Mar 30, 2010
Education
The San Francisco Film Society’s Youth Education program continues its year-round commitment to Bay Area students and educators with the annual Schools at the Festival program at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival April 22-May 6. The pioneering film literacy program celebrates its 19th year of exposing a new generation of viewers to the best in international and independent cinema, bringing thousands of Bay Area students to Festival screenings and engaging them with filmmakers from around the world. Students of all ages will have the opportunity to participate in the Festival through private subsidized screenings at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas and special visits to classrooms by filmmakers whose work is being shown at the Festival.
Fifteen narrative features, documentaries and shorts programs have been carefully selected for this year’s Schools at the Festival program to suit a broad range of curricula and grade levels, with scheduled weekday matinees open to all Bay Area high school, middle school, elementary school and home school classes. Targeted subject areas include foreign languages such as Chinese, French, Spanish and German, as well as issue-based programming for school subjects such as language arts, environmental studies, ethics, history, journalism, politics, science, social studies and world affairs.
Thanks to the generous support of Youth Education sponsor Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education Fund, all public school students and teachers will pay just $1.00 per ticket for all Schools at the Festival screenings; all other students and teachers will pay the discounted ticket price of $2.50 for Festival admission. In addition, with the support of the Goldman Environmental Prize, admission to the Schools at the Festival screening of the documentary Colony on Thursday, April 29 at 10:00 am is being offered for free to students and educators (tickets are still required). Tickets for the program are available exclusively to Bay Area educators and students and may be purchased only through the Schools at the Festival office by contacting Keith Zwölfer at 415-561-5040 or kzwolfer@sffs.org. Schools at the Festival tickets cannot be purchased through the regular Festival box office.
Supplementing a two-week schedule of educational screenings at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, dozens of local and visiting filmmakers will travel to numerous Bay Area classrooms to screen their work and interact directly with students. Filmmakers who have visited classrooms in the past include Jay Rosenblatt, Doug Pray, Jean-Marie Téno, Amanda Micheli, Ivy Ho, Les Blank, Peter Bratt, Lourdes Portillo, Michel Ocelot and Ousmane Sembène.
A set of study guides, developed by local educators and Youth Education staff, will be made available for select Schools at the Festival films. Each guide is designed to help teachers integrate the film’s content into their curricula, prepare students before screenings, direct postscreening discussions and provide additional resources, follow-up activities and projects. All Schools at the Festival programs are designed to meet the Visual and Performing Arts Content Standards for California public schools.
Films offered to middle and high school students range from inspiring narratives to in-depth cultural explorations and gripping political exposés, including: the second film of Laura Poitras’s post-9/11 New American Century trilogy The Oath, a complex portrait of two men once close to Osama bin Laden: an Al Qaeda insider driving a cab in Yemen and his brother-in-law, a Guantanamo Bay detainee; Ounie Lecomte’s first feature A Brand New Life, the story of an emotionally bereft nine-year-old and her irrepressible cohort at a South Korean Catholic orphanage; Lixin Fan’s intimate portrait of modern China, Last Train Home, which documents the lives of a family of migrant factory workers on a grueling holiday journey back to their rural village-and the resentful child they left behind; Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey’s award-winning documentary Mugabe and the White African, covertly filmed on location in Zimbabwe, about a white farmer’s court battle with President Mugabe to keep his farm; Presumed Guilty, Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith’s exposé of Mexico’s criminal justice system; Rigoberto Perezcano’s feature film debut Northless, which follows a quiet young Mexican man’s repeated attempts to cross the border into the U.S.; and Colony, Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn’s compelling documentary about the sudden vanishing of honeybees-known as Colony Collapse Disorder-and its widespread repercussions for humans.
This year’s elementary school program, Flights of Fancy, is a diverse collection of animated and live-action short films from England, Finland, France and the U.S. including Mike Attie’s short documentary Mr. Mack’s Kitchen, about local students at Lafayette Elementary School who are learning the fine art and discipline of cooking, and Pixar animator Jim Capobianco’s Leonardo, a charming and clever depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s quest to learn how to fly.
Two additional films will be screened exclusively in the Schools at the Festival program and not featured in the regular SFIFF53 program: Hilla Medalia’s documentary After the Storm, about a group of New York theater artists who travel to New Orleans to stage a production of the musical Once on This Island, starring local youth, as a benefit to renovate their hurricane-damaged recreation center, and Dave LaMatttina and Chad Walker’s Brownstones to Red Dirt, about an inspiring pen pal program between children in the crime- and murder-ridden projects of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn and orphaned children of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. After the Storm will screen on Wednesday, April 28 at 10:00 am at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Brownstones to Red Dirt will screen on Tuesday, April 27 at 10:00 am at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
Closing out the Schools at the Festival program on Thursday, May 6 is the annual presentation of youth-made short films, Talkin bout My Generation, featuring a baker’s dozen of the best new works by media makers aged 18 and under in every genre from film noir to comedy to mockumentary to an action-packed, stop-motion miniseries starring a LEGO James Bond.
SFFS Youth Education and its Schools at the Festival program are designed to develop media literacy, broaden insights into other cultures, enhance foreign language aptitude, develop critical thinking skills and inspire a lifelong appreciation of cinema. Since its inception in 1991, Schools at the Festival has served more than 55,000 Bay Area students and 3,000 teachers from more than 500 educational institutions. Founded by the late Robert S. Donn, a retired SFUSD teacher with a tremendous passion for film, the program currently is coordinated by program manager Keith Zwölfer.
Schools at the Festival is made possible this year by the generous support of Wells Fargo, Visa, the Dexter F. & Dorothy H. Baker Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, the Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Education Fund and the Tin Man Fund.
For more information, go to www.sffs.org or call 925-866-9559.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.