Mar 27, 2012
Education
The San Francisco Film Society’s Youth Education program continues its year-round outreach to Bay Area students and educators with the annual Schools at the Festival (SATF) program at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 19-May 3). The pioneering film literacy program exposes a new generation of viewers to the best in international and independent cinema, bringing thousands of Bay Area students to Festival screenings and engaging them with filmmakers from around the world. Students of all ages have the opportunity to participate in the Festival through private subsidized screenings at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas and interactive visits to classrooms by filmmakers whose work is being shown at the Festival.
Sixteen narrative features, documentaries and shorts programs have been carefully selected for this year’s Schools at the Festival program to suit a broad range of curricula and grade levels, with scheduled weekday matinees open to all Bay Area high school, middle school, elementary school and home school classes. Targeted subject areas include foreign languages such as Chinese, French, Spanish and German, as well as issue-based programming for school subjects such as language arts, environmental studies, ethics, history, journalism, politics, science, social studies and world affairs.
Thanks to the generous support of the Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education Fund, all public school students and teachers will pay just $1.00 per ticket for all SATF screenings; all other students and teachers will pay the discounted ticket price of $2.50 for Festival admission. Tickets for the program are available exclusively to Bay Area educators and students and may be purchased only through the SATF office by contacting Keith Zwölfer at kzwolfer@sffs.org or 415-561-5040. Schools at the Festival tickets cannot be purchased through the regular Festival box office.
Supplementing a two-week schedule of educational screenings at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, dozens of local and visiting filmmakers will also travel to numerous Bay Area classrooms to screen their work and interact directly with students. Filmmakers who have visited classrooms in the past include Debra Granik, Tim Hetherington, Mike Ott, Tanya Hamilton, Allison Bagnall, Jay Rosenblatt, Doug Pray, Jean-Marie Téno, Amanda Micheli, Ivy Ho, Les Blank, Peter Bratt, Leland Orser, Lourdes Portillo, Michel Ocelot and Ousmane Sembène.
A set of study guides, developed by SFFS Youth Education staff, will be made available for select Schools at the Festival films. Each guide is designed to help teachers integrate the film’s content into their curricula, prepare students before screenings, direct postscreening discussions and provide additional resources, follow-up activities and projects. All SATF programs are designed to meet the Visual and Performing Arts Content Standards for California public schools.
The program will also include the fourth annual Schools at the Festival Student Essay Contest, funded by the Nellie Wong Fund, which aims to cultivate students’ imaginations, enhance their critical thinking and creative writing skills and instill a greater appreciation for the magic of movies in young audiences. Students in grades 2-12 are invited to submit essays in response to designated questions about select Schools at the Festival films. Contest winners receive cash awards ranging from $50 to $500 and will be announced on May 21.
Films in the SATF program offered to middle and high school students range from inspiring narratives to in-depth cultural explorations and gripping exposés includingBitter Seeds, the final film in Micha X. Peled’s globalization trilogy, which follows a farmer’s daughter who fights to give powerless Indian cotton farmers a voice against multinational seed and pesticide giant Monsanto; Robert Guédiguian’s French-language feature The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the story of a former union representative whose sense of social justice is shaken when he’s the victim of a crime; Last Call at the Oasis, Oscar-winning documentarian Jennifer Yu’s enthralling, entertaining and ultimately sobering look at the world’s water crisis; Ellen Perry’s British feature Will, about an 11-year-old orphan with a passion for football who journeys from England to Istanbul in order to see his beloved Liverpool play in the Champions League Finals; Benjamin Kahlmeyer’s documentary Meanwhile in Mamelodi, a beautifully crafted portrait of a place and a family set against the raucous backdrop of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa; Bay Area filmmaker Aurora Guerrero’s debut feature Mosquita y Mari, a beguiling coming-of-age tale of two Chicana teens growing up in Huntington Park near Los Angeles; and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Alyson Klayman’s documentary about the renowned Chinese artist and dissident who has waged an uncompromising battle against censorship and authoritarian government using imagination, skill and the social media of the day.
This year’s elementary school program, The Storytellers Show, is a diverse collection of animated and live-action short films from England, Ireland, Poland, France, Australia, Thailand and the U.S. including Kealan O’Rourke’s animated shortThe Boy in the Bubble, a gothic love story narrated by Alan Rickman in which a heartbroken boy finds a magic spell to shield him from emotion forever; and Katie Mahalic’s short documentary The Vacuum Kid, about a Michigan fifth-grader with an obsession for vacuum cleaners whose unusual passion has made him a mini-celebrity.
Two additional films will be screened exclusively in the Schools at the Festival program and not featured in the regular SFIFF55 program: Katie Dellamaggiore’s documentary Brooklyn Castle, about an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level that also has the winningest junior high school chess team in the nation, cultivating many of the nation’s highest ranked players; and Agostino Imondi and Dietmar Ratsch’s German documentary Neukolln Unlimited, an authentic look at the lives of three Neukolln siblings who are fighting for their Lebanese family’s right to reside in Germany. Brooklyn Castle will screen Tuesday, April 24 at 10:00 am at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Neukolln Unlimited will screen Thursday, May 1 at 10:00 am at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, either in person or via Skype.
Closing out the SATF program is the annual presentation of youth-made short films,Youth Media Mashup, featuring eleven of the best new narrative and documentary works by mediamakers aged 18 and under from the Bay Area and beyond.
SFFS Youth Education and its Schools at the Festival program are designed to develop media literacy, broaden insights into other cultures, enhance foreign language aptitude, develop critical thinking skills and inspire a lifelong appreciation of cinema. Since its inception in 1991, SATF has served more than 60,000 Bay Area students and 3,000 teachers from more than 500 educational institutions. Founded by the late Robert S. Donn, a retired San Francisco public school teacher with a tremendous passion for film, the program currently is coordinated by program manager Keith Zwölfer.
Schools at the Festival is made possible this year with support from Union Bank Foundation, Visa, Wells Fargo, Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education Fund and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.
For more information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners contact your SFIFF publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
55th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 19-May 3 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, the Castro Theatre, SF Film Society Cinema and SFMOMA in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Held each spring for 15 days, the International is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in one of the country’s most beautiful cities, featuring 200 films and live events, 14 juried awards and $70,000 in cash prizes, upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests and diverse and engaged audiences with more than 70,000 people in attendance.