Mar 31, 2015
Festival
San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Film Society has announced an exciting array of special collaborations as part of the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 23–May 7), which aim to elevate and enhance various individual screenings from the main festival slate with a number of very special guests. Taking the audience experience beyond the traditional festival filmmaker Q&A session, these enhanced screenings will include luminary figures from many of the San Francisco Bay Area’s key culture, technology, and civic institutions—plus several notable out-of-town guests—participating in special introductions, guided discussions, in-depth analyses and much more. Representatives of such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the Black Panther Party, and iconic individuals like Rachel Kushner, Nansun Shi and David Thomson, will join SFIFF filmmakers and programmers to explore the issues in a wide variety of Festival films.
“Without a doubt, San Francisco, along with the greater Bay Area, is among the most interesting places in the world right now,” said San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Noah Cowan. “In a remarkable number of different spheres, the city and region’s key thought leaders, its celebrated innovation culture and creative heft have been brought to bear on the future of technology, the humanities, science, politics, social policy, press freedom, food, climate change and, of course, the future of film. The San Francisco Film Society sees this program as a first step to harnessing these vast human and institutional resources to support important new films as they navigate the distribution environment beyond our Festival dates.”
Additional collaborations and enhanced screenings will be announced in the weeks to come; visit festival.sffs.org for more details.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (dir. Stanley Nelson)
Saturday April 25, 3:00 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
A special in-depth Q&A with director Stanley Nelson and members of the Black Panther Party will follow this very special screening of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. With the recent Blackout Collective protests in Oakland, this screening will be the perfect opportunity for an in-depth discussion of the Black Panther Party, its legacy and its relevance to present-day civil rights movements.
About the film: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution reveals how in a few short years, the Black Panther Party grew from a small group of young people in Oakland, CA, into a movement inspiring millions worldwide. Examining the history and notoriety of the Black Panthers, and featuring the perspectives of both its charismatic leaders and the rank-and-file, this is a definitive portrait of an iconic organization whose radical vision continues to fascinate us 50 years after its founding. (USA 2015, 116 min.)
Deep Web (dir. Alex Winter)
Monday May 4, 9:00 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
Following this screening of Deep Web will be an in-depth discussion of the current states of surveillance, privacy and journalism and where they intersect online. Guests will include the film’s director Alex Winter; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legal Director Cindy Cohn; founding member of the EFF, poet and essayist John Perry Barlow; and journalist/illustrator Susie Cagle, who covered the trial of Ross Ulbricht for Forbes.
About the film: Director Alex Winter lucidly investigates the implications of online technologies and the grey legal areas of anonymous communications and commerce by focusing on the history and demise of online black market website Silk Road. In addition to documenting the federal trial of Silk Road’s purported founder and owner, San Francisco-based Ross Ulbricht, allegedly known to Silk Road’s users as the Dread Pirate Roberts, Winter weaves in the perspectives of futurists, journalists and legal experts in the mesmerizing documentary about our online lives. (USA 2015, 100 min.)
Listen to Me Marlon (dir. Stevan Riley)
Saturday April 25, 3:45 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
This screening will feature a special introduction by David Thomson, one of our greatest writers on film, whose most recent book Why Acting Matters answers the question of whether and how it does with intelligence and wit, examining the allure of the performing arts for both the artist and the audience member while addressing the paradoxes inherent in acting itself. A book signing of Why Acting Matters will follow the screening.
About the film: A treasure trove of audio tapes yields a unique autobiographical portrait of one of cinema’s greatest actors: Marlon Brando. Augmented by home movies, film clips and other archival materials, the recordings reveal a frank, self-aware man, by turns funny, poignant, self-lacerating and beset by demons both inherited and of his own making. Director Stevan Riley weaves these elements together into a mesmerizing portrait of one of America’s great artists, illustrating his singular career and his troubled life. (UK 2015, 102 min.)
The Taking of Tiger Mountain (dir. Tsui Hark)
Sunday April 26, 4:00 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
Following this screening, legendary producer Nansun Shi (A Better Tomorrow, Once Upon a Time in China) will discuss the vast changes she has witnessed over the past 40 years of Chinese cinema through the lens of Tsui Hark’s new film. Starting with the “model opera” period of the Mainland Cultural Revolution, Shi will walk us through Hong Kong’s explosion onto the international cinema stage and the rise of Mainland China as the world’s largest cinema audience.
About the film: Tsui Hark is a dazzling cinema stylist, an irreverent re-inventor of traditional genres. In The Taking of Tiger Mountain, he reworks the war film, portraying the complex standoff, then battle, between a Communist cadre and warlords propped up by Nationalist forces towards the end of World War II. Inspired by a Mao-era “model opera” to Communist ingenuity and bravery, Tsui deploys eye-popping 3-D effects and ingenious CGI to retell this story as sly political thriller and contemporary action extravaganza. (China 2014, 143 min.)
3 1/2 Minutes (dir. Marc Silver)
Wednesday April 29, 6:45 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
This screening will include a special Q&A in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, featuring members of the 3 1/2 Minutes filmmaking team and Alison Parker, Director of Human Rights Watch’s US Program. Parker is responsible for guiding Human Rights Watch’s work on human rights and the US criminal justice system, victim’s rights, counterterrorism policy and the rights of immigrants in the United States.
About the film: The “loud music” murder trial of Michael Dunn—a middle-aged white Floridian who in 2012 fired his gun into a car carrying four unarmed Black teens, killing Jordan Davis—is the utterly timely subject of Marc Silver’s discerning and deeply stirring documentary. Silver never over-dramatizes but rather humanizes the event, powerfully pinpointing the essentials in a sensational news story, while chronicling its role in a reenergized civil rights movement. (USA 2015, 98 min.)
Wanda (dir. Barbara Loden)
Saturday April 25, 4:00 pm, Castro Theatre
This screening will feature a special introduction by author Rachel Kushner, the Telluride Film Festival‘s Guest Director for 2015. Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, a New York Times Top Five Novel of 2013, and her debut novel Telex From Cuba was a winner of the California Book Award. Kushner is the only writer ever to be nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction for both a first and second novel.
About the film: Best known as a stage and movie actress, director Barbara Loden’s lone feature-length film—which she also wrote and starred in—is an arresting, controlled and stark realist gem. This gorgeously restored film focuses on Wanda, a wanderer in 1970s Rust Belt Pennsylvania who rejects the soul-sucking prospect of immersing herself in impoverished motherhood, goes on the road and eventually falls in with a petty criminal. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI. (USA 1970, 102 min.)
SFIFF is also proud to team up with several organizations on substantive programming collaborations, including the Telluride Film Festival (to present Stanton Kaye’s archival masterpiece Brandy in the Wilderness), SFMOMA (co-presenting partner for Miranda July’s New Society), Alamo Drafthouse (guest curators of the Dark Wave section), California College of the Arts (series producer for Cinema Visionaries: Alex Gibney) and long-standing partner Pacific Film Archive (guest curators of Nothing But a Dream: Experimental Shorts).
For general information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners, contact your Festival publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
58th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 58th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 23-May 7 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Castro Theatre, Landmark’s Clay Theatre and the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive 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.