Apr 2, 2013
Education, Festival
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 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9). 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.
Fourteen 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 and Spanish, as well as issue-based programming for school subjects such as language arts, ethics, health, 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 Youth Education Manager 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 and New People Cinema, 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 most 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 post-screening 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 fifth annual Schools at the Festival Student Essay Contest, funded by the Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education 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 in early June.
Films in the SATF program offered to middle and high school students range from inspiring narratives to in-depth cultural explorations and gripping exposés including The Kill Team, Bay Area-filmmaker Dan Krauss’s disturbing story of U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan in 2009, who were convicted of murdering innocent civilians; first-time filmmaker Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree, the moving story of a teenage girl who hatches a plan to rescue her sister from an arranged marriage in rural Senegal, cast entirely with non-professional actors playing roles that mirror their own lives; Inequality for All, Bay Area filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth’s incisive film that explores the ever-widening gap between rich and poor through the insights of former Labor Secretary (and current UC Berkeley professor) Robert Reich, who demonstrates how income inequality not only destabilizes markets but also ultimately undermines democracy itself; the late Claude Miller’s final film, Thérèse, starring Audrey Tautou as a bored and wealthy woman living a staid existence in the 1920s French countryside, trapped in a loveless marriage and stifled by societal convention; Much Ado About Nothing, Joss Whedon’s retro-cool black-and-white modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare’s comedy of manners; Google and the World Brain, veteran documentarian Ben Lewis’s provocative documentary about the Google Books Project and its global implications; Spanish-language narrative The Cleaner, writer-director Adrián Saba’s debut feature about a solitary middle-aged forensic worker who discovers an orphaned boy at one of his cleanup sites after a mysterious epidemic eviscerates Lima’s adult population; and Chimeras, Mika Mattila’s revelatory documentary about a pair of political pop artists in China-the hugely successful middle-aged painter and sculptor Wang Guangyi and the gifted young photographer Liu Gang-as they grapple with their place and purpose in a new China of pervasive materialism and Western influence.
Two programs from the main SFIFF lineup are being offered specifically for elementary school students this year. Based on the popular children’s books by Gabrielle Vincent, the French animated feature Ernest & Celestine is a warm and funny fairytale adventure following the improbable friendship between a street busking bear and a spunky mouse. There will be two screenings of Ernest & Celestine: one in French with English subtitles for older students studying the French language, and one in French with the English subtitles read aloud for younger students. The second elementary school program is the Family Films shorts program, a diverse collection of animated and live-action films from Argentina, Canada, England, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, Poland and the U.S., including the new animated short from Pixar, The Blue Umbrella, the story of two umbrellas trying to make a connection, with the help of a surprisingly musical cityscape.
Two additional films will be screened exclusively in the Schools at the Festival program and not featured in the regular SFIFF56 program: Kerri Gawryn’s documentary A Lovely Day, about nine young Oakland rappers who embark on a six-month journey to find their voice, their talent and their path to healing within Hip Hop culture; and Jillian Schlesinger’s SXSW Audience Award-winning documentary Maidentrip, which follows 14-year-old Dutch teen Laura Dekker as she sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. 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 Works, a short film program featuring a dozen of the best new narratives, documentaries, music videos and animation by media makers aged 18 and under from the Bay Area and beyond. Shorts 7: Youth Works screens for the public Saturday April 27, 1:00 pm at New People Cinema.
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 75,000 Bay Area students and teachers from more than 500 educational institutions.
Schools at the Festival is made possible this year with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Union Bank Foundation, Visa, Wells Fargo Foundation and Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education Fund.
For tickets and information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request screeners or 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.