SFFILM Exclusive

 
Gary Meyer, the recipient of the 2024 Mel Novikoff Award, given in appreciation of the Landmark Theatres co-founder’s role in enhancing film audience’s appreciation of world cinema, is the rare awardee who knew the legendary operator of the Surf theater chain for which the prize is named. Theirs was a friendship going back decades to long before Meyer himself achieved legend status, a figure well-known throughout the film community in the Bay Area and far beyond even the United States’ borders.

How did Gary and Mel meet?

“I was 16 and went to the Surf Theatre one night and a new schedule was out with Metropolis on it,” Meyer remembers in conversation at a San Francisco coffee shop.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic was a favorite of the teenager’s. He’d even screened it in the theater he ran in his family’s Napa hayloft. He even had film stills that he wanted to offer to the theater for its display cases. When a worker pointed out Novikoff sitting in the Surf’s café, Meyer approached him.

“I introduced myself and we spent the next two hours together,” Meyer says. “We became friends throughout the rest of my time in high school. Then when I went off to San Francisco State, I was allowed to go to the theater all the time.”

The friendship lasted a lifetime. In later years, the two men ran their respective companies, Landmark and Surf, from an office across the street from the Vogue Theatre.

“He brought all of his enthusiasm and knowledge to what he was doing with this film program. Every day, we’d spend time talking about ideas,” Meyer says, adding, “What I learned from him about showmanship and programming and how to make relationships, everything I could possibly learn. I hope [I] provided some ideas and things to him as well. So, I carry my thoughts about Mel and what he meant to me and the larger world with me every day.

“I’m thrilled [to get the award] because Mel meant so much to me and to not only the Bay Area film community but international filmmakers and programmers.”

What made Gary Meyer the movie man we know today?

Meyer’s road to the Novikoff prize began when he was a small child. He laughs now recounting how his love of movies was nearly strangled at birth. His father and grandparents were jewelers. When he turned seven, he received a watch for his birthday, a Swiss-made LaMay, named for his grandmother, and he was sent to the movies by himself for the first time. His dad was a co-pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II and wanted his son to know a little bit of what that was like, so he sent Gary off to a war movie double bill.

By the end of the first film, Strategic Air Command, a 1955 drama starring James Stewart, the little boy knew he hated war movies. He called home asking to be picked up but his father said he couldn’t have sat through two movies and asked him what time it was. That’s when Meyer noticed the watch was gone. He never found it. And he hated the second feature as much as the first.

That experience soured him on movies, but as with so many children, Disney provided a gateway drug, luring him back. Meyer fell in love with Lady and the Tramp, knocked out not just by the story but by the animation. It wasn’t long before he started making his own animations, using clay and his father’s camera.

He also started haunting movie theaters, seeing usually two double bills each week. He remembers with a laugh being allowed to pick the evening’s entertainment during one of the Meyer family’s monthly trips to San Francisco. A boy magician as well as a budding filmmaker, he saw that a movie called The Magician was playing at the Esquire with something called Wild Strawberries. And, thus, young Gary dragged his family to an Ingmar Bergman double feature.

“I didn’t fully understand what was going on but, visually, the films made a huge impression on me and I wanted to learn more about the filmmaker,” Meyer says.

That curiosity about the people making the films and their methods coupled with the hayloft screenings that he started when he was 11 provided Meyer with an invaluable informal education. He haunted the library, making suggestions about what books should be added to the film collection, to learn more about auteurs like Bergman. Meanwhile, through his early work in exhibition, he taught himself how to match music with silent films and became familiar with film rentals through the 8mm and later 16mm catalogs from which he built his programs.

When Meyer enrolled at SF State, his aim was to become a filmmaker. But after college when the opportunity to work in production didn’t arise, he went back to where he started as a middle-schooler. He became a booker with United Artists, initially charged with scheduling second features at drive-ins and worked his way up to head booker at the chain. His stint there revealed his talent for innovation, as he instituted things like dust-to-dawn screenings at drive-ins and early experiments in midnight movies.

“That was a lot of fun to do,” Meyer says.

More on Gary Meyer’s professional life in and around the Bay Area

By 1975, he was ready to strike out on his own, co-founding Repertory Theatres, Inc., which would later become Landmark, so named because most of the chain’s theaters at the time were actual historical landmarks. Even as he managed the growing chain, Meyer continued to demonstrate his flair for programming, taking on Berkeley’s UC Theatre and the Nuart in Los Angeles. His work portfolio expanded at the same time as he spent years in various capacities at the Telluride Film Festival.

When Meyer’s run at Landmark was over, he took over the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond, his love of programming sustaining the place from 2001–2012. By 2014, Meyer was onto a new adventure, founding the online magazine Eat Drink Films. More recently, the man who harbored ambitions of becoming a filmmaker has seen that come to fruition at long last as he came on board as a producer on a documentary, The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher. Now, he’s joined another, Planet Ocean, a documentary still in its early stages about deep-sea mining.

As the Novikoff honoree, Meyer picked the film that will accompany the award ceremony and onstage conversation. When he was at Landmark, Meyer liked programming a short before a feature and he does that here with Jessica Yu’s Sour Death Balls. The comic documentary short film screened at the Festival in 1993. It also screened as a short before Landmark features as Meyer fell in love with it the first time he saw it.

For the feature, he chose Macario, a melodrama by Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón, in which a poor man gains mystical powers. Meyer was a kid when he first saw, perhaps even at the1960 Festival where the film’s star, Ignacio López Tarso, won the best actor Golden Gate Award. He recently revisited it when the Morelia International Film Festival screened a new restoration. It was on his mind when asked to choose his Novikoff feature, a decision that brought out the programmer in him.

“I wanted to show a film a lot of people hadn’t heard of, a great photographed film,” Meyer says, adding “It made an impression [on me] when I saw it. It was my introduction to magical realism.”

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

 
Last century’s technology becomes a thing of the present in Oskar Alegria’s Zinzindurrunkarratz. In his last film, Zumiriki, a documentary in which he recorded his experiences living in a self-made cabin over a number of months, he employed Super 8 footage shot by his father. In the new work, he goes farther with that ancient tech. As he and a donkey named Paolo journey through the Basque countryside along an old drover’s road to deliver supplies to a shepherd, he records the trek with his dad’s old camera, its first use in decades.

The Super 8 camera is a sound model. The film Alegria’s father used had a magnetic stripe running down the edge of the frames to capture audio. Super 8 cartridges are still manufactured but only as silent film. Creativity would be required in Alegria’s approach to sound in this new endeavor.

This is the director’s third feature to screen at SFFILM Festival. His debut feature, The Search for Emak Bakia, was part of the 2012 festival. Zumiriki was actually selected twice for inclusion. It was meant to be part of the 2020 festival. After the COVID lockdown of that year forced the festival’s cancellation, Zumiriki screened in 2021’s online festival as part of the 2020 Festival Flashback.

We recently caught up with Alegria over email to chat about this latest film, working with an analog camera, and his approach to sound when faced with technical limitations. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A Interview

Q: In Zumiriki, you used some of your father’s Super 8 footage. In Zinzindurrunkarratz, you employ more of your dad’s images but also shoot the film with his camera. Were you already thinking ahead to this film while you were working on Zumiriki or did this come from a different impulse?

Oskar Alegria: Good question, it seems that you are in my mind, I thought and rethought all of that… I had a first idea of ​​filming Zumiriki with that Super 8 camera, which would have made it a greater survival exercise in that isolation in the forest… but I also thought that it would be good for the film [if the camera could] be charged by the sun (with the solar panels for the camera batteries), developed by the moon (with a pinhole photo that I take in the same cabin as a camera obscura and the light of the moon makes it arise), and that the trees were also filmmakers, by placing the camera in them and rolling with their wind, which gives it a human sway… In short, it was left pending to use my father’s Super8. For this film, it was like a call — continue shooting with that same camera but starting from its last image and completing the last frame that was interrupted.

Q: Talk about working with Super 8 and its mysteries. As you point out in the film, it is not like video or digital recording where you can see what kind of images you’re getting. You not only don’t know what you’re getting, you can’t be sure you’re capturing any pictures at all until the film is processed. Can you describe that element of anticipation and surprise when the footage comes back from the lab and you see it for the first time?

Oskar Alegria: It has been an exercise full of magic and I would say meaning… as you say, filming today with the help of a screen that allows you to review what you shot is having the present and even the future tied up too much… you know what you have filmed and you can review it again and again. But filming blind or in the dark first makes you have more aim, you have to refine a lot and not repeat, and it allows you to see the filming in another time more linked to the past or to a verbal tense that I believe is that of the film, that of the remembered present.

Q: Each cartridge is 3 minutes, 20 seconds long. You had two expired cartridges left over by your father. How many more did you use?

Oskar Alegria: I made a calculation based on my small budget, I think that these films are more artisanal than large production and I am the one who financed and worked on the film. So, I was able to buy about 25 coils… some for the introduction and initial tests and then I had about three per day on the road. That’s enough for an average of almost 10 minutes of film a day, with very tight shots, no more. That makes you refine the filming even more. It’s like the donkey, Paolo, my great companion. Donkeys eat very little, about eight times a day, and the best they can find on the road, unlike the horse that gets a big belly and for that reason gets sicker than the donkey. In my case, filming was the same exercise in containment or frugality. I could only roll eight times but the best of the way. Do not waste as is done now with digital.

Q: There is so much about memory in the film. The old Super 8 footage, the attention paid to the old way of doing things, and observation of a disappearing way of life (all of those shepherds reduced to one). In a way, the film is a memory itself, a new one built on the old ones. You’re also recreating the past through your walking journey with Paolo at your side. Is film and this film, in particular, a way of preserving a world and way of life before it completely disappears?

Oskar Alegria: Not only this film, my other films have revolved around that circle as well, trying to catch the last breath or revive something that is about to disappear. For example, that is seen in the titles. The names of my films always reflect what for me is the most important mission, that a Basque expression or word that is falling out of use comes to the fore and gains strength again. I think I make films just for that, to rescue a lost word.

Q: Can you talk about your films as a way of celebrating Basque language and culture?

Oskar Alegria: Absolutely, my parents’ town was one of the last places where everyone spoke Basque a century ago. Now children and young people have recovered it, but there were generations that lost it. It is the place where in my childhood I heard that language spoken for the first time, but only from the two last speakers… who met every day at 12 at the river, each one on a bank, and spoke to each other in a language that seemed mysterious, but it was also a language that flew through the air and crossed the river through the air… like something magical and secret.

Q: Since sound film is no longer manufactured, you had to get creative with your audio in keeping with the limitations of the technology. You’ve designed this in the way the Japanese repair pottery, showing “the cracks” by keeping images and sound mostly separate. Talk about finding that inspiration and on designing your soundscape. How much was planned in advance, based on sounds you knew you wanted, and how much was left to happenstance?

Oskar Alegria: That’s right, when I recovered my father’s camera, which had not been used for 41 years and had been stored in a closet, I felt that call: If it works, you should make a film with this same camera as an archeology exercise. The first miracle was discovering that it worked. And the second was to discover that reels with sound are no longer manufactured, so we had to shoot with silence as the protagonist. I believe that all accidents, wounds, or scars have a lot to say. As in that Japanese art of fixing what is broken with gold glue, here there was also a possibility of working with silent images that the sound of gold could sew and join together, but always with that honesty of showing the second life of things. Not fixing it perfectly, but rather the camera continued giving its beautiful imperfection. The silent, the meaningful, is also very virtuous and perhaps the best way to show certain corners of the soul, such as ruins or lost gestures.

Q: Film is such a tactile medium, but how far did you go with that?. Was this edited digitally or were there razor blades and tape involved in putting the sections together?

Oskar Alegria: It has to do with the above. When one sense disappears, there is another that develops more and takes its place… that’s why when filming silent images and uniting them through blind sounds, I realized another sense little treated in cinema, touch. When we do not see and we do not hear, it is the hand that guides us through the dark. And this is a film that recovers a path into the fog and that is where it is felt by touch. It is not a path made with the feet, I realized that when rolling my hand is very present, like an extension of the body to be able to touch and feel the landscape and its treasures.

Q: SFFILM has screened all three of your features. Can you describe your relationship with the organization and what you are looking forward to the most on your upcoming visit?

Oskar Alegria: It is a pleasure and a great honor to repeat a place like San Francisco. The great Paolo comes to mind again, the memory of donkeys works like this, they always return to the place where they were treated well, they always return to the place where they were given love and good food. For me, San Francisco and its festival is a similar place, more than a house, a good stable… and this is a great compliment.

Zinzindurrunkarratz screens 5:45 PM, Friday, April 26, at the Marina Theatre and 11:30 AM, Saturday, April 27, at BAMPFA.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

During World War I, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo but was then the Belgian Congo, supplied rubber crucial to the war effort. In World War II, the country supplied uranium the Manhattan Project needed as it developed the atomic bomb. During the Vietnam war era, copper from Congo aided the American war effort. These days the region supplies conflict minerals and minerals crucial to electric cars and cell phones.

Those factoids—what Grimonprez calls the “Congolese algorithm”—explaining how important the African nation is to Western interests come from filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, SFFILM’s 2024 Persistence of Vision award winner. The Belgian filmmaker brings his latest, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat to the Festival to accompany the award ceremony and onstage conversation. The winner of a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival for cinematic innovation, the documentary is a heady mix of Cold War politics and cool jazz that investigates the 1961 assassination of what was then the Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba.

“What the film is zooming in on is the ground zero moment in the beginning of the 1960s when so many colonies became independent,” Grimonprez says during a recent call from Greece, where he was traveling.

“There was this sort of hope of the Global South waking up and pursuing its own dream, it was actually smothered by a neocolonialist movement and neocolonialist grab of resources by the West and the United States. The story in the film is of what happened and what is still going on today.”

Johan Grimonprez’s History at the SFFILM Festival

Grimonprez is no stranger to the Festival. He first attended in 1999 when his first feature DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a deep dive into the history of airplane hijacking and revolution, screened. Then in 2016, the Festival screened Shadow World, his documentary about the international arms trade based on Andrew Feinstein’s book of the same name. For this latest work, Grimonprez has something of a personal connection: He is Belgian and the conspiracy against Lumumba included Belgian elements, starting with King Baudouin I. Belgium’s ruler had prior knowledge of an assassination plot but, bitter over losing his colony, said nothing.

“This is something that was silenced for a long time,” Grimonprez says. “The parliamentary commission on the murder of Patrice Lumumba only happened in 2001. Even then, the [extent of what happened] is not fully acknowledged; the conclusions were sort of not 100% sort of accurate and decisive.”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is Grimonprez’s attempt at a more accurate and decisive reckoning of what happened to Lumumba, setting the assassination within the context of colonial history, liberation, and the Cold War and finding the conspiracy that led up to it. At the same time, the United States engaged in a program of propaganda under the guise of entertainment, sending jazz musicians to perform in newly free Africa, while in the US musicians like drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln used their art as a form of protest.

All of these things, plus politicking in Africa and the United Nations proving to be anything but are part of Grimonprez’s kaleidoscopic documentary that is made up almost entirely of archival footage. A living history lesson unfolds of infighting at the United Nations, CIA shenanigans, and Congo and other newly liberated nations’ first steps of self-determination as First World nations and corporations seek to throttle those efforts. The “soundtrack” in the title is literal. The film is broken down into chapters with graphics suggesting album cuts from the Blue Note catalog. Music is omnipresent with performances from Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and more embellishing and commenting on history unfolding.

“You know, when independence was demanded by the Congolese roundtable, the parliamentarians brought their musicians, they brought African jazz,” Grimonprez says. “Music was very much part of the political agency.”

“The film is called A Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Music clips but with academic footnotes,” he adds. “It’s like what Hitchcock did with North by Northwest. It’s the James Bond genre where comedy turns into a thriller. It’s interesting to explore. Like, for me, you have a jazz composition but then what’s added on top is a UN vote or a speech by Lumumba or a roundtable discussion or Nikita Khrushchev banging on his shoe. The politics become part of the jazz composition. I like where the music turns into politics and politics turns into music and exploring the boundaries of what it stands for.”

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

Sean Wang is a fan of coming-of-age movies, citing as a start Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, François Truffaut’s New Wave classic The 400 Blows, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies, David Mickey Evans’ The Sandlot, and Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love. But none of those movies stars an Asian kid or has a Taiwanese American kid from the East Bay as a protagonist. For that, Wang would have to make his own film, and he has with Festival opener Dìdi (弟弟).

“When I look at those movies, it’s not about a 13-year-old boy or girl, it’s about that 13-year-old boy or girl and it’s all the little details that culminate in their life that all of sudden make it feel like a movie you’ve never seen before,” Wang says during a recent Zoom call.

“That was the hope with our movie, too, that we can just make every detail sit on top of one another until it feels like this is a story that’s so specific, that feels like the rollercoaster of a great coming-of-age movie. The hope was for something that feels new but also feels familiar at the same time.”

What is Dìdi (弟弟) about?

Set and shot in Fremont, Wang’s hometown, the Sundance audience award winner and recipient of a special jury award for its ensemble, tells the semi-autobiographical tale of 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang) who experiences a rocky summer before starting high school. It is 2008 and Chris is locked into social media and is a budding videographer. But as he experiences first love, fights with his friends, tangles with his college-bound sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), and argues with his mom Chungsing (Festival honoree Joan Chen), his feelings are volatile and the sense of humiliation that comes with being 13 is too often present. His grandma Nai Nai (Wang’s real-life grandmother Chang Li Hua, one of the subjects of his Oscar®-nominated short film Nai Nai and Wài Pó) adores him but she can only provide so much comfort to a boy with roiling emotions.

“There’s a very clear one to one of the inspirations being a version of something that’s happened in my life, literally like my family, my friends, my upbringing,” Wang says. “I think a lot of it was sort of looking back at my childhood and things that I know intimately and realizing that the emotions I feel about certain experiences–I think emotions are universal, whether you’re talking about adolescence, adulthood, emotions of shame, love, fear joy. Everyone knows these emotions but the way you frame them and the way to get to those emotions vary from person to person.

“When I think of my specific experiences and me and my friends in Fremont, California, I realized I’ve never seen that version on screen and one that stars a group of friends in very multicultural community in a place like the Bay Area,” he adds. “It also takes place in the late 2000s and utilizes the sort of internet language that I think we were all sort of growing into. And the technology was moving so fast. I felt like I hadn’t seen this period captured accurately in the movies.”

What are the inspirations behind Wang’s first feature film?

Wang began writing Dìdi (弟弟) seven years ago. His original screenplay focused much more on Chris’ relationships with his friends. Wang describes his early efforts as akin to Stand By Me or Superbad. At the same time, he was making shorts that related to his mother, including 3000 Miles, a short documentary in which the voicemails she left him provides the film’s narration, and 1990, a short in which his sister becomes a mother and his mother a grandmother. And at work, he was working on projects for Mother’s Day.

Wang didn’t want to be “the mom filmmaker.” At the same time, when he read over his early efforts on Dìdi (弟弟), he realized there was something missing. Or someone.

“I think I have a very close but also complicated relationship with my mom that is so full of love,” Wang says. “I realized in writing the movie, I got to this point where I really wanted to write about my family, but especially my mom. I realized it’s the relationship in my life, that is the most of every emotion. It’s the most love and the most joy and the most care but also the root of the most anger and shame and regret and protection. It’s the most of every emotion, so I just felt there was a lot there.

“Once I realized it was about a mother-son relationship encased in the trappings of a movie like Stand By Me about adolescent friendships, that was the eureka moment. That cracked everything open for me.”

Dìdi (弟弟) is not just a story about a boy and his mother and his friends. It is also a Bay Area story, joining a family of recent films that include Fruitvale Station, Sorry to Bother You, Earth Mama, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Blindspotting, Medicine for Melancholy, and Fremont. When Wang was growing up he says he took his hometown and its environs for granted, It’s only in looking back as an adult that he realizes how special the place is and how it has come to inspire so many personal films.

“So many things were special and unique, things that I had never seen before in movies, you know, like to grow up around such a diverse multicultural community and get to learn about all these different cultures,” Wang says. “Not because it was educational taught in school, but because of where I grew up because of the proximity of my friends and the happenstance that I grew up in a deeply rooted immigrant community.

“The Bay Area at large is such fertile soil for so many different types of stories,” he adds. “I’ve been so inspired by the stories that have come out of the Bay Area and wanted to be part of that canon.”

Wang says he went into Dìdi (弟弟) with the dream of having a big Bay Area hometown premiere at SFFILM Festival. The festival previously screened two of his shorts, Have a Good Summer and Nai Nai and Wài Pó, and Dìdi (弟弟) came into the world with support from SFFILM Rainin Grant, SFFILM Invest, and SFFILM Dolby Institute Fellowship. Filmmaker and festival enjoy a strong relationship. And San Francisco is just a short ride from Fremont.

“The word that I keep describing in making this movie and our ethos in making the movie was to try to keep it homegrown, to try to make it feel very local,” Wang says. “And so, to come back and have our hometown premiere here with SFFILM, I’m so excited for all my friends from home, my hometown friends, all the Bay Area locals to see it and hopefully notice the landmarks that we shot and just have it feel very familiar.”

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.