San Francisco Documentary Film Festival

Every big American city has at least a few churches built on the lots of failed neighborhood movie theaters, but it’s not every day that you see a church being converted back into a cinema. Okay, so San Francisco’s First Congregational Church isn’t really a church anymore – the Academy of Art College owns it now – but over Memorial Day weekend, the faithful came out anyway. The occasion: the first San Francisco Documentary Film Festival.

"I hadn’t set foot in a church myself since I was about eight," says Tod Booth, the Doc Fest’s co-programmer (with cohort Allen White), who handpicked the 21 shorts and features for the four-day event. Had an innocent seeker of God’s word accidentally wandered into one of the screenings that weekend, what prayer might he or she have said for the various sights and sounds onscreen? Included among the black mass of delights were the hardcore sex of Maggie Carey and Elena Carr’s Ladyporn, the gloriously sacrilegious iconography of André Barcinski’s and Ivan Finotti’s portrait of Brazilian horror director José Mojica Marins, Coffin Joe, and an earful of death metal from Brad Vanderberg’s Bloodhag: The Faster You Go Deaf the More Time You Have to Read – a film promoting literacy among teens, believe it or not. "I have no doubt that the words ‘penis,’ ‘blowjob’ and their many variants have never been spoken so many times in the whole history of that building," Booth says. "Of course, Plaster Caster [Jessica Villines’s film about rock stars’ immortalized members] would probably capture that record wherever it plays."

A spinoff of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, the brainchild of budding impresario Jeff Ross, a niche event like the Doc Fest (not to be confused with New York’s DocFest) is a tricky proposition in a seemingly over-festivaled town like San Francisco. But, according to Booth, "the numbers tell the tale: we had 12 programs and about 1,500 ticket buyers. I suspect a lot of our patrons are filmmakers themselves who liked meeting the out-of-town filmmakers who attended. And I think the idea of seeing movies in places other than the multiplexes, which are growing like mushrooms around here, is almost a relief for a lot of people. It makes for a fun event. The Oscars really cast a pall over the whole documentary genre," he argues. "The nominees are all so sober. I like a good Holocaust documentary as much as the next guy, but we wanted to celebrate the more lighthearted and strange side of docs."

The Doc Fest offers congenial competition as well, with the audience picking the winners. This year Arthur Borman and Steve Danielson’s Karaoke Fever took favorite feature, and Vanderberg’s Bloodhag, favorite short. Each received a trophy modeled on the Golden Boy given out to Academy Award winners, colorfully custom-painted by a local artist. "We thought about giving out a glow-in-the-dark Jesus statue or something," Booth quipped, "but we didn’t want to push this church thing too far." – Justin Lowe

Cannes International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
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South by Southwest Conference and Film Festival by Josh Zeman
San Francisco Documentary Film Festival by Justin Lowe
San Francisco International Film Festival by Chuck Stephens