SFFILM
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If Alicia could just get some sleep, everything would be all right. As she and her cousin Sarah make their way through rural Chile with Sarah’s boyfriend, his sister, and their strange American friend Brink, Alicia’s insomnia slowly takes control....
Chile |
In this companion to The Act of Killing (SFIFF 2013), Joshua Oppenheimer widens his groundbreaking documentary examination of the political violence that roiled Indonesia in 1965. The film follows a gentle optometrist as he confronts perpetrators ...
Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/United Kingdom | 99
Winner of a FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, Lisandro Alonso’s much anticipated follow-up to his “Lonely Man Trilogy” (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool) is a sublime fantasy standing at the intersection of fairy tale and landscape art. Viggo Mortensen...
Denmark / USA/ Argentina / Mexico / Netherlands / Germany / France | 108
In her sophomore directorial effort, Academy Award-winner Helen Hunt plays Jackie, a high-strung New Yorker editor who follows her son to California after he drops out of college to surf. In this effervescent coming-of-age comedy drama, Jackie’s m...
USA | 93
In this moving, tenderly wrought film based on a true story, a former national chess champion with bipolar disorder comes to volunteer at a chess club geared toward underserved children in his community. As his relationship with the kids evolves i...
New Zealand | 124
A shattered mother and father search relentlessly for their lost son in this emotionally powerful melodrama based on the true story of a toddler's kidnapping in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. The pair grows increasingly desperate as they m...
China/Hong Kong | 130
Just as the wife and four young daughters of a hard-driving beekeeper begin to chafe against their arduous, isolated life, a glitzy national TV show announces a contest for local farmers. Humor, conflict and the familiar pangs of early adolescence...
Italy/Switzerland/Germany | 110
Since 1995, the Patronas, a group of women in southern Mexico, prepare food and drinking water in large quantities to hand out as the train known as “The Beast” speeds by carrying men and boys from Central America to the US border. This deeply mov...
Mexico | 90
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
Deng, a retired widow, tries to care for her family, though her sons protest her “intrusions” into their personal lives. When mysterious phone calls and other strange occurrences disrupt her daily routine, she wonders, who—if anyone—might be comin...
China | 110
Director Hong Sang-soo's latest film is a perceptive comedy about a Japanese man who travels to Seoul to search for a former lover but mostly finds awkward interactions and misunderstanding. Although the film's sense of humor borders on the absurd...
South Korea | 66
Both tense whodunnit and layered character study, Diao Yinan’s Berlin Golden Bear winner spans five years in the life of a troubled cop who can’t shake his experiences working a particularly gruesome serial-killer case. A carefully plotted film no...
China/Hong Kong | 106
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
Postman Lyokha serves an aging community of island dwellers in a remote corner of northwestern Russia. Globetrotting veteran director Konchalovsky returns to his home turf for this humorous, rueful, occasionally surreal slice of rural life that ta...
Russia | 101
A beguiling and bracing work of dramatic fantasy, Luna melds the messy interpersonal relationships among a quartet of friends with vividly illustrated flights of imagination. In tracing the emotional and psychological states of each of the four ma...
UK | 104
The low-key realism of Kris Swanberg’s heartfelt drama Unexpected allows her to explore large social issues with great intimacy. With her inner-city high school on the brink of closure, teacher Samantha Abbot (Cobie Smolders) is at a crossroads in...
Andrew Bujalski’s characteristically clever and awkward humor remains the core of his filmmaking style in this impressive leap to a bigger budget film. Kat (Cobie Smulders) is a super intense trainer in perpetual conflict with her self help-obsess...
USA | 105
Larry drifts through life, from one menial position to the next, without much thought for the future. Often drunk, solitary and unmoored, his closest companion is his French bulldog. Not much fazes him, so he is gob-smacked to realize that he actu...
USA | 75
A mother needs absolute calm to recover from plastic surgery and becomes increasingly annoyed and borderline abusive with her free-spirited children. They in turn begin to suspect that something might not be altogether right with her since the pro...
Austria | 100
Bay Area filmmaker Leah Wolchok’s highly entertaining behind-the-scenes documentary look at the world of The New Yorker’s cartoons and cartoonists brings to vivid life a beloved part of the magazine. Featuring insightful interviews with many of th...
USA | 86
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
Filmmakers Les Blank and Richard Leacock were stubborn iconoclasts and kindred spirits. This disarming portrait captures Leacock’s wisdom and wit through conversations in his Normandy farmhouse and honors an intuitive, artful approach to nonfictio...
USA | 65
Working in the macho world of sailors, ship engineer Alice is an expert in her field and fully in command of her sexuality as well. When she comes up against the classic double standard after an affair with the ship’s captain, she risks the taunts...
France | 95
A young Albanian woman, chafing against her culture’s strictures on female behavior makes the decision to follow the local tradition of living as a man and takes the name Mark. Years later, questioning her choice, she leaves her remote village to ...
Italy / Switzerland / Germany / Albania / Kosovo | 84
A team of forensic investigators in the Peruvian countryside digs up the remains of persons who were murdered during the brutal Fujimori Era of the 1980s and ’90s. The process of identifying one particular set of bones becomes an agonizing experie...
Peru/Colombia/Germany/France | 95
An Afghan refugee and an Iranian metal-punch worker cultivate a clandestine relationship amid the corrugated-metal shacks of undocumented workers in an industrial suburb of Tehran. Like teenagers in love from time immemorial, they are convinced th...
Iran/Afghanistan | 90
Winner of the 2014 IDFA award for Best Feature Documentary, Of Men and War is director Laurent Bécue-Renard's multiyear account of the residents of The Pathway Home, an innovative treatment center for PTSD and related war traumas in Yountville, Ca...
France/Switzerland | 142
Set in the near-future, Advantageous (winner of a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival) focuses on Gwen Koh, a single mother, whose aspirations for her daughter drive her to the precipice of a fraught decision. Including eerie and inge...
USA | 97
This Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner intimately focuses on the charming and insightful Angulo brothers, who range in age from 16 to 24. Because the brothers have been kept isolated within their family’s apartment, only homeschooling, ...
USA | 84
In the new Olympic sport of women’s boxing, 17-year-old Claressa Shields bursts out from the total obscurity of a small Flint, Michigan, gym to compete for a coveted gold medal. T-Rex beautifully captures her rapid ascent, her battle to overcome a...
A tour de force of pure expressive, explosive cinema, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s one-of-a-kind drama recasts Lord of the Flies in a Ukrainian school for the deaf where violence and unforgiving social Darwinism speak louder than words. Telling its s...
Ukraine | 130
With a stark visual composition that evokes Andrew Wyeth's paintings and a clever storyline recalling Let the Right One In, this restrained and creepy coming-of-age drama tells the story of a timid village teenager who uncovers some dark family se...
Denmark | 85
Winner of the Grand Jury and Audience awards for narrative features at SXSW, this debut drops the viewer into a Thanksgiving gathering bubbling under with potential emotional hazard. The slightly frazzled Krisha (a brilliant performance by Shults’...
USA | 82
The fraught transition to democratic rule in Zimbabwe, while its autocratic dictator still rules, makes for riveting, stranger-than-fiction drama in this exceptional documentary that focuses on two leaders tasked with drafting a new constitution f...
Denmark | 100
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
