San Francisco International Film Festival

With the departure of Peter Scarlet after 19 years as its artistic director, the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), North America’s oldest, enters a new era. Moving on to accept what he called a "terrifying challenge" as director of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, Scarlet leaves behind a fest well known for its Francophilia as well as its long-standing dedication to independent voices, international directors and Bay Area filmmakers. These traditional propensities were all on display at the 44th edition of the festival (April 19 through May 3), where French films and indies accounted for 50% of the SFIFF’s 100-plus feature-length programs.

This year the festival recognized Stockard Channing’s career accomplishments in acting with the Peter J. Owens Award and a screening of Patrick Stettner’s drama The Business of Strangers, starring Channing as a scheming business executive. The film also won Stettner the SFIFF’s Skyy Prize, a $10,000 first-feature award.

Among the SFIFF’s coups was the international premiere of a digitally restored version of Fritz Lang’s magnificent silent-classic Metropolis. Juggling English-language narration from three different translations, Scarlet managed to keep pace with the live organ accompaniment, thoroughly entertaining a sold-out crowd at the historic Castro Theater. Another SRO event, The Sounds of Science, featured Hoboken, N.J., indie popsters Yo La Tengo performing an imaginative original live score for a program of short films on the natural history of marine life by avant-garde underwater filmmaker Jean Painlevé.

American underground cinema was exemplified by one of the originals: experimental auteur Kenneth Anger, on hand to receive the SFIFF’s Persistence of Vision Award and present Magick Lantern Cycle, a nine-film program of his complete collected shorts. Taking up the Beat banner, Joseph Castelo’s American Saint, a largely improvised DV road movie inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, captured an energy and spontaneity widely lacking in many of the fest’s larger-budget independent selections. Shooting on location from New York to L.A. with only a scenario-based script, Castelo elicits refreshingly unmannered performances from leads Kevin Corrigan and Vincent Schiavelli.

Junji Sakamoto’s Face features renowned Japanese stage actress Naomi Fujiyama’s transformative performance as the tortured Masako, an awkward, spinsterish seamstress who discovers the liberating power of justifiable homicide. Jia Ke Zhang returned to the festival with Platform (after winning the Skyy Prize for Xiao Wu in 1998), and even with 45 minutes excised from its original three-plus hour running time, Jia’s sophomore offering moves at a fascinatingly deliberate pace as it chronicles the confusion and ennui of a troupe of theatrical performers struggling through China’s economic upheavals of the 1980s.

Though outnumbered by narratives, documentary selections also made strong showings. Jan Harlan’s exhaustive (141 mins.) Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures wisely avoids the cradle-to-grave biopic approach. Gaea Girls by Jano Williams and Kim Longinotto adopts a stripped-down vérité approach to depict the punishing training and fanatic determination of would-be women wrestlers at the Gaea Japan training camp.

John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch won the audience prize for Best Narrative Feature in a tie with Stranger Inside from Cheryl Dunye. Kate Davis’s Southern Comfort received the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary. Promises by Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado, took both the Bay Area Golden Gate and audience awards for Best Documentary Feature with its touching and insightful portrayal of seven West Bank Palestinian and Israeli kids struggling to understand the religious strife that surrounds them.

An 18% jump in attendance at this year’s fest bodes well for Scarlet’s successor, still unnamed at press time. Scarlet, meanwhile, has expressed interest in continuing to assist the SFIFF in an advisory capacity. "I don’t look at this as good-bye [so much] as evolving to a different role," he says. – Chuck Stephens

Cannes International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
IFP/West Los Angeles Film Festival by Rolf Gibbs
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