heels of several local fixtures, a few of
whom emerge as sharply etched characters. Meanwhile,
the new Mets stadium looms in the near distance,
emblematic of Mayor Bloomberg’s redevelopment plans
for the entire area. Without recourse to voiceover or direct
interviews, Foreign Parts raises essential questions about
urban renewal’s effects on pluralism and the city’s working
class. The Willets Point landscape is unavoidably political,
but Paravel and Sniadecki remain adamantly concerned
with the grain of human experience there—its bitterness
and grace.
—Max Goldberg
SAT
THU
FRI
SUN
APR 23
APR 28
APR 29
MAY 1
2:15
9:00
1:15
6:45
PFA
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
KABUKI
147
The Good Life
Det Gode Liv
Denmark
2010
87 min
DIR Eva Mulvad
PROD Sigrid Dyekjaer
CAM Eva Mulvad, Sophia Olsson
ED Adam Nielsen
MUS Johann Jóhansson
PRINT SOURCE The Danish Film Institute,
Gothersgade 55, 1123 Copenhagen K,
Denmark. EMAIL: signea@dfi.dk.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
documentaries
In English, Danish, Portuguese and French
with subtitles.
“We’ve always had what we needed, and then some. And
now we don’t have anything.” Such is the predicament of
Mette Beckmann and her middle-aged daughter Anne, two
women suddenly facing an unfamiliar nemesis—poverty—in
this compelling and timely documentary by Eva Mulvad.
Against the picturesque backdrop of a Portuguese
resort town, The Good Life chronicles Mette and Anne’s
reluctance to surrender the opulent lifestyle they have
enjoyed for decades far south of their native Denmark.
While the elderly and pragmatic Mette makes feeble
attempts to ensure the pair’s survival, her entitled daughter
desperately clings to delusions of their family’s former
grandeur. Bitterly lamenting a present reality for which she
feels unprepared, Anne assuages the harsh challenges
of adult life with frequent sunbathing, the frivolous pursuit
of material objects and a particularly virulent strain of
naïveté. The quotidian struggles of this tragic and often
entertaining duo are thoughtfully juxtaposed with the
overwhelming beauty of Portugal’s coast. With a film that
unapologetically parallels Albert and David Maysles’ 1975
classic Grey Gardens, Mulvad not only crafts an engaging
narrative but also highlights a series of issues increasingly
at the forefront of modern society. As the world prepares
to face the consequences of widespread irresponsibility—
both financial and otherwise—many people find themselves
in situations not unlike that of Anne and Mette. Mulvad’s
memorable protagonists point to the uncertainty of the
human condition and offer a glimpse into a fate from
which none of us is necessarily exempt.
Eva Mulvad
Following her graduation from the National Film School of
Denmark in 2001, Eva Mulvad produced films for Danish
national television before distinguishing herself as one of the
region’s top documentary filmmakers. Her breakthrough work,
Enemies of Happiness (2006), which traces the story of the
first Afghan woman to enter the nation’s parliament, garnered
the 2006 IDFA Silver Wolf Award and 2007 World Cinema Jury
Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The Good Life is Mulvad’s
sixth feature-length documentary.
—Damon O’Donnell
FRI
THU
SUN
148
APR 22
APR 28
MAY 1
3:45
6:45
9:30
KABUKI
KABUKI
KABUKI
The Green Wave
Germany/Iran
2010
80 min
DIR Ali Samadi Ahadi
PROD Jan Krueger, Oliver Stoltz
SCR Ali Samadi Ahadi
CAM Peter Jeschke, Ali Samadi Ahadi
ED Barbara Toennieshen, Andreas Menn
MUS Ali N. Askin
WITH Pegah Ferydoni, Navid Akhavan,
Payam Akhavan, Shirin Ebadi
PRINT SOURCE Visit Films, 89 Fifth Avenue,
Suite 806, New York NY 10003. FAX: 718362-4865. EMAIL: al@visitfilms.com.
In Farsi with subtitles.
Ali Samadi Ahadi
Born 1972 in Tabriz, Iran, writer/director Ali Samadi Ahadi
fled his country alone at the age of 12. He is now based in
Germany, where he studied filmmaking and TV production. His
documentaries, starting with Culture Clan (2004) and including
Lost Children (2005), made with Green Wave producer Oliver
Stoltz, have won several awards. He made his first feature film,
the comedy Salami Aleikum, in 2009.
documentaries
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
Spring and summer of 2009 were a heady time for the
youth of Iran. The candidacy of comeback reformist MirHossein Mousavi promised a blossoming of democracy
and freedom not seen during the regimes of the Shah or
the Islamic Republic. Green scarves and banners emerged,
symbolizing the opening up of life and activism. Then,
when the people realized that the outcome—projected
so clearly in favor of Mousavi—was manipulated to give
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory,
their fury led to massive street demonstrations. These
in turn provoked a brutal government crackdown in the
form of beatings, torture and murder. As the regime
silenced conventional media outlets like newspapers
and state-run TV, new ones took their place. With The
Green Wave, filmmaker Ali Samadi Ahadi has created a
moving documentary collage that adroitly captures this
21st-century model for a new-media people’s movement.
A variety of real-time Facebook reports, tweets and
videos posted on the Internet were integrated into the film
composition, and hundreds of actual blog entries served as
background reference for the experiences and thoughts
of two young students whose story anchors the narrative.
Vivid animation appears alongside authentic, often
disturbing from-the-street photographs of the movement
and on-camera interviews to drive the moving account of a
youth revolt against one of the most repressive regimes in
the world. It’s a captivating amalgam of election meetings,
demonstrations and unrest, and ultimately attacks by
the militia, perfectly capturing a revolution in flux, yet
evergreen with hope.
—Frako Loden
SAT APR 23
SUN APR 24
MON MAY 2
4:00
2:45
6:15
PFA
KABUKI
KABUKI
149
Hot Coffee
USA
2010
88 min
DIR Susan Saladoff
PROD Carly Hugo, Alan Oxman, Susan Saladoff
CAM Martina Radwan
ED Cindy Lee
MUS Michael Mollura
PRINT SOURCE If Not Now Productions. EMAIL:
hotcoffeethemovie@gmail.com.
WEB: hotcoffeethemovie.com.
documentaries
Most folks will at least vaguely recall the infamous case
of Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, in which a woman
who spilled a cup of coffee on her lap sued the fast food
conglomerate for over $2 million dollars. As depicted in
the media, the 1994 lawsuit quickly became a nationwide
joke. Moreover, the public outrage over the perceived
legal frivolity was subsequently maniputlated to help
justify massive legal reform to favor big business. This
larger legislative agenda, sold to the public as a means
of protecting honest citizens from greedy individuals, had
been underway since the 1980s, and its success has
left the public less able to seek redress for corporate
wrongdoing in court. The alarming facts of the case—
including significant corporate misconduct and extensive
physical injury—remained hidden. Starkly unraveling a
history of corruption and self-interest, lawyer-turneddocumentarian Susan Saladoff’s vital debut feature uses
the cautionary hot coffee case—among several vivid
examples of similar injustices, each one more frustrating
and disturbing than the last—to expose a massive public
relations campaign that has both facilitated and masked
an effort to close off the one forum where average
citizens have a fighting chance at holding corporations
accountable to the law. Culminating with a travesty so
appalling that it simply cannot be ignored, Hot Coffee cuts
to the core of a corrupted civil justice system whose decay
has been systematically orchestrated, and challenges us to
do something about it.
Susan Saladoff
Susan Saladoff has spent the past 25 years practicing law and
representing victims of individual and corporate negligence.
Beginning her career as a public interest lawyer with Public
Justice, she subsequently served as the organization’s 20th
president. Recognized by her peers as an Oregon Super Lawyer,
she has previously directed, produced and edited several short
documentaries. Hot Coffee marks her feature filmmaking debut.
—Landon Zakheim
FRI
APR 22
MON APR 25
TUE APR 26
150
6:30
6:30
2:00
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
KABUKI
The Last Buffalo Hunt
US Premiere
USA
2011
76 min
DIR Lee Anne Schmitt
PROD Lee Lynch, Lee Anne Schmitt
CAM James Laxton, David Fenster,
Lee Anne Schmitt, Lee Lynch
ED Lee Anne Schmitt
MUS Roger Pipers
PRINT SOURCE CalArts/Film Deptartment,
Lee Anne Schmitt
Lee Anne Schmitt is on the faculty of CalArts’ graduate film
directing program. She creates evocative, deeply felt works that
consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual,
including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections
of landscape with personal memory (Las Vegas, 2000), with
the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003) and
with urban development (The Wash, 2005). Her previous film,
California Company Town (SFIFF 2009), an examination of
the landscape of the loss of the American dream, screened at
over 50 festivals and made top ten lists in Artforum, New York,
Time Out and Cinema Scope.
documentaries
24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia CA 91355.
FAX: 661-253-7824. EMAIL: leeanneschmitt@
gmail.com. WEB: leeanneschmitt.com.
Lee Anne Schmitt (California Company Town, SFIFF
2009) turns her essayistic directorial style onto the mythic
idea of the American Western frontier. Centering on an
officially sanctioned annual hunt on one of the last freeranging American bison herds, the film meditates on the
iconography and activities associated with a special brand
of American individuality as seen through the lens of a
dying cowboy culture. Schmitt deftly poses the ideologies
of frontierism and freedom against the practicalities
of commodification and regulation. She displays the
breathtaking open landscapes of southern Utah and
presents the men who have worked its land for decades
against a growing clutter of plastic teepees and casinos.
Perhaps most troubling is the industry that has grown out
of the hunt, now a mere tourist activity, an anachronistic
experience for scrapbooks. The result is a rounded picture
of the trajectory of the ideals surrounding our shared
national narrative, an unvarnished look at the residue of
a Western past and future. Schmitt continues her work
of documenting culture through its detritus and decay.
As in California Company Town, her approach is to let
images and activities unfold and accumulate, allowing the
duration of events to speak for themselves (recalling the
work of experimental auteur James Benning.) The result
is double-edged, as we are given access to the majestic
beauty of an America we all desire, while we also witness
it fading away.
—Sean Uyehara
SAT APR 23
TUE APR 26
WED APR 27
3:30
6:30
4:00
NEW PEOPLE
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
151
Let the Wind Carry Me
Cheng zhe guang ying lu xing
North American Premiere
Taiwan
2010
88 min
DIR Chiang Hsiu-chiung, Kwan Pun-leung
PROD Tony Luo
CAM Kwan Pun-leung
MUS Kuo Li-chi
PRINT SOURCE Yonder Pictures Limited Inc.,
11th Floor, No. 92, Sec. 1, Zhongshan N. Road,
Zhongshan District, 104 Taipei, Taiwan. EMAIL:
yonder88@gmail.com. WEB: letthewindcarryme.
com.
documentaries
Special support for this program generously
provided by Taipei Economic and Cultural Office,
San Francisco.
For nearly three decades Mark Lee Ping-bin has
collaborated with many of the most urgent filmmakers in
Asia. As the primary cinematographer to Hou Hsiao-hsien,
lensing classics such as A Time to Live and a Time to
Die (SFIFF 1987), Goodbye South, Goodbye (SFIFF
1997, 2003) and Three Times (SFIFF 2006), Lee
has altered the visual grammar of filmmaking. Let the
Wind Carry Me documents Lee’s working process and
philosophical outlook, as he strives to present a vision of
the world to filmgoers. With discussions on Lee’s work
with Hou and other Asian master directors with whom
Lee has collaborated such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Wong
Kar-wai and Tran Anh Hung, Lee’s intense and beautiful
way of seeing is made clear. His tireless quest to picture
things just so, however, does take a toll on Lee’s personal
life. His status as an itinerant artist blows him from project
to project, leaving his wife and children anchored to
their home is Los Angeles without direct access to their
husband and father. The demand for Lee’s services is
great, and for good reason, as his economical and often
fearless ideas have made lasting impact on the stunning
design of his films. And it appears that success hasn’t
changed Lee, except perhaps in giving him the means
and time to delve even more deeply into questions of
the esoteric nature of perception. But, as the film offers
discreetly, at what price?
Chiang Hsiu- chiung
Kwan Pun-leung
No stranger to SFIFF, Chiang Hsiu-chiung brought her debut
fiction feature Artemisia to the Festival in 2009. She is also an
accomplished actress, delivering a Golden Horse–nominated
performance in Edward Yang’s epic A Brighter Summer Day
(SFIFF 1992). Behind the scenes, Chiang worked as assistant
director and performance supervisor on Yang’s films, including
A Confucian Confusion (SFIFF 1995) and Yi Yi (2000), and
those of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Flowers of Shanghai (SFIFF 1999)
and Millennium Mambo (SFIFF 2002).
Kwan Pun-leung has photographed close to 20 feature films,
including (with Mark Lee Ping-bin and Christopher Doyle) Wong
Kar-wai’s highly acclaimed In the Mood for Love (2002). With
Doyle and Lai Yui-fai he has won numerous awards for his
photographic work on Wong’s 2046 (2004), including Golden
Horse, National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics
Circle awards. In 1999, Kwan directed a making-of documentary,
Buenos Aires Zero Degree, about Wong’s film Happy
Together (1997).
—Sean Uyehara
FRI
APR 29
SUN MAY 1
WED MAY 4
152
6:15
1:30
3:45
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
KABUKI
Marathon Boy
England/USA/India
2010
98 min
DIR Gemma Atwal
PROD Gemma Atwal, Matt Norman
SCR Gemma Atwal
CAM Matt Norman
ED Peter Haddon
MUS Garry Hughes
PRINT SOURCE DRG. EMAIL: blankcanvas@
blueyonder.co.uk. WEB: marathonboymovie.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
Gemma Atwal
British filmmaker Gemma Atwal was a 2009 Gucci Tribeca
Documentary Fund grantee. Her first film as a director was
Expedition Alaska (2008), a feature-length documentary that
follows a team of renowned scientists, naturalists and wildlife
filmmakers into Alaska’s four billion acres of wilderness to
assess the impact of global warming.
documentaries
In Oriyan and English with subtitles.
A national hero, Budhia Singh made headlines by running
more miles before the age of six than most people run in
a lifetime. But what motivates this young boy? Is it safe
for a five-year-old to run multiple marathons? Filmmaker
Gemma Atwal focuses on these questions and many more
in this spellbinding and often unsettling documentary.
Budhia is a scrappy slum kid from the eastern Indian
state of Orissa, where he and his mother search for their
next meal. Biranchi Das is a charismatic judo instructor
who runs an orphanage and becomes Budhia’s mentor.
Together, this dynamic duo captivates a country. As
the determined boy runs and runs, coach Das sets his
sights on Olympic gold. When India’s government hurls
accusations of child endangerment, the story takes a
sharp and sudden turn. Using footage she gathered over
several years, beginning with Budhia at three years old and
ending when he’s eight, Atwal crafts a tale with thrilling
twists and turns. Her verité style gives us an immediate
sense of access to the people and places of the story
while refraining from easy judgments. Combining intense
scenes of contemporary Indian life with striking shots
of the country, Atwal builds a fascinating story full of
contradictions and complexities that resonates well past
the last frame.
—Brendan Peterson
FRI
SAT
TUE
APR 29
APR 30
MAY 3
2:30
1:00
9:15
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
153
Miss Representation
USA
2011
85 min
DIR Jennifer Siebel Newsom
PROD Jennifer Siebel Newsom
SCR Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Jessica Congdon
CAM Svetlana Cvetko, John Behrens, Ben Wolf
ED Jessica Congdon
MUS Eric Holland
PRINT SOURCE Girls’ Club Entertainment, 912
Cole Street, #198, San Francisco CA 94117.
EMAIL: info@missrepresentation.org.
WEB: missrepresentation.org.
documentaries
Special support for this program generously
provided by Celeste and Anthony Meier.
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
Today’s female teenagers consume more media than
anyone ever. Each week, they devour more than 31
hours of television and 17 hours of music: programming
pervaded by the message that their value lies more in their
fleeting physical attraction than in lasting intellectual or
leadership capacities. Miss Representation measures
the magnitude of that phenomenon, including the way
objectification gets internalized—in a symbolic devaluing
of self-worth—inhibiting girls and women from realizing
their full potential. Actress, filmmaker and former first
lady of San Francisco, Jennifer Siebel Newsom marshals
astonishing facts and statistics, supported by provocative
stories from teenage girls as well as candid interviews
with actors, politicians, journalists, academics and activists
(a roll call that includes Jane Fonda, Geena Davis,
Margaret Cho, Condoleeza Rice, Nancy Pelosi and Gloria
Steinem). Siebel Newsom critically examines recent and
stark episodes of sexism and prejudice in the public
sphere, including the media’s unbalanced treatment of
Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and Hollywood’s ongoing
exploitation of actresses and women directors. The
accumulation of startling details will leave viewers shaken
but armed with a new perspective. A personal narrative
woven throughout, reflecting on the recent birth of her
daughter Montana, affirms Siebel Newsom’s genuine
desire to ignite national enthusiasm for helping to advance
the next generation. This is powerful advocacy on behalf
of a more balanced portrayal of women and girls across
the full spectrum of media we and they so voraciously
consume.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, former first lady of San Francisco,
is also an actress, filmmaker, spokesperson and mother. After
receiving an MBA from Stanford, she moved to Los Angeles and
landed roles in film, television and theater. She founded Girls’
Club Entertainment in order to develop and produce independent
films with strong social, political and cultural significance,
focused on empowering women. In May 2010, Siebel Newsom
partnered with the Professional BusinessWomen of California to
create the First Lady’s Young Women’s Summit to help empower
high school girls in the Bay Area.
—Kim Bender
FRI
APR 22
WED MAY 4
154
6:00
5:45
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
Nostalgia for the Light
Nostalgia de la luz
France/Chile/Germany
2010
90 min
DIR Patricio Guzmán
PROD Renate Sachse
SCR Patricio Guzmán
CAM Katell Djian
ED Patricio Guzmán, Emmanuelle Joly
MUS Miranda & Tobar
PRINT SOURCE Icarus Films, 32 Court Street,
21st Floor, Brooklyn NY 11201. EMAIL:
livia@icarusfilms.com. WEB: icarusfilms.com/
new2011/nost.html.
Special support for this program generously
provided by CineClean.
Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán first gained international recognition with his
epic documentary The Battle of Chile, filmed in 1973, a cinema
verité account of the rise and fall of Salvador Allende’s Popular
Unity government. After going into exile, Guzmán continued
to make films about his homeland, including In the Name of
God (SFIFF 1988); The Southern Cross (SFIFF 1993); Chile,
Obstinate Memory (SFIFF 1998) and The Pinochet Case
(SFIFF 2002). Guzmán teaches documentary film classes in
Europe and Latin America and is the founder and director of the
International Documentary Festival of Santiago.
documentaries
In Spanish with subtitles.
For a man who has been making political films all his life,
Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán appears at
first to be an aberration: an examination of the strangely
beautiful work of astronomers using the mammoth
telescopes in the remote highlands of Chile’s Atacama
Desert. The images of heavenly bodies they see are
millions of years old, their light reaching us only now. The
telescopes are in a place so high and dry that no humidity
exists whatsoever, nothing to interfere with the view of
the heavens. The desert has no birds, no animals, no
insects. But there is another side of the Atacama. Here
is where the Pinochet dictatorship quietly established its
biggest concentration camp. In an attempt to cover up its
crimes, the military regime dumped the bodies of its critics
by the thousands in this same desert in the 1970s. Just
as assiduously as the astronomers search the heavens,
relatives of the disappeared comb the desert searching
for the remains of the victims, the scientists as detached
and joyful in their pursuit as the relatives are impassioned
and somber. We meet both groups—although they never
intersect—on a seemingly similar quest: searching the
past, looking for the light. Guzmán magically weaves the
two together in one of his most touching, most thoughtprovoking films.
—Miguel Pendás
TUE
THU
APR 26
APR 28
6:30
6:15
KABUKI
PFA
155
Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
USA
2010
88 min
DIR Andrew Rossi
PROD Josh Braun, David Hand, Kate Novack,
Alan Oxman, Adam Schlesinger
SCR Kate Novack, Andrew Rossi
CAM Andrew Rossi
ED Chad Beck, Christopher Branca,
Sarah Devorkin
MUS Paul Brill, Killer Tracks
PRINT SOURCE Magnolia Pictures, 2222 S.
Barrington Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90064.
EMAIL: aayers@magpictures.com.
documentaries
Special support for this program generously
provided by Visionary Circle member
Susan Murdy.
The venerated New York Times finds itself front-page
in Andrew Rossi’s fascinating documentary on print
journalism and its battle to survive in a contemporary
climate of layoffs, cutbacks and new-media competition.
Given full access to the institution and its newsrooms
and corridors, Rossi tracks one year in the life of the
Times’ media desk, one that featured moments both
low—including a day in which over 100 staffers were laid
off—and high. From WikiLeaks to Twitter, new modes of
communication and journalism are brought to the forefront
as challengers to the Gray Lady’s throne, but as one
staffer notes, “Trees are still cut. Papers are still delivered.”
At the film’s heart is Times columnist David Carr, a former
drug addict who is both the paper’s strongest advocate
and its most irascible, charismatic iconoclast; whether
publishing an exposé on the Tribune Corporation’s internal
issues or giving a bratty editor a verbal slap-down, he
brings a down-to-earth humanity into such overarching
issues as new versus old media, corporate control and
journalistic integrity. Thanks to Carr and the other news
hands interviewed here, Page One makes clear that
whether it’s online or off, printed or downloaded, what
matters—and what’s at stake—is good journalism.
Andrew Rossi
“I’d been impressed with the newsroom’s openness ever
since they agreed to let me and my camera in,” notes director/
producer/cinematographer Andrew Rossi in a Filmmaker
Magazine blog entry on the making of Page One. “What really
surprised me was the realization that something fundamental
was changing, not just in the news business, but in how we as a
culture access and interpret and internalize information.” Rossi’s
first feature documentary was Eat This New York (2004),
which screened on the Sundance Channel. Page One: A Year
Inside the New York Times is his third documentary feature.
FRI
SUN
156
APR 29
MAY 1
6:15
5:30
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
Pink Saris
England/India
2010
96 min
DIR Kim Longinotto
PROD Amber Latif, Girjashanker Vohra
CAM Kim Longinotto
ED Ollie Huddleston
MUS Midival Punditz
PRINT SOURCE Women Make Movies, 462
Broadway, Suite #500, New York NY 10013.
EMAIL: kf@wmm.com.
In Hindi with subtitles.
Kim Longinotto
Born in London in 1952, Kim Longinotto is a widely acclaimed
chronicler of ordinary women fighting entrenched societal
injustice. Her extensive body of work includes a pair of films
made in Africa, Sisters in Law and Rough Aunties, as well as
Gaea Girls (SFIFF 2000) and Divorce Iranian Style (SFIFF
1998). Longinotto received the Inspiration Award at the 2010
Sheffield Doc/Fest, where Pink Saris also won the Special
Jury Award.
documentaries
Acclaimed British filmmaker Kim Longinotto (The Day
I Will Never Forget, SFIFF 2002) begins her latest
unflinching portrait of gutsy everyday heroines with a line
from Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore: “When
old words die out on the tongue, new memories break
forth from the heart.” For 20 years now, Sampat Pal Devi
has been battling the insults, violence, discrimination
and sexual abuse routinely visited on married and single
women of the untouchable caste. This intimate portrait,
shot by the filmmaker herself with unblinking compassion,
captures the founder of the Gulabi (or “Pink”) Gang
tirelessly challenging husbands, fathers-in-law and
policemen in her home state of Uttar Pradesh. In one
illuminating case, Devi intercedes on behalf of a pregnant
woman whose fiancé was pressured by his father to
abandon her. She confronts the older man—clearly not
used to having his authority questioned by a woman—and
refuses to leave until she gets her way. Devi incorporates
lodging, counseling and inspiration as part of her mission,
and the filmmaker does not shy from showing the financial
and personal strain of a 24/7 calling. To the contrary, the
most searing scene is arguably a nasty argument between
Devi and her husband, who claims fame and notoriety
have gone to her head. Knocked off her pedestal, she
is touchingly vulnerable and acutely real. Longinotto has
enormous admiration for her subjects but little interest in
glorifying them. She recognizes that all social progress is
the work of ordinary human beings, flaws and all.
—Michael Fox
SAT
THU
APR 23
APR 28
1:00
6:15
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
157
The Pipe
Ireland
2010
83 min
DIR Risteard Ó Domhnaill
PROD Rachel Lysaght, Risteard Ó Domhnaill
CAM Risteard Ó Domhnaill
ED Nigel O’Regan, Stephen O’Connell
MUS Stephen Rennicks, Hugh Drumm
PRINT SOURCE Scannáin Inbhear, Barr na Trá,
Béal an Átha, Co. Maigh Eo, Ireland.
EMAIL: thepipethefilm@gmail.com.
WEB: thepipethefilm.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
documentaries
The discovery in 1996 of a vast natural gas deposit off
Ireland’s west coast led global energy giant Shell to begin
laying a high-pressure pipeline across the seabed and
onto shore, where it would terminate at a refinery near
the small town of Rossport. Shell did not ask Rossport’s
farmers and fishermen if it could pass its pipeline beside
their houses and through the community’s pristine
commonage and coastline; according to resident Willie
Corduff, it simply informed them of the fact. “They tried to
bully us, and it didn’t work.” In 2005, the community made
international headlines when Corduff and four others
were jailed for blocking construction of Shell’s pipeline.
Thousands rallied behind the Rossport Five. “And that,”
says Corduff, “is when it all began.” Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s
reflective and rousing documentary incorporates archival
footage from those days but begins its own chronicle
a year later, during a violent nighttime clash between
police and locals blockading the construction site after a
government go-ahead to Shell. What follows is an intimate,
stirring and utterly timely portrait of a community straining
under a titanic battle—for what it considers its very
survival—against a Goliath of money power and a largely
compliant state. Ó Domhnaill’s keen-eyed camera stays
close to the lush countryside and a handful of courageous,
colorful players in the grassroots effort. Shell, meanwhile,
which refused to participate in the film, remains a shadowy
onscreen conglomeration of trespassing land surveyors,
men with binoculars, locals in hardhats tempted by shortterm jobs and a hulking, ominous ship named Solitaire.
Risteard Ó Domhnaill
Irish-born Risteard Ó Domhnaill spent summer vacations as a
child in County Mayo, where the town of Rossport is located.
He filmed The Pipe over the course of four years beginning
in 2006. He holds degrees in theoretical physics from Trinity
College in Dublin and history and Gaelic from the University
of Galway, and has worked as a news cameraman and current
affairs editor. The Pipe marks his directorial debut.
—Robert Avila
SAT APR 23
SAT APR 30
MON MAY 2
158
6:00
12:15
6:30
NEW PEOPLE
KABUKI
PFA
Position Among the Stars
Stand van de sterren
Netherlands
2010
111 min
DIR Leonard Retel Helmrich
PROD Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich
SCR Leonard Retel Helmrich, Hetty NaaijkensRetel Helmrich
CAM Leonard Retel Helmrich, Ismail “Ezther”
Fahmi Lubish
ED Jasper Naaijkens
MUS Danang Faturahman, Fahmy Al-Attas
PRINT SOURCE Films Transit, 252 Gouin
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
In Indonesian with subtitles.
Special support for this program generously
provided by Netherlands Cultural Services.
Leonard Retel Helmrich
Born in the Netherlands in 1959, Leonard Retel Helmrich
is a master of cinema verité as well as one of its leading
contemporary innovators. “The more dramatic a certain situation
is,” he says, “the least aware people are of the camera—even
when you are standing in their field of vision. This is why
practically no one looks directly into the camera during
shooting.” Shape of the Moon (SFIFF 2005) received the
Joris Ivens Award for best feature-length documentary at the
2004 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and the
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2005
Sundance Film Festival.
documentaries
Boulevard E., H3L 1A8 Montreal, Canada.
EMAIL: janrofekamp@filmstransit.com.
WEB: positionamongthestars.com.
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich (Eye of the Day,
2001; Shape of the Moon, SFIFF 2005) returns with
the latest chapter in his stunningly artful and intimate
portrait of the Shamshudin family of Jakarta. After a
pulse-quickening recap of choice moments from the first
two films—all the introduction one needs—grandmother
Rumidjah is summoned to the big city from the countryside
by her son Bakti to counsel and motivate her teenage
granddaughter Tari—the family’s great hope for attaining
middle-class stability. Tari is smart but devious, and more
interested in boys, music and colored contact lenses than
studying. And presuming she does get into a university,
where will the money for tuition come from? Meanwhile,
Bakti breeds his beloved fighting fish and serves as a
low-grade neighborhood functionary. The domestic drama
of intersecting lives unfolds against a neon backdrop
of rapidly increasing materialism in Indonesia and the
fascinating underlying tension between secular modernism
and Islam’s central place in Indonesian life. Helmrich’s
virtuoso long sequences, distinguished by how-did-hedo-that? camera movement, transmute the banality of
the everyday into art without romanticizing it. In one
memorable passage, he turns the unannounced arrival of
workers fumigating the alleyways with clouds of pesticide
smoke into a scene that proceeds from unnerving to
otherworldly to absurdly funny. Helmrich’s eye, though,
remains fixed on his subjects. Tari may represent the
future of the family and Indonesia, but Rumidjah is the
rock, the moral center, the connection to the land and, yes,
the stars.
—Michael Fox
TUE APR 26
WED APR 27
WED MAY 4
8:50
6:00
9:00
PFA
KABUKI
KABUKI
159
The Redemption of General Butt Naked
USA
2010
84 min
DIR Eric Strauss, Daniele Anastasion
PROD Eric Strauss, Daniele Anastasion
CAM Eric Strauss, Peter Hutchens, Ryan Hill
ED Jeremy Siefer
MUS Justin Melland
PRINT SOURCE part2 pictures, 287 Court Street,
Brooklyn NY 11231. EMAIL: rachael@part2
pictures.com. WEB: generalbuttnakedmovie.com.
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
documentaries
Can a warlord become an advocate for peace? Can a
nation ever heal the open wounds of a brutal civil war?
The Redemption of General Butt Naked is the account
of a man and a country attempting to move forward
in the wake of unspeakable violence, both on a quest
for revolutionary transformation. In 1996, General Butt
Naked metamorphosed from ringleader of the ruthless
Butt Naked Battalion—responsible for the deaths of over
20,000 people in Liberia’s 14-year civil war—to Joshua
Milton Blahyi, an evangelist who claims to be bringing
peace and forgiveness to his ravaged country. Or so the
story goes. This riveting documentary charts the rise and
fall of the Butt Naked Battalion and the general’s horrific
tactics. We see the fearsome armies he led—literally naked
except for weapons draped on their backs—slaughtering
fellow countrymen in Monrovia’s streets; we see the child
soldiers he recruited, hefting machine guns larger than
their emaciated torsos. Yet years later, with infectious
charisma, Blahyi preaches the Gospel to the family
members of his victims. He begs forgiveness and testifies
before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “I
killed your brother out of madness,” he says. “Now, let me
be your brother. Count on me when you need brotherly
counsel.” Are we witnessing a changed man? Filmmakers
Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion neither romanticize
nor prosecute Blahyi on his alleged journey of redemption.
Instead, they shrewdly task the audience with a set of
harrowing questions about justice, violence, mortality and
faith.
Eric Strauss
Daniele Anastasion
The Redemption of General Butt Naked is the first feature
film for director/producers Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion.
The two have previously produced and directed various series
for broadcast, such as Hard Time, an Emmy-nominated prison
series that premiered on the National Geographic Channel in
2009, as well as work for Frontline/World, the History Channel
and A&E, among others. Strauss also directed, shot and
produced Heroin Crisis and Iraq’s Guns for Hire. Anastasion’s
other credits include KKK: Inside American Terror and Inside
the Body Trade.
—Sara Dosa
THU APR 28
SAT APR 30
MON MAY 2
160
1:30
6:45
9:45
KABUKI
KABUKI
KABUKI
Something Ventured
USA
2011
84 min
DIR Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine
PROD Paul Holland, Molly Davis, Dan Geller,
Dayna Goldfine, Celeste Schaefer Snyder
CAM Dan Geller
ED Jen Bradwell, Gary Wiemberg
MUS Laura Karpman
PRINT SOURCE Zeitgeist Films, 247 Centre
Street, 2nd Floor, New York NY 10013.
EMAIL: nadja@zeitgeistfilms.com.
WEB: somethingventuredthemovie.com.
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
Dan Geller
Dayna Goldfine
Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s past films include Ballet
Russes (2005), which received a national theatrical release,
the Emmy Award–winning Kids of Survival (1999) and
Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm (1994), which was
nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding
Directorial Achievement in the Documentary Form. They live in
San Francisco.
documentaries
Special support for this program generously
provided by Margaret and Will Hearst, and
by Visionary Circle members Julie, Wally and
Walter Haas.
One day in 1957 a Wall Street brokerage firm received a
strange letter from a group of men who would come to be
known as “the traitorous eight.” Scientists and engineers
at Shockley Semiconducter, frustrated with William
Shockley’s “confusing and demoralizing management,”
wanted to offer their services as a group to another
company. A young banker who traveled to California to
meet them had a better idea. What followed would usher
in an era characterized by new terms like “venture capital”
and “start-up company” and new names like Apple, Intel,
Cisco Systems and Silicon Valley. Beginning with the
crew-cut techies of the late ’50s, Something Ventured
tells the story of the engineers, inventors and capitalists
who joined forces to change the landscape of American
technology and finance. Directors Dan Geller and Dayna
Goldline use interviews and vintage footage to set outsize
personalities against the shifting images of recent history,
spiced with the conflicts inevitable when financial and
computer mavericks interact. “(Steve) Jobs is a national
treasure,” observes Arthur Rock, who helped launch Intel,
Apple, Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems. “He’s so
visionary, so bright. I had to fire him, though.” “[Venture
capitalist Tom Perkins] had to take me to buy a suit,”
remembers Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers.
“He always said he could buy the suit, but that still didn’t
help.” This intriguing documentary reveals the origins, the
risks, the triumphs and the failures behind many of the
high-tech and financial giants who created the world we
now live in.
—Pamela Troy
SUN
SUN
APR 24
MAY 1
2:00
3:00
PFA
KABUKI
161
Tabloid
USA
2010
87 min
DIR Errol Morris
PROD Julie Bilson Ahlberg, Mark Lipson
CAM Robert Chappell
ED Grant Surmi
MUS John Kusiak
PRINT SOURCE IFC Sundance Selects, 11 Penn
Plaza, 18th Floor, New York NY 10001. FAX:
646-273-7250. EMAIL: ebrambilla@ifcfilms.
com.
documentaries
Special support for this program generously
provided by Celeste and Anthony Meier.
“You could tell a lie long enough that you believe it,”
suggests Joyce McKinney, the fabulously eccentric
subject of Errol Morris’s new documentary covering tabloid
journalism, bondage, Mormonism and love. A former Miss
Wyoming who boasts an IQ of 168, McKinney became
infamous in the UK in 1976 as the mastermind of the
“Manacled Mormon Kidnapping” after she abducted a
former lover who had abandoned her for the Mormon
Church. Charged with kidnapping and rape, she held him
hostage in a cottage in Devon for several days, where
she chained him to a bed (with mink-trimmed handcuffs)
in order to erase all elements of “Mormon brainwashing”
from his mind. “I would have skied down Mt. Everest nude
with a carnation in my nose for him,” noted the everquotable McKinney during her trial, which became one of
England’s biggest media stories of the 1970s thanks to
its combination of kinky sex and a buxom all-American girl
gone wild. Now living relatively anonymously, McKinney
“reveals all” to Morris’s camera as do various British
tabloid hacks still busy putting their own spin on the tale.
A welcome return to the eccentric Americana of Gates
of Heaven (1980) and Vernon, Florida (1982), Tabloid
never uncovers what is the truth and what is a lie—Morris
writes that even he doesn’t know. “And that’s what I like
about it.”
Errol Morris
A former graduate student at UC Berkeley and associate of the
Pacific Film Archive, Errol Morris famously bet Werner Herzog
he could direct a feature film; the result, Gates of Heaven
(1980), started Morris on a critically acclaimed career (and
forced Herzog to eat his own shoe). His films include Vernon,
Florida (1982), The Thin Blue Line (SFIFF 1988) and Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control (1997). His film on former Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003), won an
Oscar for Best Documentary. In 2008, Morris received SFIFF’s
Persistence of Vision Award.
TUE
THU
162
MAY 3
MAY 5
9:30
2:45
KABUKI
NEW PEOPLE
The Tiniest Place
El lugar más pequeño
International Premiere
Mexico
2011
100 min
DIR Tatiana Huezo
PROD Nicolás Celis
SCR Tatiana Huezo
CAM Ernesto Pardo
ED Paulina del Paso, Tatiana Huezo
MUS Leonardo Heiblum, Jacobo Lieberman
PRINT SOURCE Centro de Capacitación
GGA Documentary Feature Contender
Special support for this program generously
provided by the Consulate General of Mexico,
San Francisco.
Tatiana Huezo
Born in 1972 in El Salvador, Tatiana Huezo moved to Mexico
City at age five. A graduate of the prestigious Centro de
Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), she’s the recipient of the
Gucci/Ambulante award, a grant established in 2007 to support
new and established Mexican documentarians. Huezo has taught
documentary film at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
The Tiniest Place is her first feature-length documentary.
documentaries
Cinematográfica, Calzada de Tlalpan, 1670 Col.
Country Club, 04220 Mexico City DF, Mexico.
EMAIL: boris@elccc.com.mx.
To walk into the jungle-shrouded village of Cinquera,
El Salvador, is to enter a world where ghosts walk,
passing back and forth between the past and present.
Here, decades after a brutal civil war annihilated the
village, survivors return to bury their dead and rebuild the
community from the ashes. During the 1980–92 civil
war, Cinquera was invaded by the National Guard, which
targeted it as a potential haven for guerrillas of the FMLN
opposition. Cinquera was literally wiped off the map,
disappearing temporarily from official charts in a conflict
that resulted in 80,000 deaths with tens of thousands
more disappeared. We see the result of that devastation
on the resolute and composed survivors now sowing new
seeds in Salvadoran-born Mexican filmmaker Tatiana
Huezo’s stunning debut feature. In an unobtrusive portrait
of collective memory, we mingle with villagers as they
recall horrifying ordeals of rape, mutilation and torture; a
man talks about the madness that consumed him; an old
lady habitually talks to her dead daughter. Of those who
managed to escape into the woods, many joined the FMLN
(whose rebel flag still appears painted on the sides of
houses). A remarkable example of Mexico’s bourgeoning
documentary scene, The Tiniest Place guides us through
this landscape with a contemplative, poetical eye, as the
deep forest looms in mute witness to the testimonies we
overhear. Battle scars and wounds may run deep but they
prove unable to destroy the soul of Cinquera.
—Christine Davila
SAT
SUN
THU
APR 30
MAY 1
MAY 5
6:00
4:15
5:45
PFA
KABUKI
KABUKI
163
!Women Art Revolution
USA/Canada
2010
83 min
DIR Lynn Hershman Leeson
PROD Lynn Hershman Leeson, Kyle Stephan
SCR Lynn Hershman Leeson
CAM Hiro Narita, Antonio Rossi, Fawn Yacker,
Lise Swenson, Lynn Hershman Leeson
ED Lynn Hershman Leeson
MUS Carrie Brownstein
PRINT SOURCE Zeitgeist Films, 247 Centre
Street, 2nd Floor, New York NY 10013. FAX:
212-274-1644. EMAIL: nadja@zeitgeistfilms.
com. WEB: womenartrevolution.com.
documentaries
This is a Cinema by the Bay film.
Can you name three women artists? The question was
asked of visitors to two major metropolitan art museums.
Nobody filmed could. If you can’t either, see this film.
And if you can, ditto, because you might owe that fact
to the feminist artists, critics, curators and academics
who, starting in the late 1960s, took on the old-boy art
establishment in an all-out WAR: Women Art Revolution.
Lynn Hershman Leeson was there with her camera and
in 40 years has never turned it off. In her living room,
in artists’ studios, over coffee, she recorded dozens of
women artists. Their candid tales of WAR come woven
together in this engaging, provocative film with original
graphics by Spain Rodriguez and a score by Carrie
Brownstein. Some of the stories are public record, such
as congressmen debating the merits of Judy Chicago’s
The Dinner Party with its depictions of “women’s genital
regions.” Others were newsworthy protests at major
institutions (meet the Gorilla Girls—still masked). But
most are personal revelations that, taken together, form a
history of a culture that grew out of the struggles of the
1960s but remained marginalized: How Faith Ringgold,
the first to raise her voice in protest, challenged Robert
Rauschenberg and Carl Andre as a representative of the
made-up “WSABAL”; where Leo Castelli Gallery told the
late Nancy Spero to put her artwork; and the childhood
outrages that led women artists to adopt fictional
identities, as in Howardena Pindell’s Free, White and 21
and Hershman Leeson’s own Roberta Breitmore series.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “a provocateur du cinema” (Variety), is
internationally acclaimed for her pioneering work in media and
new technologies, in which she explores issues of identity and
privacy, the interfacing of humans and machines and real and
virtual worlds. Having come on the scene with her audacious
Roberta Breitmore series (1974–78), she turned to cinema
in 1998 with Conceiving Ada (SFIFF 1998), followed by
Teknolust (SFIFF 2002) and Strange Culture (SFIFF 2007),
all featuring Tilda Swinton. Her art is in numerous museum
collections. Hershman Leeson is chair of the Film Department
at the San Francisco Art Institute and professor emeritus at the
University of California, Davis.
—Judy Bloch
SAT APR 23
MON APR 25
164
3:00
8:40
SFMOMA
PFA
Yves Saint Laurent l’Amour Fou
France
2011
100 min
DIR Pierre Thoretton
PROD Kristina Larsen, Hugues Charbonneau
CAM Leo Hinstin
ED Dominique Auvray
MUS Côme Aguiar
PRINT SOURCE IFC, 11 Penn Plaza, 18th Floor,
New York NY 10001. FAX: 646-273-7250.
EMAIL: ebrambilla@ifcfilms.com.
Special support for this program generously
provided by Howard Roffman.
Pierre Thoretton
Oise native Pierre Thoretton is a visual artist who has had
solo exhibitions in France and Germany. Yves Saint Laurent
l’Amour Fou is his first feature. “I don’t know about fashion, I’m
interested in people,” he has said of the film. “For me, it’s a film
about love.” He knew Saint Laurent from the time when he was
the husband of actress Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello
Mastroianni and YSL muse Catherine Deneuve.
documentaries
Few figures loom larger in the annals of 20th-century style
than Yves Saint Laurent. Barely out of his teens when he
was appointed head of the House of Dior, he triumphantly
launched his own brand only a few short years later. For
decades he epitomized the jet-set lifestyle, dressing its
luminaries and sharing their giddy excesses. Visual artist
Pierre Thoretton’s first feature captures the well-known
highs and lows of this remarkable but also stormy career:
Saint Laurent’s breakdown when conscripted into the
French Army in 1960, during Algeria’s Independence War;
signature designs like the Mondrian-inspired dresses that
epitomized Pop Art chic; his celebration of feminine beauty
via muses from Deneuve to Iman; becoming the first haute
couture house to “democratize” fashion via affordable
prêt-à-porter lines; working compulsively hard and playing
harder in the cocaine-fueled celebrity bubble of Studio
54. But Thoretton’s film provides us privileged access
beyond the headlines. Its primary voice is that of Pierre
Berge, Saint Laurent’s surviving business and life partner.
Recalling their half-century together, Berge decides
to surrender some of that past by selling many of their
fabulous properties in what is dubbed the auction of the
century. As he bids adieu to long-cherished possessions,
we get the vicarious thrill of touring sumptuous homes
in Morocco and France (one of them an “homage” to
Proust) and a stunning art collection that stretches from
ancient Egyptian artifacts to Matisse and Warhol. Yves
Saint Laurent l’Amour Fou documents a crazy love for all
things beautiful.
—Dennis Harvey
TUE
THU
MAY 3
MAY 5
7:00
8:15
KABUKI
KABUKI
165