The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 19-May 3) presents its second World Cinema Spotlight. The Spotlight calls attention to a current trend in international filmmaking, bringing to light hot topics, reinvigorated genres, underappreciated filmmakers and national cinemas. This year’s Spotlight, Filming Between the Lines: Innovative Literary Adaptations, gathers three excellent examples of a new breed of literary adaptations exploring innovative ways of bringing the printed word to the silver screen.
Bonsái (Chile 2011) This comically keen adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s now-classic novella about a detached but sympathetic anti-hero fumbling through early adulthood in Santiago, Chile, is an existential romance rich with insights into the nature of love, the power of literature and the science of pruning miniature plants. Bonsái screens Friday, April 20, 9:30 pm and Sunday, April 22, 12:45 pm,Sundance Kabuki Cinemas and Tuesday, April 24, 6:30 pm, Pacific Film Archive.
Oslo, August 31 (Norway 2011) A recovering drug addict takes a long day’s journey into the Norwegian capital’s night in this nuanced character study, which uses Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel, Le Feu Follet as a jumping off point for a meditation on modern alienation. Oslo, August 31 screens Friday, April 20, 8:50 pm, PFA; Saturday, April 21, 6:45 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; and Friday, April 27,9:15 pm, SF Film Society Cinema.
Patience (After Sebald) (England 2011) This moving tour through the landscape of W.G. Sebald’s genre-bending novel, The Rings of Saturn, presents a multilayered homage to his discursive, elegiac and perfectly illusion-free style by poets, mapmakers, novelists and acquaintances-admirers haunted and inspired by the voice of the German writer, who died in 2001. Patience (After Sebald) screens Friday, April 27, 6:30 pm, PFA; Saturday, April 28, 6:30 pm, SF Film Society Cinema; and Tuesday, May 1, 9:30 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.
Other films based on literature in the Festival include Chicken with Plums; Farewell, My Queen; Headhunters; Trishna and Wuthering Heights.
For tickets and information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners contact your SFIFF publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.