SFFILM
The Bay Area's home for the world's finest films and filmmakers.
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Chinese director Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul is a captivating and profound portrait of a small group of Tibetan villagers on an arduous, 1,000-mile pilgrimage to the holy city of Lhasa. With a graceful documentary style that makes full use of t...
China | 115
A mysterious and poetic work that eludes easy interpretation, this drama returns Marco Bellocchio to his themes of corruption in Italian society, here stretched over many centuries. It is his particular genius that connects a 17th-century nun tort...
Italy/France/Switzerland | 107
Chantal Akerman’s final work epitomizes the late filmmaker’s intuitive sense of cinematic form, and reaffirms her inextricable relationship with her mother Natalia (Nelly). Edited from over 40 hours of footage captured during the last period of Ne...
Belgium/France | 115
Serious children, activist youth and fun-loving seniors roam the titular city in this delightfully unclassifiable mix of documentary and whimsical fiction. It’s a singular celebration of an adopted hometown by Doyle, the Australian-born cinematogr...
Hong Kong | 90
After a breakup with his girlfriend, Kris sets off with his friend Michal in search of new experiences. Stylishly capturing the romantic yearning, drunken debating, aimless wandering and philosophizing of youth, Michal Marczak’s highly constructed...
Poland/UK | 100
Ania’s life appears to be stuck in autopilot until one day when she spots a wolf wandering through the woods near her apartment. Part feminist fairy tale, part surreal cross-species romance and part case study of one person’s descent into madness...
Germany | 97
Threatened by homophobic violence on an almost daily basis, a group of African American gay and trans youngsters living in Washington, DC, form a gang to confront and defeat their victimizers in this rousing and often very funny documentary. But t...
USA | 90
A man runs a walking disco tour with his browbeaten son. Meanwhile, a slimy, inhuman maniac stalks the streets of their town. See the film The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato called the best film of Sundance, “the entry that woke audiences up by waterboa...
USA | 93
A chorale for several voices in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, this poetic and visually stunning work tracks several characters, including a teenager studying Japanese who is bullied for being light-skinned and a writer and his muse who are gra...
Haiti/USA | 88
Thrown into a shocked daze of mourning by his wife’s death, a new widower (David Oyelowo) attempts to snap himself out of his inertia with a visit to his hostile, cancer-stricken mother-in-law (Dianne Wiest). Terrific performances by the two leads...
USA | 82
David Farrier, an out-and-proud gay male New Zealand journalist, stumbles upon an online fetish empire while researching a story about the sport of man-on-man competitive tickling. A simple click rapidly pulls him—and the viewer—into a cyber-infor...
New Zealand | 92
A slow-burn satire dubbed “a buddy movie without the buddies,” Chevalier brilliantly mines the comedy of the modern male competitive spirit. Six well-to-do Greek men on a sailing vacation devise increasingly extreme competitions to determine, defi...
Greece | 104
We are embedded on a massive cargo freighter as it chugs slowly across the vast Atlantic ocean in this haunting, meditative and expansively ambient film. Mauro Herce humanizes the melancholy of a hard-working crew as they struggle against the elem...
Spain/France | 74
A tentacled alien offers humans a deal: He will postpone destroying Earth if authorities will allow him to teach a junior high class in which the lesson plan includes tutoring his students on how they can kill him before he rains down destruction ...
Japan | 110
When a kingpin with a face only Picasso could love threatens to bring down New York City’s infrastructure, a seriously ill boy with a unique, ghostly superpower teams up with a bedridden crusading cop to stop him. The team behind A Cat in Paris (S...
France/Belgium | 84
Animation's growing popularity over the years has been remarkable, with new big studio releases regularly earning over $400 million at the worldwide box office. But where does the independent animation studio fit into all of this? In 2014, former ...
90
When a series of mishaps triggers an ill-prepared, trouble-prone young boy to flee into the New Zealand wilderness, his reluctant foster father (Sam Neill) chases after him, and a freewheeling, energetic adventure ensues. Writer/director Taika Wai...
New Zealand | 101
In Counting, director Jem Cohen (POV Award, SFIFF 2013) brings his discerning camera eye to a series of international locales where his idiosyncratic vision coaxes meaning from the most ordinary details. From winter snows in Coney Island to a Sou...
USA | 110
Director Johan Grimonprez provides powerful and sinister imagery to document journalist Andrew Feinstein’s ominous and important book on the global arms trade. The film examines the disturbing recent history of the business of war, providing dark ...
USA/ Belgium/ Denmark | 94
Lost house keys prompt a hunt through massive piles of leaves in first-time writer/director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal’s funny and appealing celebration of male teenage friendship. Unfolding over the course of a single afternoon and featuring a...
Mexico | 96
Thirteen-year-old African American teen Morris Gentry loves hip-hop, dislikes school and is starting to develop a keen interest in girls. He’s also been reluctantly uprooted from the US to live in Heidelberg, Germany, and this charming coming-of-a...
USA/Germany | 91
Two years after a sexting scandal derails New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s once promising career, he attempts a comeback with a run for New York mayor with a documentary crew in tow. The filmmakers are on the spot when controversy erupts over...
USA | 96
Life rarely works out as planned, but that doesn’t stop Maggie (Greta Gerwig) from trying to steer not just her own destiny, but also those of a dissatisfied anthropology professor (Ethan Hawke) and his intellectual wife Gretchen (Julianne Moore) ...
USA | 98
Buckle up for a whimsical road trip with Microbe and Gasoline, two 14-year-old boys equipped with wild imaginations, insightful observations of the world and a vehicle they’ve hand-built to carry them across France. Visionary writer/director Miche...
France | 105
James Cameron’s suspense classic is 30 years old. It is still considered one of the finest science fiction films ever made and one of the great Hollywood sequels. Fifty-seven years after her first disastrous trip, Ripley is ordered to return to pl...
USA | 137
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wise, precisely observed, compulsively watchable drama about four female friends and their midlife awakening runs over five hours, yet the leisurely duration is not an indulgence but a careful strategy—to show what other films ...
Japan | 317
Looking for a fresh start, perennial philosophy flunk-out and sexually frustrated Madrid 30-something Gonzalo (Álvaro Ogalla) demands the Catholic Church relinquish its symbolic hold on his misspent life by removing his name from the baptismal rec...
Spain/France/Uruguay | 80
Sonita Alizadeh is like many teenagers—she loves hip-hop, argues with her mother and gossips with her friends. She is also an Afghan refugee living under the tenuous protection of a Tehran homeless shelter, where she contends with the imminent ri...
Germany/Switzerland/Iran | 91
Dedicated home-care nurse Vlasta (Karlovy Vary winner Alena Mihulová) traipses around the south Moravia countryside on bus and foot tending to (and bantering with) patients too infirm or elderly to travel. When she herself is diagnosed with a seri...
Czech Republic/Slovakia | 92
A compromised mission in a chaotic African country draws well-intentioned NGO employees into increasingly murky moral territory. This powerful drama, based on a true story, follows the group’s leader Jacques (Vincent Lindon) as he hustles fixers a...
France/Belgium | 112
In 1989, Barack Obama (played by Parker Sawyers in an uncanny performance) is a summer associate at a Chicago law firm. On a lovely summer’s day, he invites his colleague Michelle Robinson to a community meeting. Writer/director Richard Tanne char...
USA | 80
Documentary filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s narrative debut is an exquisitely observed portrait of a delicate ten-year-old Quebec boy grappling with the insecurities and confusion of impending adolescence. The fragility of innocence is foregrounded th...
Canada | 118
Join us for an evening of stories about objects in films from writers, artists, filmmakers and actors. Have you ever been distracted by a detail that catches your attention in a movie? Become entranced by a costume or a set? Or just fallen in love...
60
Noted screenwriter Thomas Bidegain brings the tough, tense attitude of his earlier scripts for A Prophet and Rust and Bone to a contemporary adaptation of John Ford’s The Searchers. When Alain’s 16-year-old daughter Kelly disappears at a French co...
France/Belgium | 104
Penny Lane’s documentary—comprised of archival material, animated sequences and the occasional talking head—blooms into an incredible almanac of early 20th-century quackery and innovation as she focuses on JR Brinkley, an early broadcasting baron,...
USA | 79
Two brothers are bitten by the movie bug when they conceive an idea to smuggle drugs in empty film canisters in this often hilarious satire of politics and filmmaking. With an easily manipulated director on board, their controversial storyline inv...
Lebanon/Qatar | 107
Katie Couric narrates this devastating documentary covering the current political battle over gun control and gun violence from the team that impressively tackled child obesity in Fed Up (SFIFF 2014). With a balanced eye that presents the history ...
As the punches and shuffles of a boxing gym and the spirited gyrations of group dance practice evolve into the mysterious affliction that gives the film its name, one girl struggles with friendship, family and growing up. This atmospheric story of...
USA | 72
Babak Anvari’s debut feature is a shiveringly good ghost story set in a Tehran apartment building in the waning days of the Iran-Iraq War. Focusing on a woman forbidden by the government to pursue her medical career and her daughter who is perhaps...
UK/Jordan/Qatar | 84
Hamid, the often exasperated program director of a Farsi-language radio station based in San Francisco, awaits a much-anticipated meeting between Metallica and real-life Afghani band Kabul Dreams at his studio. Meanwhile, he has to contend with th...
USA/Iran | 93
A taped journal that theologian John Hull kept after the onset of blindness in 1980 forms the basis of this elegant and moving depiction of struggle and transcendence. Hull’s own voice provides the audio, though an actor plays the deceased writer,...
UK/France | 90
Audrie & Daisy is an urgent real-life drama that examines the ripple effects on families, friends, schools and communities when two underage young women find that sexual crimes against them have been caught on camera. From acclaimed filmmakers Bon...
Moises Chambi Yucra and his family stand at the crossroads of time. For generations, they have has made a humble living harvesting salt from Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, but beneath Uyuni sit massive amounts of lithium,...
USA/Bolivia | 76
Taking place within the quiet serenity of the dense Swedish woods, isolated from civilization, this intense drama delivers a harrowing tale of abuse and psychological imprisonment and the power of imagination to withstand painful circumstances. En...
Sweden/Denmark | 89
Shot with the permission and supervision of North Korean authorities, Russian director Vitaly Mansky’s film turns a propaganda effort into a deep-cover documentary about life inside one of the world’s most repressive nations. Its subjects—a young ...
Russia/Latvia/Germany/Czech Republic/North Korea | 106
Reflective of the unease in present-day Turkey, this slow-burn thriller focuses on a man recently released from prison who is forced to turn informant as a condition of his parole. In circumstances of heightened paranoia, he begins to see threats ...
Turkey/France/Qatar | 115
Filmmaker Moby Longinotto’s fascinating, thoroughly candid documentary invites audiences to pull up a chair at the never-dull family table in a Mississippi trailer park home. Everything is on the menu: dashed dreams, seething resentments, sexual a...
USA/UK | 80
This immensely entertaining series covers the history of contemporary recorded music through scores of original interviews with the famous producers and artists who created it. The two segments presented here focus, respectively, on the role of th...
USA | 102
On the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, three legendary criminals—each with his own colorful past—may team up for the biggest caper of their careers—if any of them survives long enough to actually pull it off....
Hong Kong/China | 97
RSVPs are now open! Join us at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival for our members-only surprise screening. Film to be announced on stage the morning of the screening. Complimentary coffee will be served. Happy SFIFF! This screening...
A Paris-based art historian returns to her native town of Rennes to teach a class. There, she encounters a troubled male student who is contending with an itinerant mother as well as the demands of university life. Grounded in the terrain, music a...
France | 148
In this moving drama inspired by a true story, a French Red Cross nurse working in Poland immediately after WWII is brought to a local convent to help a pregnant nun in labor. When she finds other nuns in similar circumstances and hears their trag...
France/Poland | 115
Brilliant but largely unheralded Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) is featured in this rich documentary tribute. Interviews, readings of Kaufman’s poems, historical footage and experimental images blend into a unique portrait of an enigmatic artis...
USA/Portugal | 90
Despite the picturesque cows and dogs in the fields of Vermont’s Mile Hill Farm, a botched culling of an unlucky sheep is an early hint that Tony Stone’s sympathetic and beautifully crafted portrait of farmer Peter Dunning will be something more c...
USA | 91
Amanda Micheli’s stirring and suspenseful documentary follows several aspiring parents who desperately want to have a baby but are struggling with infertility and the high cost of treatments. They place themselves in the hands of Las Vegas doctor ...
Executive produced by Wim Wenders and Errol Morris, this elegant and chilling documentary provides a glimpse of what the US government doesn’t want you to know about drone warfare by focusing on three veterans whose service experience causes them ...
USA | 92
Yaelle Kayam’s debut feature is strikingly shot against the tombstones of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, where an Orthodox woman’s longing for her husband’s love sets in motion a transformational journey into a nocturnal world of pimps and prostitut...
Israel/Denmark | 83
The power of cinema has rarely been revealed as strongly as in this documentary about an autistic man named Owen Suskind who, as a boy, discovers a way to communicate with his parents through Disney movies. Now a young man, Owen is getting ready t...
After California voters reversed the state’s Three Strikes law, thousands of inmates became suddenly eligible for resentencing and release. This provocative and touching documentary chronicles what happened next. Filmmakers Kelly Duane de la Vega ...
USA | 81
Du Haibin’s insightful documentary captures five years in the life of a young Maoist zealot in northern China and provides an unforgettable portrait of China in transition. As the tumult of the country’s recent history unfolds, cracks in the armor...
China/USA/France | 106
Susanna White’s vastly entertaining adaptation of John le Carré’s novel involves Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor), a mild-mannered poetry professor embroiled in the defection of a Russian money launderer with a prodigious head for numbers. Featurin...
UK | 107
Quiet teenager Theo moves with his family from Manhattan to Brooklyn when they inherit his grandfather’s brownstone. There he forms a fast and thick bond with the charismatic son of the Chilean woman who rents the building’s storefront space, but ...
USA | 85
Though best known as the scribe behind the legendary cult film Blade Runner, Hampton Fancher’s life has been full of plenty more sticky situations, close calls and other brushes with fate. Michael Almereyda’s lively portrait of the actor/producer/...
USA | 84
David Thomson proposes: forget that movies may be art or show business. They are an experiment with our sense of reality. Thus, it is in entering into a picture and emerging from it that the culture shock is most apparent and instructive. So he wi...
75
On a quest to uncover Leonard Bernstein’s “universal language of music,” renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma gathers virtuoso musicians from around the globe to collaborate on new musical explorations. This exceptional documentary profiles several of these ...
Simultaneously an astute observation of nonfiction filmmaking’s dilemmas, and a wonderfully creative autobiographical collage, Cameraperson is a must-see for all documentary enthusiasts. Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, who has lensed such acclaim...
A damning indictment on today’s free-for-all fraternity system and society’s winner-take-all notions of masculinity, writer-director Andrew Neel’s adaptation of Brad Land’s memoir of a brutal hazing at the hands of his new "brothers" is a harrowin...
In this suspenseful war film that uses fear of the dark to great effect, a French army contingent operating in Afghanistan is beset by mysterious disappearances. While Captain Antarès (Jérémie Renier) initially and understandably blames local vill...
France/Belgium | 103
Chef’s Table returns to SFIFF, this time profiling local culinary luminary Dominique Crenn, the first female in the US to be awarded two Michelin stars. In this episode, Crenn—the owner/chef of San Francisco's Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn—intimat...
USA | 50
In a small South Indian village, a cantankerous centenarian keels over and dies, setting the stage for a capricious comedy of errors among three generations of dissimilar sons. Conflict, confusion, corruption and a series of ill-conceived actions ...
India/USA | 123
A middle-aged artist, a young ingénue, existential crises, romantic fumblings and confessional drinkathons—like Monet and his water lilies, Hong Sang-soo keeps returning to the same core material and refining his pitch-perfect preoccupations of wh...
South Korea | 121
Small fishing communities of the Faroe Islands, an isolated Nordic archipelago in the North Atlantic, endure an uneasy period of transition as disparate global pressures—including animal rights activism, plummeting wildlife populations and mercury...
Denmark/USA | 81
In this moody evocation of a troubled relationship, Frank (Michael Shannon), a gifted chef who hasn’t gotten his due, seduces Lola (Imogen Poots), a budding young designer, with a perfect omelet, but fear, jealousy and dark secrets from the past s...
USA | 88
