49th San Francisco International Film Festival Features New Programming Tracks, New Venues and New Media Innovations

A Two-Week Whirlwind Journey of 227 Films from 41 Countries

March 28, 2006

San Francisco, CA—The 49th San Francisco International Film Festival kicks off April 20 and runs though May 4, offering 227 films (97 features and 130 shorts) from 41 countries, including one world premiere, 11 North American premieres, 12 U.S. premieres and 38 West Coast premieres. The Festival opens with Hong Kong director Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s musical romance Perhaps Love, set in Shanghai and Beijing and featuring a pan-Asian all-star cast, including Jacky Cheung, Zhou Xun, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Ji Jin-hee. The film screening at the Castro Theatre will be followed by a Hong Kong–themed Opening Night party at the Regency Center. Closing the Festival will be A Prairie Home Companion by 2003 Film Society Directing Award recipient Robert Altman. Altman turns Garrison Keillor’s beloved radio show into a musical-comedy ensemble masterpiece starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly and Lindsay Lohan. The Closing Night party will take place amidst the loft-like lounges and cushioned dance floor of club Mezzanine.

This year’s Festival also includes a special Centerpiece film, Romance & Cigarettes, director John Turturro’s deliriously over-the-top, no-holds-barred melodrama and exuberant homage to the musical, starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet; and the always popular ZOOM! After Hours film and party, with a showcase screening of Emmanuelle Bercot’s provocative psychodrama Backstage, starring Isild Le Besco and Emmanuelle Seigner, with after party at Roe.

“The 49th International will present a dazzling array of great films and great filmmakers, exciting parties and special events and one-of-a-kind experiences for all of our varied audiences,” said Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat. “We will look to the past, to cinema’s history, and forward to its various possible futures. We will be citywide, mounting screenings in nearly a dozen locations around town. We will honor the work of acclaimed directors and debut promising new talent. And we will bring international guests together with Bay Area filmmakers in the most beautiful and forward-thinking city in the country.”

The recipient of this year’s Film Society Directing Award is Werner Herzog, who will be appearing onstage at the Castro Theatre for an interview before a screening of one of his latest films, The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), a luminous and at times comic science-fiction fantasy, blending Herzog’s trademark romanticism with an ecological tale of space travel. The Peter J. Owens Award, honoring an actor whose work exemplifies brilliance, independence and integrity, will be given to Ed Harris, who will also be interviewed onstage at the Castro prior to a screening of one of his favorite early films, A Flash of Green (1984), a Florida-set character drama about a small-town newspaper reporter bribed into helping an unscrupulous land developer. Jean-Claude Carrière, the recipient of the 2006 Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting, will be interviewed at the Kabuki 8 Theatres before a screening of the classic comic tale of erotic obsession, Belle de Jour (1967), directed by Luis Buñuel and starring Catherine Deneuve. All three of these award recipients will be honored at the annual black-tie Film Society Awards Night on April 27 in the Grand Ballroom of the Westin St. Francis Hotel.

Visionary filmmaker Guy Maddin will receive this year’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, which honors the achievement of a filmmaker who works in forms other than narrative features. Maddin will engage in an onstage conversation at the Kabuki 8 Theatres before a program of some of his greatest short films, including his newest, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a collaboration with Isabella Rossellini commemorating her filmmaker father Roberto’s centennial.

Each year, the Festival invites a leader in cinema to address the issues facing the film world today. The 2006 State of Cinema address will be delivered by the eloquent and provocative Tilda Swinton, star of Orlando (SFIFF 1993), The Deep End (SFIFF 2001), Bay Area filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Conceiving Ada (SFIFF 1998) and Teknolust (SFIFF 2002) and, most recently, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), as the icy White Witch.

As the Festival looks ahead to its 50th anniversary in 2007, it continues to expand its programming throughout the city. This year, in collaboration with several arts organizations and nontraditional screening venues, selected programs from SFIFF 49 will be presented at a range of satellite locations, including a collection of Festival film mashups from the International ReMix (see below) program at Edinburgh Castle; a Porchlight nonfiction storytelling event at the Swedish American Hall; selected documentary film screenings at art space Intersection for the Arts, youth media center BAYCAT and local bars El Rio and Bar of Contemporary Art (BoCA); an outdoor screening of local filmmaker Dolissa Medina’s Cartography of Ashes projected onto a firefighter’s training tower at SFFD Fire Station #7; and a live performance and dance party with renowned VJ group Addictive TV at club Mighty.

In line with the Film Society’s transformation into a next-generation film exhibition organization, SFIFF 49 will inaugurate a new programming stream, KinoTek. Spotlight: KinoTek programs will focus on the ways new technological platforms produce new aesthetic and narrative forms, affect existing ideas of media production, distribution and exhibition, and create new relations with and among their audiences. This year’s KinoTek programs include: Cock Byte: Masters of Machinima, highlighting the work of machine animation geniuses Rooster Teeth Productions, creators of the wildly popular online episodic parodies Red vs Blue and The Strangerhood, who will appear in person to present their greatest hits and new work, all made using the 3D graphics engines from video games; Addictive TV, a two-part program presenting the trailblazing VJ group’s most current projects; Scribble, Scrapple, I.C. You, featuring several pioneering modes of “live cinema” in short performances that transpose gestures and objects into projected sounds and images on the fly; International ReMix, which allows Festival Web site visitors to reedit, repurpose, remix and mash up an array of clips from selected Festival films; and Pocket Cinema, featuring short works made by and for mobile devices such as cell phones with in-person discussions by the makers.

A dynamic supplement to the Festival’s slate of screenings is a new salon-type program, House 2, which offers a range of opportunities for festivalgoers to engage with authors, filmmakers and industry experts through panels, Q&As, book talks, discussions and signings. As part of its new SF360 initiatives, the Film Society presents SF360 Panels, a series of provocative panels about the various innovative ways in which Bay Area film and new media leaders are exploring America’s newest film and new media frontiers. Topics will include convergence technology, using film as a tool for social and political change and animation, digital media, broadband and special effects. In addition, a special seminar copresented with 826 Valencia will focus on adapting literary work for the screen with writer/director Bent Hamer and writer/producer Jim Stark, in conjunction with the Festival screening of their new film Factotum, an adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor.

KinoTek is just one of several Spotlight: programming streams in this year’s Festival. From the 20th Century pays homage to the silent and suave heroes and avant garde magic of cinematic history with two silent films with live musical accompaniment and one 1940 classic. Alloy Orchestra, masters of the silent film score, returns to San Francisco to perform its new score composed for a new print of Clarence Brown’s silent film The Eagle (1927), a risqué Zorroesque adventure in which the dashing Rudolph Valentino rides roughshod over Russia’s dastardly villains while seducing its lovely daughters and its jealous queen. Continuing its annual tradition of commissioning a new score for a rarely screened silent film, SFIFF 49 brings avant-pop band Deerhoof to play its original score for beatnik icon Harry Smith’s master film work Heaven and Earth Magic (1962) and a free-form musical set accompanying the projection of Smith’s Films 1–5 from The Early Abstractions. In Hal Roach’s gender-bending screwball comedy Turnabout (1940), sophisticated New Yorkers Tim and Sally Willows awaken to find their bodies switched by a Hindu idol. With a new 35mm print produced from the original nitrate picture and track negatives, this Festival screening is a preview of UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Festival of Preservation and a carte blanche selection by 2005 Mel Novikoff Award recipient Anita Monga.

A selection of programs appropriate for audiences of all ages, Spotlight: Family Films also features Alloy Orchestra in an interactive family program of classic and contemporary silent short comedies with live musical accompaniment, Not So Quiet Silents, which includes a chance for audience members to make creative sounds of their own (recommended for ages seven and up). In Viva Cuba, a fairytale-like film that was Cuba’s candidate for the Oscars, 11-year-old Malú runs away from home with her best friend Jorgito on a quest to find her father (recommended for ages ten and up, with a live subtitle reader in one theater at the April 22 screening). Two shorts programs finish out the Family Films series, one produced for kids and one produced by them. Friends—Lost and Foundis a fun collection of animated and live action films recommended for ages seven and up. Humor, fear and loss are all explored in Youth Gone Wild, an eclectic array of shorts illustrating the great talent of the young filmmakers of tomorrow (recommended for ages 11 and up).

Spotlight: IndieAsia features a quartet of North American premieres from the very edge of the Pacific Rim: Takushi Tsubokawa’s Clouds of Yesterday from Japan is an impressive and original debut feature telling the story of a reel of silent film hidden by a young boy in the 1930s; now a grandfather, he searches for the missing reel in order to complete his life. Twenty-two-year-old Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin’s deceptively titled first feature, A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos), is a silent film following the struggle of a common Filipino against the repressions of religion and politics during the Spanish colonization in the 1890s. From Indonesia, John de Rantau’s Looking for Madonna is an unusual film about AIDS, which follows the plight of an Indonesian teenage schoolboy and his encounter with a village prostitute who barters sex for top-quality aloe tree wood. And new Chinese talent Ying Liang mixes social drama with pungent dark comedy to capture Chinese society’s current mood in Taking Father Home, in which teenager Xu Yun heads to the big city in search of his father who is rumored to be rich.

Showcasing much madness and mayhem, Spotlight: The Late Show features movies that will keep you up late with all things wacky, scary and headbanging. Japan’s leading director of meatball, off-the-wall comedies, Minoru Kawasaki, offers up an unforgettable genre hybrid, Executive Koala, about a dutiful employee with a giant koala head who must contend with complex office politics while worrying that he may be responsible for his girlfriend’s death. A fervid example of the Japanese pinku eiga genre (a popular form of erotic softcore cinema), Mitsuru Meike’s The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai  (for adult audiences only) is a riotous amalgam of political satire, apocalyptic comedy and steamy erotica, in a tale of an escort specializing in teacher-student scenarios who acquires a mysterious cylinder that could cause nuclear havoc. Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey is Sam Dunn and Scot MacFadyen’s intelligent, humorous and affectionate documentary about heavy metal music, its myriad forms and rabid fans, featuring some of the genres most noted heroes. And to keep you screaming into the night, the Festival offers The Descent, SFFS Dark Wave film festival alum (Dog Soldiers, 2002) Neil Marshall’s horror film about a group of six women on a caving expedition who come face to face with their worst nightmares.

Eleven films will be in juried competition for the tenth annual SKYY Prize, a $10,000 cash award given to a new feature filmmaker.  The contenders are: Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Brothers of the Head from England; Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson from the U.S.; Pascale Breton’s Illumination from France; Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways from Australia; Ricardo Benet’s News from Afar from Mexico; Juan Solanas’s Northeast from Argentina; Greg Zglinski’s One Long Winter Without Fire from Switzerland and Belgium; Alicia Scherson’s Play from Chile; Kang Yi-Kwan’s Sa-Kwa from South Korea; Wanma-caidan’s The Silent Holy Stones from China and Tibet and Ying Liang’s Taking Father Home from China. The winner of the SKYY Prize will be announced, along with the winners of the FIPRESCI Prize and Golden Gate Awards in 14 categories, at the Golden Gate Awards ceremony on May 3 at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater.

Three surprise films will also be included in the Festival lineup as part of a new Talk Cinema series presented by film critic Harlan Jacobson. Jacobson hunts and gathers the finest films from all over the world and brings them back to his Talk Cinema audiences all over the U.S. so they can experience the delight of discovery by not knowing what they’re going to see, just like the film pros seeing a film at its debut screening. Immediately following each screening, there will be a seminar-style moderated discussion with a critic or special guest from the film.

Flash Screenings, a program designed to showcase late-breaking additions to the Festival program has already confirmed Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 whichwill screen on April 24 at 11:30 pm. And on May 2 at 10:00 pm, festival goers will get a sneak peek at the first reel of A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s highly anticipated animated project starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. Both films will screen at the Kabuki 8 Theatres. Additional Flash films to be announced.

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.