49th San Francisco International Film Festival Presents Big Tilda

Oversize Photocollage Images of Tilda Swinton by San Francisco Artist Lucy Gray to Be Projected on City Hall

March 28, 2006

San Francisco, CA—On five evenings beginning Tuesday, April 25 and running through Saturday, April 29, the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 20-May 4) will present Big Tilda, a public art project featuring photocollage images of world-renowned actor Tilda Swinton by award-winning San Francisco artist Lucy Gray. The images will be projected outdoors on the north and south faces of City Hall from 9:00 pm until midnight each evening using high-powered Pani projectors. 

Swinton, who most recently played the Ice Queen in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, will be present at the SFIFF’s annual Film Society Awards Night gala at the Westin St. Francis Hotel on Thursday, April 27. She will then deliver the Festival’s annual State of Cinema Address on Saturday, April 29 at the Kabuki 8 Theatres.

“Tilda Swinton is bold, brilliant and beautiful and I can’t think of anything more spectacular than to be able to see Lucy Gray’s extraordinary images of her projected three stories high and half a block long in the very center of the city,” said San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat.

By projecting the Big Tilda images on City Hall, SFIFF 49 seeks to continue its efforts to highlight the Festival as a citywide celebration of film as art and to consolidate San Francisco’s position as an international arts and cultural destination. This project, along with other events during the 15-day Festival, will further bring the city into the Festival and the Festival into the city, and help illustrate Mayor Gavin Newsom’s message that digital media is of crucial importance to San Francisco.

The 12 collages in carousel slide rotation on the north face of City Hall and the 12 additional images on the south face of City Hall were created over a period of two years by Lucy Gray, who began placing her pictures in public settings in 1995 when her series “Naming the Homeless” hung in the nave at Grace Cathedral. She began photographing Swinton on the set of the movie Thumbsucker where she took vivid color shots, but wasn’t satisfied.

“I didn’t feel [the photos] were expressive of the inner life of this towering personality, this fascinating mind and heart, this actress who has played every disparate part as simply and directly as the last,” Gray recalls. “I wanted to capture her complexity, her charm, her lack of affectation, her atmosphere.”

This series of photocollages began after Gray returned from photographing the famous Route 66, but came away feeling the landscape needed “something more.” Transferring the film from both shoots to digital discs, she experimented in Photoshop by making a vest for Swinton out of a piece of the road that said Historic Route 66. As a result, the photocollage series was born. In early 2006, Leggat and Gray began talking about the outdoor projection of these images as a welcome addition to the SFIFF 49 programming. Big Tilda grew out of those initial conversations.
 
Images from Gray’s photocollage series have been included in The Photo Review 2005 Competition Issue, Women in Photography International Online Competition and Pro Arts Gallery Juried Exhibition New Visions 2005 in Oakland, California. The first full exhibition of the images was at the Audis Husar Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles from February 1 to March 30, 2005.

SFIFF thanks Stefanie Coyote and the S.F. Film Commission for their invaluable help in presenting Big Tilda. SFIFF also thanks James Mulder and the Pani projector company of Vienna, Austria.

Founded in 1957, the vanguard San Francisco International Film Festival is the longest-running film festival in the Americas. Held each spring for two weeks, the International is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in the country’s most beautiful city, featuring some 200 films and live events with more than 100 filmmakers in attendance, presenting some 22 awards and attracting a diverse audience of nearly 80,000 people.

The 49th International runs April 20–May 4, 2006 at the Kabuki 8 Theatres, the Castro Theatre and the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco; the Pacific Film Archive Theater in Berkeley; and Landmark’s Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto, as well as several smaller venues. To purchase tickets and for ticket information log on to www.sffs.org, call 925.866.9559 or visit the Main Ticket Outlet at the Kabuki 8 Theatres (1881 Post Street) or the Satellite Ticket Outlet at Virgin Megastore (2 Stockton Street). For additional information log on to www.sffs.org or call 415.561.5000.

San Francisco Film Society, presenter of the flagship SFIFF, is a nonprofit arts and educational organization dedicated to celebrating the world of film and media in all its glorious forms. In early 2006 the Film Society unveiled SF360, a broad-spectrum series of initiatives designed to showcase the extraordinary vitality, variety and innovation of the San Francisco Bay Area film and media scene, including www.sf360.org, SF360 San Francisco Movie Night, SF360 InSchool Cinemas and the SF360 Festival of Festivals.

The Film Society will present the first annual San Francisco International Animation Festival from October 11–15, 2006 and a new SF International Youth Media Festival in 2007.

First to 50: SFIFF will hold its landmark 50th anniversary in April 2007.