Apr 10, 2013
Festival
The San Francisco Film Society announced today that Eric Roth will be the recipient of the 2013 Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9). The award will be presented to Roth at Film Society Awards Night, Tuesday May 7 at Bimbo’s 365 Club.
The Film Society and its year-round programs in exhibition, education and filmmaker services will be the beneficiary of the star-studded fundraiser honoring Roth; Philip Kaufman, the previously announced recipient of the Founder’s Directing Award; Ray Dolby, the previously announced recipient of the George Gund III Award and the soon-to-be-announced recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award for excellence in acting. Katie and Todd Traina are chairs of this year’s Film Society Awards Night gala.
“It is a truly unique talent that can craft real life and history into the stuff of drama,” said Ted Hope, executive director of the Film Society. “Eric Roth shows us the heroic in the everyday, and reveals our common reality to be truly heroic. His writing allows us to reclaim history and help us understand its relevance anew, never diminishing the complexity of individual journeys-be they the stories of our idols or of those that we might have passed on the street. In each case he delivers us a front row seat, and the experience is as impactful and emotional as if we lived these events ourselves. We are proud to name him as the newest recipient of the Kanbar Award.”
Roth will also be honored at An Evening with Eric Roth at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Wednesday May 8, 8:30 pm. An onstage interview and a selection of clips from his notable screenwriting career will be followed by a screening of The Insider (dir. Michael Mann, USA 1999, 157 min.). When tobacco executive-turned-whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) tries to tell his story to 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the mysterious strangers, anonymous death threats and all-powerful corporations who get in his way turn his life into a real-life thriller in Michael Mann’s suspenseful, ripped-from-the-headlines drama, a modern classic nominated for seven Academy Awards.
Over the past four decades, Eric Roth has been a major screenwriting presence in Hollywood. Roth won an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for his screenplay for the Best Picture-winning Forrest Gump (1994), directed by Robert Zemeckis. He received his second Oscar, Golden Globe and WGA Award nominations for the screenplay for Michael Mann’s The Insider, for which Roth also won the WGA’s honorary Paul Selvin Award and a Humanitas Prize. He garnered both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for the screenplay of Steven Spielberg’s drama Munich (2005), and for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), which also brought Roth a BAFTA nod. Roth’s other writing credits include Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998), Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and a contribution to one of the last films by legendary film director Akira Kurosawa, Rhapsody in August (1991). More recently, he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Award is named in honor of Maurice Kanbar, a longtime member of the board of directors of the Film Society, film commissioner and philanthropist with a particular interest in supporting independent filmmakers. Kanbar is the creator of New York’s first multiplex theater and, most recently, Blue Angel Vodka.
Previous recipients of the Kanbar Award are David Webb Peoples (2012), Frank Pierson (2011), James Schamus (2010), James Toback (2009), Robert Towne (2008), Peter Morgan (2007), Jean-Claude Carrière (2006) and Paul Haggis (2005).
For more information or tickets to Film Society Awards Night, contact Trista Kendall at 415-561-5049 or tkendall@sffs.org.
Tickets to An Evening with Eric Roth are $20 for SFFS members, $25 for the general public. Box office now open online at festival.sffs.org.
For more information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews contact your SFIFF publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
56th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 56th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 25-May 9 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, the Castro Theatre and New People Cinema 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 in attendance.