Mar 30, 2010
Festival
The 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22-May 6), under the auspices of an ongoing partnership with The Film Foundation and American Express, will present a new print of Satyajit Ray’s masterwork The Music Room(India 1958) at the Castro Theatre and the Pacific Film Archive.
The Music Room, the stunning film by Satyajit Ray, is based on a novel by the Bengali writer Tarashankar Banerjee about a turn-of-the-century aristocrat named Biswambhar Roy whose wealth is dwindling but who continues to spend money on lavish concerts in his music room. His existence may be threatened, but his vision of perfection, embodied in the hypnotic musical sequences, will not be denied. Many of Ray’s films have a rueful, Chekhovian tone of ironically tinged regret, a tone that is crystallized in The Music Room, one of the greatest films in the history of Indian cinema. When the Academy Film Archive restored Ray’s film, it had to work with extremely compromised and damaged materials-the finished product is something close to a miracle. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation.
The work of Satyajit Ray occupies a special place in the history of the San Francisco International Film Festival. His first film, Pather Panchali, had its U.S. premiere at the first Festival in 1957. Since then, the Festival has shown more of his films than those of any other director. In 1992, the Festival bestowed its directing award upon him. Unfortunately, he passed away just prior to the Festival and was unable to receive it in person.
The Music Room will play 2:30 pm, Saturday, May 1 at the Castro Theatre and 6:15 pm, Sunday, May 2 at the Pacific Film Archive. In Bengali with English subtitles. The Music Room will be presented as part of The Film Foundation and American Express’s Preservation Screening Program. In its third year at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Preservation Screening Program brings a new cinema collection, “20 Years/20 Films,” that represents a diverse selection curated from the nearly 545 films restored by The Film Foundation since its inception in 1990.
For tickets and information, go to www.sffs.org or call 925-866-9559.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.