Face Time: 17 Years at the San Francisco International Film Festival

Since 1985, San Francisco Film Society staff photographer Pamela Gentile has focused her compelling visual sensibility on the faces of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The resulting images, numbering nearly 50,000, display an astonishing range of film personalities.

Face Time is a highly subjective selection of those images, chosen by the photographer herself.
Pamela grabs people on the run between shows, at a party, at a Q&A session after a screening, having a drink or just playing pool after the last show. Sometimes she asks them to pose, always in an imaginative way, usually without special lighting, sets or props, or even an assistant, let alone makeup or wardrobe for enhancement.

Her photos are deceptively simple. But getting images that reveal the essence of such fleeting moments at a Film Festival is actually quite difficult. It's something that Pamela does about as well as anyone in the world. Her photos have become inseparable from the Festival itself.

Face Time ran August 3–28, 2001 at the 39th Exposure Gallery, located in the San Francisco Film Centre, 39 Mesa Street, Studio 4.

While at the San Francisco Film Centre, check out the Film Society’s Kurosawa Gallery, featuring portrait photographs by Pamela Gentile of the recipients of the Film Society’s award for lifetime achievement in film directing, including Akira Kurosawa, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Arturo Ripstein, Abbas Kiarostami and others. The Kurosawa Gallery is located at the south end of the first floor.