Mar 25, 2016
Festival
San Francisco, CA — The San Francisco Film Society announced today that it will host the International Premiere of Our Kind of Traitor, on Sunday May 1, 5:00 pm at the Victoria Theatre as part of the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival. Special guests expected to attend include Susanna White, director of the film. The complete Festival lineup will be announced on Tuesday, March 29.
“We’re so pleased to be premiering this film at the Festival,” said SFFS Director of Programming Rachel Rosen. “It’s the kind of smart, exciting, expertly acted movie that San Francisco audiences will appreciate.”
Susanna White’s vastly entertaining adaptation of John le Carré’s novel involves mild-mannered poetry professor Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor) who becomes embroiled in the defection of a Russian oligarch with a prodigious head for numbers. Vacationing with his beautiful wife Gail, Perry meets the extroverted Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) who invites him to an all-night party and later challenges him to a tennis match. There’s a hidden motive in these overtures of friendship-the Russian wants to defect and hopes that Perry can broker a deal such that the British government will secure the safety of Dima and his family.
Thus begins a globetrotting, suspense-ridden drama involving the unscrupulous machinations of money launderers, bankers and Secret Service bureaucracy where the criminally minded Dima emerges as the most heroic of anti-heroes. The film memorably skewers the British banking system and a Secret Service bureaucracy that calmly toys with people’s lives. As MI6 official Hector (Homeland’s Damian Lewis) puts it, “Who cares what the Russians do as long as they spend their money here?” a question that underlines the various hypocrisies characterized in the film. Skarsgård steals every scene he’s in while McGregor is terrific as the mild-mannered teacher keen for adventure. Faithfully following le Carré’s smart and tricky novel, screenwriter Hossein Amini (The Two Faces of January, SFIFF 2014) tracks the action from Marrakech to the Swiss Alps and all centers of power in between. Our Kind of Traitor plays Sunday May 1, 5:00 pm, at the Victoria Theatre and Tuesday May 3, 12:30 pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission. In partnership with Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions will open the film in Bay Area theaters this summer.
Susanna White was born in 1960 in the UK. She is a director and producer known for helming Nanny McPhee Returns (2010), several highly acclaimed miniseries (2012’s Parade’s End, 2005’s Bleak House for which she won a BAFTA for Best Drama Serial) as well as individual episodes of Masters of Sex and Billions.
Tickets to Our Kind of Traitor are $13 for SFFS members, $15 general. Box office opens March 29 for SFFS members and April 1 for the general public, online at sffs.org.
For general information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners, contact your Festival publicist.
59th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 59th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 21-May 5 at the Castro Theatre, the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission, the Roxie Theater and the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco and BAMPFA in Berkeley. Held each spring for 15 days, SFIFF is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in one of the country’s most beautiful cities, featuring nearly 200 films and live events, 14 juried awards with nearly $40,000 in cash prizes and upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests.