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2020 Festival Honorees

Pedro Costa: In the Dark, Into the Light

By Johnny Ray Huston

In cinema you need a certain intimacy, and maybe a little solitude.
— Pedro Costa

In the 21st century, few if any directors have demonstrated the persistence of vision of Pedro Costa. This persistence is present in his dedication to the same primary setting, the Fountainhas shantytown within Lisbon, Portugal, and to real-life characters. (Only Tsai Ming-liang has approached his faithfulness to an ensemble of vérité actors). But more than that, it is a matter of Costa’s singularly intense devotion to cinema as a means for both documentary truth-telling and dramatic transformation.

Their titles are one way of entering the world of Costa’s movies. The films starring his male lead Ventura, 2006’s Colossal Youth (taking its name from a 1980 post-punk album by Young Marble Giants) and 2014’s Horse Money, sport potent clashes between two words. But when a woman is at the center of the story, her name — her presence — spills over into the title: 2000’s In Vanda’s Room focuses on smack-addled Vanda Duarte, while his latest work, 2019’s Vitalina Varela, is wholly named after its protagonist, a move that evokes classic examples of melodrama (Mildred Pierce) and formal rigor (Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles), both of which are abundantly present within Costa’s most recent vision.

The ramshackle places in Costa’s films are lived-in — marked and smudged walls, detritus on grimy floors — and the cinematography and framing can make an empty door sing a lovelorn song. Rail-thin and completely racked by asthmatic smoker’s coughs, setting her works and latest fix on an old phone book, Vanda of In Vanda’s Room spends almost the entirety of the movie in bed, yet the film is as much about the fast destruction of her neighborhood as it is about her gallows humor and slow deterioration. Portugal trailblazed harm reduction with its policies near the time of the movie’s release, and one can’t help but think of Larry Clark’s 1971 book of photographs, Tulsa, when sharing its pitilessly faithful look at drug usage. Gorgeous lensing tangoes with squalor. One character’s base needs stab through another’s storytelling. Costa’s compositional use of light, darkness, and color is painterly in a masterful sense, yet true to modernity; he never falls into sentimentality or beauty for beauty’s sake.

One triumph of Colossal Youth is that maybe no director more than Costa makes the transition to digital video without losing film’s rich depth, gaining a new nimbleness. Now on methadone and a mother, her hard edges softened, Vanda has gone from unknowingly dancing with death to resolutely and good-humoredly striking deals with it. But the movie’s star is incantatory Ventura, who repeats a profession of love — a lament learned by heart — over and over, and in doing so transforms documentary into drama. The personality of Fountainhas’s crumbling old buildings is replaced by the vulgar generic sterility of new ones. Sounds of construction and destruction are a constant. The movie is sweepingly magnificent, and humble. Costa closes with a gorgeous, tranquil 360-degree panorama.

In a breathtaking moment near the beginning of Horse Money, what seems like a still gives way to motion. Shot in color, at once a directly provocative and deeply elliptical work, the movie is reminiscent of black-and-white genre cinema in its shadow play. Here, as in all of Costa’s features, the background sounds of other voices in other rooms are a constant, but this time they turn derisive as Ventura — right hand trembling, legs shuffling forward when he isn’t laid bare like a corpse — navigates a hero’s odyssey through isolating terrain. Vitalina Varela is introduced through a sunlit doorway, but soon is submerged in the dark as she whispers a monologue about her arrival in Portugal from Cape Verde, burning with fever in the wake of her unfaithful husband’s funeral.

In Nina Simone’s “In the Dark,” darkness focuses one’s attention on one’s heartbeat, promising thrills and kisses and new discoveries that fuse the sacred and profane. Cinematic blackness is equally vivid in Vitalina Varela. True to his name, Ventura ventures — at times even crawling — through a relentless maze of darkness as a priest attempting to console Vitalina, that is when he isn’t talking to himself. (Costa has cited Robert Bresson’s 1951 Diary of a Country Priest as an influence.) As is her right, it is Vitalina who dominates the movie, with her strong countenance and searching gaze. “You didn’t expect my visit,” she tells her late husband. The world teems outside his pitch-black apartment, now hers. Inside, she cooks for others, or, in a pivotal scene, sends them on their way when their talk of a mistress offends her. Most of all, Vitalina does time alone, her defiant loyalty matched by the director at her side.

Today it is impossible to ignore that loneliness and solitude are at the core of Costa’s films, and that his characters, struggling with government housing if they even have a place to live, are at risk more than ever within the global societal climate. There is Vanda Duarte of In Vanda’s Room, staring blindly into the abyss as her entire neighborhood literally crumbles around her. There is Ventura of Colossal Youth, examining new project apartments for a family that he lost long ago. And there is Vitalina Varela in the final, perhaps brightest, shot of the movie that bears her name, building a home, all on her own.

“You are completely alone in the movie theatre,” Costa has said. “It’s not a party. It can become something joyful.”

Johnny Ray Huston is a writer and collagist based in San Francisco, He has acted in Gary Fembot’s play Shelter in Place (2018) and movies Mondo Bottomless (2006) and Scream of the Mandrake (2015). He co-composed music, sang, and acted in Skye Thorstenson’s Tourist Trap (2010), which won a Golden Gate Award at the 2011 Festival.

Sienna Miller: Here to Sear Your Brain

By Randy Myers

It’s somewhat of a shock that it’s only been in these last couple of years that multi-talented actress Sienna Miller, unforgettable in films as diverse as the gangster drama Layer Cake (Festival 2005) and the epic adventure The Lost City of Z (Festival 2017), segued from primarily supporting performances to lead roles.

From her intense portrayal of the notorious Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl (2006) – one of her first major parts – to her BAFTA/Golden Globes nominated turn as a resilient Tippi Hedren enduring the wrath of Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl (2012), her performances and characters sear into our consciousness and stay lodged there.

That’s particularly true of her shattering acting tour de force as an anguished, troubled mom desperately searching for her missing daughter in American Woman (2019). Miller’s crescendo-like performance in Jake Scott’s gritty drama remains not only a career high, but is also one of the most effective, visceral acting feats of the previous decade.

The New York-born, London-raised actress consistently becomes a high point of the films she’s in, and is one of contemporary cinema’s most dedicated, under-appreciated artists, a risk taker with the ability to tackle tough characters that are shouldering the burdens of an unjust world. Her latest dramatic high note is the tricky-to-pull-off Wander Darkly (2020), which world-premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Critics praised her portrayal of an unhappily married mom clinging to the fabric of a deteriorating past after a devastating car crash. Diego Luna costars as her husband.

Born to a South African mom who was a model and a banker father, Miller studied acting at New York’s prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute but didn’t immediately migrate to her true love, acting. She originally pursued a modeling career, gracing photo ad campaigns for Coca-Cola, and frequently popped up on the cover and in the folds of the Italian edition of Vogue. The acting profession, though, beckoned, and her passion for it blossomed at an early age.

“I’ve wanted to be an actress for as long as I can remember, and I can say I was almost born in the theater,” Miller recalled in a previous interview. “My mum went into labor while she was watching The Nutcracker Suite in New York – apparently I was kicking like mad.”

While she seemed to come out of nowhere with her role as a girl mixed up with mobsters in Matthew Vaughn’s frisky 2004 debut feature Layer Cake, a slick gangster double-stabber starring a relatively unknown-at-the time Daniel Craig, Miller had appeared before in other films – her first being the 2001 romantic comedy South Kensington – opposite Rupert Everett and Elle Macpherson. She had also appearing on TV, including as a member of the regular cast of the clever Keen Eddie (2003), a witty Fox series about a New York cop fumbling about due to a transfer to a precinct in London.

But it was her sultry and sexy role as a cagey Tammy in Layer Cake that garnered the most attention from audiences and critics alike for the 21-year-old. In 2008, all that attention led to her receiving the BAFTA rising star award.

Frequently, Miller’s work helped prop up the performances of actors around her, from Heath Ledger in the title role of Lasse Hallstrom’s fanciful Casanova (2006) to Bradley Cooper’s Navy SEAL in Clint Eastwood’s 2015 Oscar-winning adaptation of Chris Kyle’s autobiography American Sniper.

That’s changing now, Miller said in a recent Forbes interview during her American Woman tour.

“I’ve supported men through many films where there is that kind of arc, but [American Woman] was a first for me. I think it was the best role I’ve ever been given.”

Miller’s diverse filmography includes numerous appearances in many high-profile films, including the actioner G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) wherein she got the chance to play a villain; Bennett Miller’s somber true crime drama Foxcatcher (2014); and the trippy, rather prescient Ben Wheatley adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (Festival 2016).

Other spot-on performances include portrayals of one of Jude Law’s many love interests in the 2005 Alfie remake, a prostitute in Anna Boden’s and Ryan Fleck’s gambling addict drama Mississippi Grind (2015), the tenacious wife of British explorer Percy Fawcett in James Gray’s striking The Lost City of Z, a mobster’s daughter in Ben Affleck’s 2016 adaptation of author Dennis Lehane Live by Night, and a no-guff police detective in 21 Bridges (2019).

Miller’s love for acting extends to the stage where she’s received raves for playing, amongst others, the iconic characters of Sally Bowles in the 2015 Studio 54 Broadway production of Cabaret and Maggie in the 2017 West End production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Given Miller’s ascent in films and theater, it might seem like she might be taking it a bit easier in the coming years. Not true.

In a 2019 Vanity Fair interview prior to American Woman’s debut, Miller – who is involved in numerous charity organizations – says she won’t be slowing down anytime soon. “I don’t think I’ve ever reached a point where I’m like, ‘Ah, this is it. Now I can relax and sit back.’ I don’t think I ever would, irrespective of what success I might have or failure I might have. I think it’s always an endless kind of quest for something. And in these moments where you creatively tap into something that you weren’t even sure you were aware of or had – I suppose that’s the closest you can come to some sense of achievement.”

Randy Myers is a freelance film critic for the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times. He is the former president of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle and adores independent and international films.

Steve Coogan: Artist and Self-Lampooning Genius

By Pam Grady

They have been at it for 10 years now, actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, on working holidays all over Europe, first captured in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (Festival 2011), and in three subsequent outings, most recently in The Trip to Greece (Festival 2020). They dine at the world’s best restaurants and stop in at historical sites, but mostly they bicker and engage in constant games of one-upmanship, particularly in the realm of celebrity impersonation. Their dueling Michael Caines have become the stuff of cinematic legend.

Steve Coogan has turned playing Steve Coogan into an art form unto itself. Coogan has played Coogan for Jim Jarmusch in Coffee and Cigarettes (Festival 2004) and even played himself interviewing himself in a promotional video for his 2015 autobiography Easily Distracted. But it is in his work for Michael Winterbottom that Coogan has honed his Pirandellian feat of blending life and art, without vanity.

“I don’t want to be someone who’s trying to spin this public image of me. I have had some negative tabloid press… but I don’t like to portray myself as somehow a nice, well-rounded person,” Coogan told The Guardian.

It is in Coogan’s indifference to how he or his characters might come across that fueled his initial career. Of Irish descent, he was one of six children raised as a Roman Catholic in Manchester. He studied acting at the Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama before embarking on a career as stand-up comic who became known for his gift of mimicry. He further supported himself doing voice work on commercials and on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. In 1992, he and fellow Manchester Polytechnic alumnus John Thomson won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

A television one-off The Dead Good Show (1992) followed by a stint on the 1993 Channel 4 series Saturday Zoo introduced the world to two of Coogan’s striking creations, beer-sodden Mancunian Paul Calf and his sister Pauline (portrayed by Coogan in blonde wig and full drag, which typically consisted of a micro-mini skirt and stiletto heels).

It was on the radio, on the 1991 BBC show On the Hour, that Coogan introduced a character that has loomed large over his career, Alan Partridge, a TV presenter whose defining traits are insensitivity coupled with a complete lack of self-awareness. Coogan brought the character to television in the sketch series The Day Today (1994) before starring in his own show Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1994-1995), which was followed by a second series, I’m Alan Partridge (1997-2002); a feature film, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), and assorted TV specials and videos, and even a comic autobiography, I, Alan: We Need to Talk about Alan (2011), written by Coogan, Armando Iannucci, and Rob and Neil Gibbons.

With Alan Partridge, Coogan’s fame was sealed and he began his assault on the big screen. He’d appeared in a few films, although it was his voice work as The Mole in Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (1996) that stands out among his early roles. His film career really started in earnest with The Parole Officer (2001), in which he played the titular character and co-wrote the screenplay. The following year, he began his long association with Winterbottom when he was cast in 24 Hour Party People as Tony Wilson, the real-life Mancunian TV presenter who founded the influential Factory Records and Manchester’s famed Hacienda Club – and also a man Coogan knew.

“I co-presented a regional TV show with him,” Coogan told Time Out. “There are elements of Alan Partridge about him. But he’s the left-wing, avant-garde Alan Partridge.”

In 2004, Coogan starred as Phineas Fogg in a remake of Around the World in 80 Days. Among his diverse portrayals have been a gay man who discovers he fathered a child in youth in Happy Endings (Festival 2005), an ambassador in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), as a film director in over his head in Tropic Thunder (2008), a high-school drama teacher in Hamlet 2 (2008), a complaining constituent in In the Loop (Festival 2009), a father caught up in a bitter divorce in What Maisie Knew (Festival 2013), strip-club owner Paul Raymond in Winterbottom’s The Look of Love (2013), and an obnoxious celebrity chef whose life is upended by a grandson he never knew he had in Ideal Home (2018).

With 2013’s Philomena, Coogan could add Oscar nominee to his list of achievements when he and co-writer Jeff Pope received a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay and, as a producer, Coogan shared in a Best Picture nomination. The actor starred in the film as well, playing Martin Sixsmith (on whose book Philomena is based), a journalist who helps an elderly woman (Judi Dench) find the son she was forced to surrender for adoption 50 years before.

With Stan & Ollie (2018), Coogan enjoyed a dream job, playing comic legend Stan Laurel, a performer he’d grown up admiring. The character the actor portrayed was an elderly Laurel treading the boards one last time with his old partner during a 1953 tour. Coogan received well-deserved BAFTA and British Independent Film Awards nominations for his performance.

He appreciated the turn to drama. While he continues to make comedies, as exemplified by The Trip movies, he has also sought to expand the range of not just what he can do but of how fans and filmmakers perceive him.

“The trick, says Steve Coogan, is to keep moving, branch out,” revealed an interview with the actor in The Guardian when Stan & Ollie came out. “Aged 53, he feels that comedy, by and large, is a young man’s game. He has been there, he has done it, and is shifting towards drama. ‘It’s fine to be biting, acerbic, and silly when you’re young,’ he says. ‘But when you grow up you need to act like a grownup.’ Then he catches himself and winces at his presumption. ‘Maybe that just means I’ve got flabby and middle aged.'”

Pam Grady is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Alamo Drafthouse: Community through Curation

By Cory Sklar

The Alamo Drafthouse is a haven. A refuge for lovers of cinema. A community space for horror heads, arthouse fans, and rom-com enthusiasts. A place where an aspiring filmmaker can meet their favorite director, writer, cinematographer, or actor. But it’s not just a place for cinephiles. It’s also a place where the general moviegoing public can enjoy a first-run movie with some great food and an amazing cocktail, and not have to worry about hearing the people next to them yapping or the distraction of someone using their phone. It’s a place for parents that need somewhere to get away for a little bit. The Alamo is many things to many people, who can all agree on one thing: It’s a damn good place to watch a movie.

The Alamo began in 1997 as a hand-built, single-screen movie theater in the warehouse district of Austin, Texas, founded by Rice University alumni Tim and Karrie League, a married couple with a deep passion for cinema. They opened the original Alamo with one intention—to have “good food, good beer, and good films all in the same place,” and create a place where they would want to spend a lot of their own time.

Early on, they innovated the theater experience with an ingenious food and drink ordering system. Write your order on a little card, place it on the front of your table, and boom! A friendly member of their waitstaff takes care of it for you. This method also innovated how to communicate while collectively watching a movie. Who needs to talk when you can just pass notes to your friends in the theater like you did back in junior high? That note-passing comes in handy at The Drafthouse, as the theater also implemented its now-famous no talking/no texting policy. Tim League came up with this idea after observing a particularly rowdy and distracting screening of Blue Velvet (1986). We’ve all been there.

As the Alamo chain quickly expanded locations, the original warehouse district location became a hub for eccentric movie curation with cult films, foreign rarities, and actor and director retrospectives. There were silent movies with live scores performed by local bands, as well as themed nights where food-and-drink menus were based on the plot or location of the evening’s main attraction. Soon a community of film lovers was born.

The popularity of these specialty screenings paved the way for the other Alamo theaters to specialize in genre screenings of movies hand-selected by some of the most talented, knowledgeable film buffs in the biz, like Jake Isgar who programs the Alamo Drafthouse at The New Mission in San Francisco, and his predecessor, Mike Keegan. These screenings bring out the weird-movie loving hordes of Drafthouse devotees. Each location enlists local tastemakers to curate weekly specialty nights, such as Music Mondays, Terror Tuesdays, and Weird Wednesdays. These hosts and curators become figureheads of their respective scenes. Going to an Alamo screening feels like being in an exclusive club and hanging out with the cool kids.

With their annual Fantastic Fest, a film festival that shines a spotlight on horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, Asian, and cult films, Tim League and the Drafthouse programmers introduce young, up-and-coming underground filmmakers to audiences nationwide. Through their in-house house distribution company, Drafthouse Films, The Alamo has exposed important works that would have otherwise been left in obscurity to audiences worldwide. Movies like The Miami Connection (1987), Roar (1981), Ms. 45 (1981), The Visitor (1979), and Wake in Fright (1971, Festival 2010) have all found new audiences, as they have been lovingly restored and rereleased by Drafthouse.

Alamo Drafthouse also works to collect, preserve, screen, and distribute obscure classics through their nonprofit organization The American Genre Film Archive (AFGA), which houses over 6,000 film prints, a 4K film scanner, and theatrical and home video distribution arms. This accomplishment in addition to their unique programming is more than enough reason why this modern institution is so deserving of SFFILM’s prestigious Mel Novikoff Award.

As a pioneering art and repertory film exhibitor who exposed so many films to so many audiences, Mel Novikoff was someone who set out to expand the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. Few institutions outside of the Alamo Drafthouse embody Mel’s work and vision more.

Oh, and Alamo’s fried pickles aren’t bad either.

Cory Sklar is a local musician, radio DJ, writer, and sometimes host at The Alamo Drafthouse at The New Mission in San Francisco.

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