There were no media-hyped maniacs at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival--no people in gorilla suits handing out flyers or cute key chains or penlights as invitations to midnight screenings (although Spike and Mike did strategically position a few emissaries to hail their upcoming animation fest). Nonetheless, San Francisco presented a blow-out sequence of 191 films from 39 countries with 13 world premieres with all the rip-sizzle style of a barker's dream carnival.

Launched by Irving M. "Bud" Levin in 1957, the same year that Alfred Hitchcock shot Vertigo in town, the festival's original opening premiered Antonioni's El Grido, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Wadja's Kanal. Now the Festival is run by arts patron and San Jose Sharks owner George Gund III (and an insomniac staff), and it has kept pace with both its first year and with European festivals, offering a strong mix of international and American mainstream filmmaking as well as alternative, eccentric, and often politicized filmmaking from all over the world.

Never short of San Francisco spit fire, this year's SFIFF was hot with film luminaries. Francisco Rosi, in attendance to receive the Akira Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement, was toasted by "the last of the one-eyed directors" and king of cult melodrama, Andre de Toth, who was also the subject of a tribute. The festival, in collaboration with Cinecitta and the Pacific Film Archive, presented several of Rosi's films in newly restored prints.

Jim Jarmusch and Peter Greenaway were also on hand to present their latest projects. Jarmusch's biopic of Neil Young, titled Year of the Horse, turned into an unannounced concert at the Trocadero Transfer, while Greenaway intrigued viewers with The Pillow Book, a sensuous fable of a female erotica writer.

Impressive submissions from international filmmakers included Honey and Ashes, a female-oriented drama about male domination in South Africa by Swiss-Tunisian Nadia Fares; the film won the SKYY Prize, a $10,000 cash award established by SKYY Spirits to mark an international film currently without U.S. distribution. Informed by the disappearance of 30,000 people during the bloody national purge carried out by Argentina's military dictatorship in the 1970s, Moebius, directed by Gustavo Mosquera, is subversive as well as technically masterful. La Promesse, by documentary veterans and brothers from Belgium Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, touched on the ethical dilemma faced by a 15-year-old as he rebels against his father. Influenced by Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, the film lends an atmosphere of documentary "truth" to a story acted by non-professionals.

Not surprisingly, the Asian offerings were also astonishing. Tsai Ming-liang's The River from Taiwan, which had already garnered the Special Jury Prize in Berlin, unfolds in a series of gorgeous long takes to depict the forbidden territory of homoeroticism and incest between father and son. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Goodbye South, Goodbye adeptly plays with color timing to completely saturate sequences in mono-color in a contemporary tour through urban ganglands.

Local pillars from the experimental filmmaking set such as George Kuchar and Lynn Hershman counter-balanced European heavies like Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker, both of whom presented new films this year--indeed, the festival was full of extraordinary films and gala events; balancing out the unavoidable harried festival madness were late-night driftings to North Beach's Tosca and hordes of festival-goers just having a lot of fun.

The Cannes Film Festival by Noah Cowan
The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival by Michael Jones
The New York Underground Film Festival by Pamela Grossman
SXSW Film Festival by Holly Willis
San Francisco International Film Festival by Isabel Sadurni
Aspen Shortsfest by Holly Willis
Gen Art Film Festival by Adam Pincus