SFFILM
The Bay Area's home for the world's finest films and filmmakers.
← Back to Events
(In)famous for pitching a no-hitter on LSD in 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis was the Muhammad Ali of the ballpark: proudly black, loudly opinionated and ready to rumble. When his addictions left him broke and unemployable, he battled back to ...
USA | 100
Portuguese director Joaquim Pinto poetically, dynamically and candidly chronicles an entire year of his life as he undergoes experimental treatment for his longtime HIV and VHC infections in this truly epic yet personal documentary. The film takes...
Portugal | 164
Four couples gather for a dinner party on a night that coincides with a comet passing overhead. Repercussions straight out of The Twilight Zone ensue as relationships begin to shift amid the chaos. Coherence soon takes a turn for the delightfully ...
USA | 89
Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) is a white-collar drone stuck in a Kafkaesque world of perpetual humiliation. Enter James Simon (also Eisenberg): a Type-A doppelgänger who offers to woo Simon’s dream girl (Mia Wasikowska) for a price. As writer/dire...
UK | 93
Imaginary friends and the Blue Angels are only a couple of the entities to be encountered in this collection of documentary and narrative shorts. Under Bill Morrison’s masterly treatment, Oliver Sacks’s encephalitic patients have their story told ...
86
Comprising an array of animation techniques and styles, from hand-drawn to CGI to puppetry and including narrative, non-narrative and experimental forms, these shorts represent the most arresting and wonderful animated work out there. All 2013 fil...
74
Today’s teen filmmakers live in a media-saturated culture, with the tools to create and distribut...
71
South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s 15th film finds him once again exploring the world of self-interested filmmakers with strained love lives. In a series of amusingly droll and acerbic drinking sessions, attractive film student Sunhi nervously...
South Korea | 88
Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof has rooted his remarkable career in a wide-ranging critique of censorship and authoritarian rule in his native Iran. Here, the filmmaker extends his uncompromising and diverse body of work with a taut, finely wove...
Iran | 127
Academy Award nominee, K.K. Barrett engages in a wide-ranging conversation covering his acclaimed career in production design on such films as Her (2013), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), I ♥ Huckabees (2004) and Lost in Translation (2003). Barre...
75
Isabelle Huppert stars in this daring blend of a police procedural, screwball comedy and social satire, following two internal affairs cops who investigate the murder of an informant in a small town in northern France. Serge Bozon’s (La France SFI...
France/Belgium/Luxembourg | 105
Starting out from Alice Springs, a young woman decides to walk to the Indian Ocean, 2,000 miles across Australia, with four camels and a dog for company in this adaptation of adventurer Robyn Davidson’s memoir, a journey of self-discovery made vis...
UK/Australia | 110
A poverty-stricken father and his two young children try to survive in modern-day Taipei in yet another remarkable piece of cinema from the great Tsai Ming-liang. Tsai's oblique approach to space and time renders Stray Dogs an often mysterious wor...
Taiwan/France | 138
The step from a teenage girl's "first time" to her decision to join the world's oldest profession proves very short in François Ozon's latest. This "portrait in four seasons and four songs" focuses on comely Parisienne Isabelle (Marine Vacth), who...
France | 93
Luc Schaedler's latest work presents distinct and illuminating portraits of contemporary life in China. Attentively observing life on a parched farm, a grim industrial zone, a rural village and a booming megacity, the documentary expressively rev...
Switzerland | 80
A struggling father copes with the loss of his wife while blind to the emotional toll her death and his frequent absences have taken on his sons—a motocross-riding teenager and his brother, a sensitive pre-adolescent boy. Outstanding performances ...
USA | 93
In 1988, labor organizer Cesar Chavez began a 36-day water-only fast to protest the use of pesticides that led farm workers and their children to develop cancer at record rates. With unparalleled access, Chavez's former press secretary Lorena Parl...
From the wintry landscapes of Siberia to a desert posting in Israel for two female soldiers, these narrative and documentary shorts showcase a wide-ranging exploration of life and locale. Here in the US, two delightful shorts depict the lives of ...
83
High in the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, nine-year-old Peyangki would rather play outdoors than study in the monastery. A trip to the capital, and exposure to television and the modern world, opens his eyes to an enticing, complicated future i...
France/Finland | 80
Freedom Summer ushers the audience into the center of the Civil Rights conflict during the heated summer of 1964 in Mississippi, the nation's most segregated state at that time, and documents the efforts of more than 700 student volunteers who ban...
USA | 113
Are strange occurrences in an affluent Buenos Aires suburb evidence that the skittish residents are actually being targeted? Paranoia runs rampant in this accomplished first feature, instilling a disorienting sense of dread in the viewer. The film...
Argentina/France/Germany/Qatar/Uruguay | 79
Eleven experimental films take us on a journey through the looking glass—reflecting on the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future. Featuring new works by Su Friedrich, John Smith, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Basma Alsharif, Charlotte Pr...
77
In this low-key, loosely plotted coming-of-age tale, a Turkish teenage girl wrestles with mood swings, unfocused restlessness, familial responsibilities, shifting friendships and romantic complications during a year of quiet tumult.
Turkey/Germany/Netherlands/Greece | 97
Recent college graduate Tamako does little more than sleep, eat and indifferently work in her father’s store. “Japan is hopeless,” she insists, but she seems pretty hopeless herself. When her dad makes a tentative stab at dating, it turns the numb...
Japan | 78
Surly Tokyo loner Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) has a mission: Recovering loot buried somewhere in the snowbound countryside outside Fargo, North Dakota. No matter that this treasure may exist only in the Coen brothers' classic movie—it’s real to her. A...
USA | 105
Comedian Mike Myers pays homage to the talent manager who first tasted success alongside his client, rocker Alice Cooper. This affectionate documentary blends Gordon’s reminiscences, archival footage and testimonials from clients and friends, incl...
84
Producers, writers, and directors from the award-winning destination for comedy on the web, Funny Or Die, will offer insight into how they create their online video content. For aspiring writers and directors who are passionate about comedic filmm...
Adapting his autobiographical novel, director Abdellah Taïa tells the story of a gay Moroccan boy finding self-realization and personal strength within a society that shuns him. Shot by the brilliant Agnès Godard, the film takes the form of a dipt...
France/Morocco/Switzerland | 82
In a contemporary Ethiopian village, a 14-year-old girl is abducted from school. Her attempt to free herself from a future of forced marriage sets off a legal firestorm in this powerful drama inspired by a true story that pits the law against an e...
Ethiopia | 96
Set in Guadalajara, The Amazing Catfish follows the quiet transformation of a solitary young woman informally adopted and absorbed into a rambunctious matriarchy in a state of crisis. Filmed by Claire Denis’ long-time cinematographer, Agnès Godard...
Mexico | 89
Two- and four-legged creatures display remarkable similarities in Benedikt Erlingsson's gorgeously photographed series of connected tales, set in rural Icelandic horse country. Though the film contains a running string of tragedies, its tone never...
Iceland/Germany | 81
This unique hybrid of documentary and narrative offers an evocative portrait of the quotidian lives of a devout young Christian goat farmer and the bull-riding cowboy who lives nearby. As much a portrait of the Eastern Texas town where they live, ...
USA/Belgium/Italy | 100
What makes a masterpiece? This documentary examines the curious life of one of the most prolific art forgers in the United States, who—under the guise of philanthropy—deceived museums across the country with his ingenuously crafted counterfeits fo...
Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, this urgent dispatch from the besieged Syrian city of Homs is both an elegy and a call to action. Filmed between 2011 and 2013, it presents a visceral eyewitness account of t...
Syria/Germany | 87
In a West Virginia coal-mining town, the unthinkable has happened: Ten men have lost their lives in a mining accident, leaving the community in shambles as it tries to make sense of the disaster. Featuring standout performances from Elizabeth Bank...
Miriam Karlkvist took a well-deserved Shooting Star award at Berlin for her portrayal of an androgynous teenage girl negotiating life in a mafia-controlled town whose code of silence is destroying her family. A first feature from Fabio Mollo, film...
Italy/France | 90
San Francisco’s beloved nonfiction storytelling series returns to the Festival for a special night of film industry–themed stories. The rules for telling a story at Porchlight are deceptively simple. Tell a true 10-minute tale to an audience of st...
A reluctant smuggler and his eager neophyte brother drag a massive load of narcotics up the coast of Colombia, posing as fishermen. Paramilitary, guerrillas and hardscrabble desperation suffuse every inch of the jungle and waters that surround the...
Colombia/USA | 82
“It’s better to be happy than well dressed,” says nonagenarian style maven Iris Apfel. Better yet, why not be both? This documentary by the legendary Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens)—who recently passed away at age 88—is an affectionate tribute to an...
USA | 83
San Francisco Film Society proudly joins the California College of the Arts as co-presenter of the Cinema Visionaries series, an ongoing program featuring key filmmakers in conversation with CCA students and a public audience. For our inaugural co...
70
Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Script at the Berlin Film Festival, Stations of the Cross follows 14-year-old Maria as she wrestles with the spiritual demands of her family's traditionalist Catholic sect. Modeled on the eponymous path of Christ...
Germany | 110
Badly trailing in television's ratings race, ABC decided to enlist liberal novelist Gore Vidal and conservative talking-head William F. Buckley Jr. for some lively commentary on the ’68 presidential conventions. What they got instead was an intell...
USA | 87
In a small seaside city in the Dominican Republic, a local in her early 20s navigates a complicated romance with a wealthy, much older woman, whose drifting expat existence forms a counterpoint to her young lover’s daily hustle. Quiet tensions und...
Dominican Republic/Argentina/Mexico | 85
Take a trip around the world, into the future and back to the past, with this distinct selection of narrative and documentary shorts. Whether it be a bowling championship, the inside of a bus or Iran during the 1979 revolution, these filmmakers gr...
100
This collection of short animated films includes CGI, cel, hand-drawn and stop-motion techniques that present the hilarious, strange and touching visions of artists from around the world. In a program that includes new works by Don Hertzfeldt, Dav...
When a beautiful young woman dies, she leaves behind her husband, David, and best friend, Claire. The widower’s main coping mechanism—dressing in his wife’s clothes—becomes a way for the woman's two loved ones to explore their grief (and their own...
France | 105
Val (portrayed magnificently by Regina Casé) is a devoted live-in housemaid for an upper middle-class family in São Paulo. When her estranged daughter arrives from their hometown to take university entrance exams, tension in the household rises as...
Brazil | 111
An eclectic array of experimental short films and videos that points to new filmic terrain and new approaches to subjectivity, narrative, history and form. From the beautiful choreography in Arrowed, NO ID and Blackout to the abstract beauty of St...
82
Unexpected shifts in life and community are presented in a variety of ways—from the sublime to the ridiculous—in these seven inventive narrative and documentary shorts. The poetic ruminations of elders living in Scotland and Hong Kong expose the r...
Director Bobcat Goldthwait chronicles the life and work of Barry Crimmins, a key figure of Boston’s 1980s comedy scene turned political satirist and activist. Through wonderful archival footage and interviews of comedic luminaries such as Stephen ...
USA | 107
Named one of the "13 People Who Made the World More Creative" by Fast Company, Nonny de la Peña is leading a field she invented called immersive journalism and is changing the way people experience nonfiction narratives. Using cutting-edge, virtua...
As the first Arab accepted to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem, young Eyad struggles between two antagonistic worlds to secure an identity and a purpose for himself. Along the way, he encounters cultural prejudice, personal compro...
Israel/Germany/France | 104
Challenging our ideas about connected story lines, H. envisions a world thrown out of balance by a possible astronomical event. When something falls from the sky and explodes over Troy, NY, there follows a rash of strange apparent effects. People ...
USA/Argentina | 97
This affectionate portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold is also a love letter to the kaleidoscopic culinary and cultural wonders of Los Angeles. Gold is known for his eclectic embrace of mom-and-pop restaurants along with mo...
USA | 91
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 ...
USA | 98
In the impossible spaces and eerie places of these nine experimental films, birds fill the sky and then disappear, a parrot barks, people and animals are transformed. Color leaps from the frame—the glow of an ancient forest, the spectacle of firew...
The Diplomat tells the remarkable story of the life and legacy of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whose singular career spanned 50 years of American foreign policy and six presidential administrations from Kennedy to Obama. Told through the perspect...
USA | 104
In Eden, acclaimed filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve dives deep into the 1990s French house music scene through Paul (Félix de Givry), a trailblazing DJ who injected the "French touch" into electronic music and whose career parallels the rise of Daft Punk...
France | 131
Bay Area poet Donté Clark's efforts to heal a community reeling from violence form the core of this inspiring documentary. With the help of teacher/mentor Molly Raynor, Clark collaborates with African American teenagers from the RAW (Richmond Arti...
Domingo is a devoted family man and Christian missionary gliding through a dutifully modest if unexceptional life. He’d happily keep it that way, too, but for the fact that a fatal accident leaves him, disturbingly, without a sense of guilt. Shot ...
Chile | 90
Masterfully blending enchanting magic realism with piercing sociological insights, Philippe Lacôte's fleetly paced drama charts the unusual circumstances that set the seemingly directionless Run (Abdoul Karim Konate) on the path to becoming an ass...
Ivory Coast/France | 102
Park Jung-bum, one of Korea’s most acclaimed young directors, writes, directs and stars in this unflinching look at a man in a remote mountain village struggling to improve his lot in life and take care of his emotionally disturbed sister and her ...
South Korea | 180
Vietnamese director Diep Hoang Nguyen’s debut feature is a sensuous and moody observation of a young student’s struggle to get an abortion in the tropical languor of the slums of Hanoi. Thuy Anh Nguyen finds the right balance of innocence and fort...
Vietnam/France/Germany/Norway | 99
Chaitanya Tamhane’s gorgeously recorded debut unfolds almost in slow motion. The film—a prizewinner at the Venice International Film Festival—concerns a criminal case in Mumbai’s lower court, tracing the private and professional lives of the lawye...
India | 116
David Gelb, creator of the revered food documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, now unveils a new Netflix series called Chef’s Table, featuring beautifully filmed portraits of radical food artists from around the world. In these episodes, master of fire...
Populated by charming oddballs, quirky café/bar Bota (literally “the world” in Albanian) is a silent witness to the lives and secrets of people living in the shadow of the past. Long after the end of Albania’s harsh dictatorship, the locals’ lives...
Albania/Italy/Kosovo | 104
This powerful musical biopic tells Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s dramatically compelling story in—to use ancient recording jargon—two tracks. In the 1960s as the band rides surf music onto the charts, a creatively restless Wilson (Paul Dano) writes the...
USA | 120
In this charming slice of magic realism, a quiet drifter finds a construction job in a small town and meets a friendly woman who lives nearby. Though he finally feels the urge to settle down, Vincent’s newfound life is thrown into jeopardy when hi...
France | 76
Nearing the end of his years and retired to a remote Sussex farm house, Sherlock Holmes is determined to take back authorship of his own story. As his memory begins to fail, he is driven to revisit his final case about which his regrets are strong...
UK | 105
Alice Klieg, a woman with borderline personality disorder who wins an $86 million lottery prize, decides she wants her own talk show where she’s the subject of every episode. Network officials are glad to take her money, but balk a bit when she wa...
USA | 86
Sin-Dee is on a tear. Fresh out of prison, she’s heard from her friend Alexandra that her man Chester has been hanging out with another woman, and whichever one she finds first had better watch out. One of the most talked-about movies at this year...
Sly San Francisco teen Clark Rayman is navigating life pretty well between an aloof dad and a pill-addled mom until she checks in for rehab and his father tries on the role of disciplinarian. Clark decides to find a new place to live and a new fam...
USA | 94
In a mad dash from his mother’s funeral back to the station to head off an internal affairs investigator, detective Ko (played by Hong Sang-soo regular Lee Sun-kyun) hits and kills a man on a dark roadside. Stashing the body in the trunk is not th...
South Korea | 111
First there was an opportunity ... then there was a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him: Spu...
USA | 117
In this modern love story set against the Austin music scene, two entangled couples—struggling songwriters Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Ryan Gosling), and music mogul Cook (Michael Fassbender) and the waitress whom he ensnares (Natalie Portman)—chas...
USA | 145
The Lovers is a refreshing, funny look at love, fidelity, and family, starring Debra Winger and Tracy Letts as a long-married and completely dispassionate husband and wife. Both are in the midst of serious affairs and on the brink of officially ca...
