San Francisco Film Society Presents SF360 Film+Club: Wholphin at Mezzanine Featuring the Debut of Wholphin No. 4 DVD Magazine

SF360 Film+Club Takes Movies Out of the Theater and Puts Them in a Club

July 16, 2007

San Francisco, CA - The San Francisco Film Society’s SF360 Film+Club, a monthly social screening series, returns to Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street at Mint), on Tuesday, July 31, with a program of selected highlights from the uniquely entertaining Wholphin, a quarterly magazine collection of rare and unseen short films, about to release issue No. 4.

“Why should you attend the screening of Wholphin at Mezzanine?,” asks Sean Uyehara, programming associate of the Film Society. “Well, I can’t actually speak for you. But, for me, it has something to do with the combination of Peter Saarsgard and alcoholic bees.”

Brent Hoff, Wholphin’s editor and curator has crafted an evening’s worth of entertainment, beginning with several shorts from the singular Wholphin archive running on monitors throughout the club.

The featured films of the night are:
Two Cars, One Night, the first film from New Zealand director, Taika Waititi, whose feature film, Eagle vs. Shark, played at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival and is in theaters this summer. Waititi is currently working on developing Two Cars, One Night into a feature-length film, which will feature more cars, more nights.

An excerpt from Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture (SFIFF 2007), an unconventional documentary that follows artist and professor, Steve Kurtz, after the FBI falsely accuses him of bioterrorism, because his artworks, which incorporate genetically modified food and bacteria, are mistaken for WMDs.

Chris Waitt's Heavy Metal Jr., a documentary about a band of Scottish nine-year-olds preparing to perform their song, “Satan Rocks,” at their county fair.

Andrew Zuckerman and Alex Vlack’s High Falls, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard as a couple keeping secrets from one another. High Falls is also being expanded into a feature film.

Toby MacDonald and Luke Morris’s Heavy Metal Drummer, the story of a Moroccan teenager whose passion for heavy metal music sets him apart in the Arab world. Morris’s inspiration for this film came from “a story of 14 metalheads who’d been arrested and tried in Casablanca for moral and religious crimes, essentially, wearing Metallica T-shirts and having a penchant for death metal.”

Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific_LAS VEGAS 05 featuring mind-bending aerial video footage that makes Las Vegas look like a model. Barbieri's Site Specific series includes films on Rome, Shanghai and Seville, and New York will be added next.

Following the films there will be a live, interactive program featuring headless flies, strange creatures from the deep, disturbing bacteriaphage, a hive of alcoholic bees and glofish.

Hoff hopes that, “This program will finally put to rest all the awful rumors going around town that you have no idea what a Wholphin is.”

Dave Eggers and Hoff of McSweeney’s publishing house launched Wholphin, the quarterly DVD magazine of unusual and unseen things in December 2005. The imprint is named in honor of a real, rare and fertile hybrid marine mammal born when a whale and a dolphin procreate. The first three volumes have contained cinematic artifacts, foreign sitcoms, animation, documentaries, instructional videos and short films from art house A-listers including Errol Morris, David O. Russell, Selma Blair, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, David Byrne and Dennis Hopper.

Doors open at Mezzanine at 7:00 pm, program starts at 7:30 pm.
Complimentary Damrak and Agavero cocktails and tasting from 7:00–8:00 pm.
Tickets are $8.00 at the door or $5.00 if reserved in advance by emailing info@sf360.org.
Must be 21+ to attend.

SF360 Film+Club: Wholphin is presented by the San Francisco Film Society, Mezzanine and Rehab, and is sponsored by SF Weekly, 7x7, Damrak and Agavero.

For more information, www.sffs.org.

The San Francisco Film Society, presenter of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24–May 8, 2008), is a nonprofit arts and educational organization dedicated to celebrating film and the moving image.