SFFILM Exclusive

Home Is a Hotel, a documentary focusing on residents of San Francisco Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels that makes its world premiere at the Festival on Sat., April 22, takes its inspiration from a 2015 short film of the same name. Kevin Duncan Wong and Todd Sills, two of the feature’s three directors (the third is Kar Yin Tham) helmed the short as members of a local film cooperative, following a single resident and her daughter, recent immigrants from China. It became an award winner on the festival circuit and through it, Wong and Sills became cognizant that they were onto a bigger story.

“After we screened at CAAMFest, my aunt came to me—we had a woman, Sāam Yī, who took care of my grandpa in the last years of his life—and she was like, ‘You know Sāam Yī lives in an SRO,” Wong remembers during a Zoom call with his partners and SFFILM.

“When people saw the film, the response was, ‘I didn’t know that existed’ or they had some story about some person who was important to them who had or still lived in that kind of housing It seemed like there was this undercurrent; there’s so many people in the city that make it run and make it is what it is that are only able to live here because of this kind of housing.”

“Those responses, not knowing that SROs existed, not knowing what kind of housing stock it was, not knowing about the communities that lived there. It made us feel like there was more work to do,” adds Sills.

What is Home is a Hotel About?

The SROs are residential hotels with communal bathrooms and kitchens, and living quarters that are small for a single person let alone the families they often house. Home Is a Hotel focuses on a cross-section of tenants at SROs found throughout the city. Among the people who open their lives to the filmmakers’ lens are an African American artist, a pair of recovering addicts co-parenting their young son, an elderly Latina immigrant who has lived a life of music, and a mother raising a small child while searching the city for an older daughter lost to the streets.

Wong and Sills began the new project in 2016, originally developing around 15 characters, but they lost a few undocumented participants who became fearful for their status after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. A few others potential subjects stepped away for one reason or another. Then there were those that had compelling stories but those tales were from their pasts. What the filmmakers were looking for were people with an eye toward the future.

“We were asking folks, ‘What are your hopes and dreams? What do you imagine?’” Wong says. “One of the questions we had on our list was ‘Where do you see yourself in five years, where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ Some folks had something to say about that, and conversely, some were like, ‘I don’t think about this. I don’t try to plan that far ahead because it’s like setting myself up for disappointment.’ That was an interesting answer to the question but they knew where they wanted to go, even if they didn’t have a timeline for when they might get there.”

Originally, and Wong admits, probably naively, the filmmakers thought the feature would take two or three years to complete. Tham joined the film as a translator at the beginning before coming on board as a producer in 2017. Then when Sills accepted a teaching job in Vientiane, Laos, she became one of the documentary’s directors.

How did the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect the Filmmakers?

The onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 presented the production with a new complication. It changed the course of the lives of some of the people in the film and severely impacted the Tenderloin, where so many SROs are but it also allowed the filmmakers to take some time to look at what they’d shot. They had received some smaller grants but in cutting a new trailer and pulling together a new work sample, they were able to unlock support from bigger organizations, including SFFILM, where Wong and Tham became 2022 FilmHouse residents.

“I felt (the residency) was really helpful on two levels,” says Tham. “One is that sense of community in terms of being able to discuss a project with other makers. And also, because of that program, in some ways, it gave us momentum. That was when we started to look at post in terms of editing, so having that group over the program really helped us structure how we wanted to get feedback, and then really relying on the FilmHouse editing suite to meet and discuss cuts.”
“The other thing I really appreciated was that it was mix of filmmaker from all different disciplines and tastes,” Wong adds. “When I was in the 2016 BAVC fellowship, that was all nonfiction makers. That was great, but it was from a very specific lens. Once we got into the editing phase with this, I think having a diversity of perspectives on the craft was really helpful in finding the film.”

What inspired the creation of Home is a Hotel

One of the things that animated the filmmakers to make Home Is a Hotel is the state of housing in San Francisco. The 2022 homeless census estimated nearly 8,000 residents are unhoused. When Wong and Sills embarked on the documentary in 2016, the already high price of housing was reaching the stratosphere. Those living in SROS are keeping a roof over their heads but oftentimes just barely.

“What folks do when housing is expensive, they make do with less than they would like, but SROs are literally the smallest you can go, there’s nowhere left to go. This is really the bottom before you’re unsheltered.” Wong says. “I think we sort of dive into that, make that more visible, bring folks into the experience of that in a way that helps them understand how dire the situation is…I feel like we discover how big of an impact having decent, stable housing can be in seeing that in the lives of characters that we follow…It’s not hopeless. There is a solution. It really is a question of the will to put the resources there.”

“I think there’s enough statistics, enough characterization of what’s going on from a numbers perspective,” adds Tham. “I think what we’re really trying to show is the real lived experience perspective, and hopefully, people can enter into this world with more empathy.”

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.

What is the Persistence of Vision Award?

SFFILM Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award, given to an artist whose singular work falls outside the realm of traditional narrative, goes this year to Mark Cousins, the prolific filmmaker whose deep knowledge and intellectual curiosity is reflected in work that runs the gamut from the 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey to Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise to The Eyes of Orson Welles. The POV Award ceremony on Thursday, April 20, included Cousins in conversation along with a screening of his documentary The March on Rome, which investigates the rise of fascism and Mussolini 100 years ago while finding parallels with the world’s contemporary rightward drift. That’s not all. Friday, April 21, Cousins was on hand for a screening of another of his films, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, in which he gives voice to the Master of Suspense, allowing him to explicate his work from beyond the grave.

Cousins was not available for an interview as he was traveling but he did answer questions posed to him via email as he sat in an airport, waiting for a flight.

Q&A Interview

Q: Before we get to your career, I wanted to start with a question about film festivals and their place in film exhibition. If I’m not mistaken, you used to host a traveling one yourself along with Tilda Swinton. We seem to be at a juncture, hastened by COVID, where the theatrical experience is waning. Certainly, not the first time it’s been challenged but streaming seems to have so many in its grip and so many theaters that closing during the pandemic simply never reopened. Art houses are an endangered species. Given that, can you talk about the importance of SFFILM Festival and others in terms of giving filmmakers, who might not otherwise have the opportunity, a venue to show their work on a big screen and audiences the chance to see films that may never come around again or only come around in a streaming setting?

Mark Cousins (MC): Film festivals came about because of market failure. Film distributors weren’t showing a wide enough range of films, so film festivals had to fill in the gaps.

The market isn’t failing as it was. Today, so many films are a click away. The failure isn’t scarcity but abundance.

This doesn’t mean that the job of film festivals is done. Abundance creates its own problems – especially lack of appetite. Not only is film history everywhere today, so are film festivals. Maybe they add to our sense of [feeling] overfed?

Isn’t it time that they innovate more?

That’s why Tilda Swinton and I did our 5 punky playful film events, to try to sketch new ideas about film festivals!

Q: I’m only half-joking when I ask, when do you sleep? If IMDB is to be trusted, I count 9 projects on your plate since 2020 alone. True, we were all forced to sit inside a lot during the pandemic and a couple of the projects are shorts, but it is still a lot of work. What drives you and how do you manage multiple projects simultaneously?

MC: I am driven by the pleasure of making. It is an intoxicant. I started directing in the 1980s, when production was slow, equipment was heavy, and crews were large and mostly male. All those things have changed. There’s a new lightness in filmmaking and I am riding the thermals.

Q: Two of your 2022 projects, March on Rome and My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, screen at the festival. Talk about your motivation for making them and how you determined your approach to the material. March is such a deep dive into forgotten history that you tie into our alarming present. And Hitchcock is just a delight, scholarship that so perfectly captures the master’s voice.

MC: I was asked to make March on Rome by Italian producer Andrea Romeo and Palomar productions.
I jumped at the chance because I am interested in the far right–in the 1990s, my first good film was about neo-Nazis and Holocaust denial. Also, this was a film about visual culture, which is one of my passions.

I was reluctant at first to make a film about Hitchcock, as so much has been said and done about him. But then I spied an unusual way of looking at this great 20th-century visual thinker, and so I went for it. The result is a lockdown film, a movie close to the contours of Hitchcock which is hopefully ludic!

Q: How do you decide what projects to take on, be they about film or another subject, such as the a-bomb or Belfast?

MC: The subject needs to have visual potential. It needs to be opened by a visual key. Ideally, too, it needs to allow me to combine anger and gentleness.

Q: You made the 15-hour The Story of Film, the 14-hour Women Make Film, and The Story of Film A New Generation, clocking at 2 hours, 40 minutes. Tell me about the joys and pitfalls of these massive undertakings?

MC: People often say that attention spans are shrinking, especially those of young people. But is that true? If you take the long view, I suspect that people still like the labyrinth, getting lost in the maze of a story, a structure, a city. A film is like a city.

Q: What was your gateway drug into film?

MC: Herbie Rides Again. Gene Kelly’s clothes. Cyd Charisse’s legs. The sexualities in Cabaret. Shirley MacLaine running near the end of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.

Q: Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami, Jeremy Thomas, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Schrader, Susan Hayward, and Lena Horne are among cinema luminaries that have graced your films. Who are some others you admire?

MC: Imamura Shohei. Kira Muratova. Chantal Ackerman. Lynda Myles. Virginia Woolf.

Q: You used to work in television interviewing filmmakers and actors in a forum that actually allowed them to talk about their work in a way few shows do. Tell me about your time making that series. Also, do you ever miss it?

MC: That was a quarter of a century ago. I was so young. Suddenly I was friends with Jane Russell or drinking beer with Lauren Bacall. I got to know so many movie stars. Before Scene by Scene, classic cinema was a myth for me. After it, it was intimate, discrepant.

Q: You famously used an axe to destroy your own film, Bigger Than the Shining. So much of film history is the story of vanished films—silents lost to the ether, nitrate prints gone up in flames, etc. Why add one more title to the list of movies we’ll never see again and your own work, at that?

MC: I wanted to make another miserable film because rumor is exciting, theatrical. It fuels our imagination. The unseen is a crucial aspect of cinephilia.

Q: Last question. The award this year is dedicated to producer and Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy. Would you care to say a few words about him?

MC: Did Tom exist? Did he really bring so many people into the movie tent? Did I really talk to him about Mexican melodrama and Leni Riefenstahl and Abel Gance in a hotel in London eating peanuts because we forgot about dinner?

If so, and if my memories of him are only a tiny corner of the picture, then wow.

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.

In a way, BlackBerry, SFFILM’s Sloan Science on Screen Award recipient that screened at the Festival on Monday, Apr. 17, began with DIY woodworking videos on YouTube. Producer Niv Fichman (The Saddest Music in the World, Antiviral) approached Operation Avalanche writer/director Matt Johnson and writer/producer Matthew Miller with the proposal that they adapt the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story of the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, about the once popular precursor to modern smartphones. Finding those videos turned out to be key to cracking the story.

The story behind the making of BlackBerry

The book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff spun the tale of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ontario, company that invented the BlackBerry through the eyes of its two CEOS, tech geek Mike Lazaridis and hard-charging businessman Jim Balsillie. What Toronto native Johnson wanted to find were opinions of people who had worked at RIM. His brother-in-law is an engineer and through him, he learned of the connection between that profession and DIY projects, leading Johnson to scour YouTube until he struck gold when he discovered that one of BlackBerry’s original engineers later started his own woodworking company, posting videos about his projects. Johnson reached out and managed to overcome the man’s initial reticence.

“He really opened up from his perspective as just an engineer on the ground,” Johnson said during a phone call in the days leading up to the Festival. “He told us everything that was happening in the day to day. That’s when it clicked with us that this company, yes, is an engineering firm. But to us, it’s a lot like what it’s like to start a filmmaking career. You’re working with your friends, you’re working all day, and it’s fun. You don’t go to work for the money. The camaraderie is more important than either the product or the compensation.

“That’s when it really took off. We came up with this structure, a story about a kind of exciting startup culture that gets transformed through success into a corporate culture. That is when, all of a sudden, we knew what the characters needed to be and we were able to dig into all of our research from that angle. So that was a real lightning moment for us.”

Fichman originally hired Johnson and Miller merely to write the script, but as the pair threw themselves into the work, it became apparent that they wanted to tell the story themselves. Miller became a producer. BlackBerry became Johnson’s first feature since Operation Avalanche and he took on the role of Doug, Lazaridis’ closest collaborator at the beginning and the company’s amiable and goofy conscience.

“Basically, as soon as I realized this was an opportunity to tell the story of my own life, I thought, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be right to write it and put it in somebody else’s hands,’” Johnson said. “It wasn’t that I wanted to do it so badly, but because I thought, ‘Well, what we’re writing is really not going to be manageable by somebody who hasn’t exactly lived through it in the same way. Niv agreed one to one. He was an amazing partner.”

The Trotsky’s Jay Baruchel came aboard to play the silver-haired Lazaridis, a man perhaps too invested in his company’s product, while It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton is the id of the piece as the energetic, crude, take-no-prisoners Balsillie. BlackBerry represents another step in the evolution of Johnson’s career, after making his 2013 feature debut with the ultra-low-budget, Slamdance award winner The Dirties, followed by Operation Avalanche in 2016, in which film geeks working for the CIA during the Cold War get involved with shenanigans involving the space race and Stanley Kubrick–and a film in which Johnson and his crew managed to invade NASA.

What was it like to work on BlackBerry?

“By American standards, BlackBerry’s budget is quite small, 8½ million Canadian,” Johnson said. For me, it meant that all of the sudden I was working with the actors’ union, all of the sudden we were working with a crew of 40+ people and the marshaling and coaching that went on. It was so funny how life imitated art, trying to maintain the ethos of that early Research in Motion. We’re all doing this for the fun energy while knowing not only the stakes but also that there were way more people involved. I like to hope that some of that energy remains on the screen. That was, by far, the hardest part of the process.

“You may notice that we tried to shoot as much in the real world as we could,” he added. “A lot of the actors aren’t really actors. A lot of them are real people, all those engineers I’m surrounded by are all very young filmmakers from Toronto, who have no background in acting but have a certain vitality, a certain life. And we shot in all the real places Research in Motion actually was. We shot in Waterloo in a lot of the real factories. The kind of stuff was important. We didn’t necessarily break in to as many places as we did on my last film but certainly authenticity was important.”

What does Johnson make of the rise and fall of BlackBerry?

The story of BlackBerry reads like an Icarus tale, a company that flew too high and crashed and burned, as much a victim of corporate hubris as the invention of the iPhone, the product that slew BlackBerry with its more advanced features and sleek style. But Johnson sees another reason for the fall of Research In Motion and its phone.

“I think Michael Lazaridis really had a bit of falling love with his own product, to the point of obsession,” he said. “I think what the film highlights in its own small way is a kind of – I don’t want to say arrogance–but there is that myth of the man who makes a statue of a woman and he makes it so perfect, so beautiful, that he falls in love with it. It was like that with Mike, so that when all of a sudden there was another device that did things almost the exact opposite of what his did, his pride and love for his own creation made him completely blind to the positives of what the smartphone was going to become. He fell so in love with what he’d done that he was blinded by possible improvements, because he thought, ‘Well, this could never be better.’”

What can we expect from the in-person conversation?

Johnson expressed his delight at BlackBerry being chosen for Sloan Science on Screen honors and the opportunity it gave him to geek out with a scientist. He looked forward to the onstage conversation between him and physicist Joel Moore, the Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

“I’m thrilled,” he said. “I spoke to so many scientists, specifically from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when we were making Operation Avalanche, and my brother and brother-in-law are scientists. Although I am painfully ignorant of all sciences, I love the fact that I can interface with people who know what they’re talking about… I’m sure he knows so many things that I just teased in the film. He is going to educate me.”

See the full conversation here

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.