49th SF Int’l Fest Opening with “Love,” Closing With “Prairie”

A quarter of this year’s narrative features are from the Pacific Rim, with a special focus on the films of indieAsia, and many hail from Latin America, as well. Special focus also goes to “midnight”-style movies, such as Minoru Kawasaki‘s “Executive Koala,” about an employee who carries on his shoulders a large koala head.

In keeping with the San Francisco Film Society‘s SF360 initiatives to broaden the festival’s involvement with the city, and to create more opportunities for the city to participate in the festival, a “citizen press corps” of bloggers, podcasters, photobloggers, and videobloggers are being accredited. The festival’s screening at a variety of non-traditional venues, including the Edinburgh Castle, the Swedish American Hall (for a Porchlight storytelling night), Intersection for the Arts, BAYCAT youth media center, Bar of Contemporary Art. There’ll be an outdoor screening at the firefighter’s training tower at SFFD Fire Station #7, as well.

An even more non-traditional venue in which the festival will screen films this year is: your cell phone. Its Pocket Cinema program features short works made for mobile devices, including cell phones. The festival’s KinoTek spotlight, which houses the Pocket Cinema works, highlights new technology’s ability to create new visual and storytelling forms. The festival features one of the latest trends in filmmaking, machinima, with “Cock Byte: Masters of Machinima.” The festival also moves in a new direction with its “International ReMix,” venture, which allows the festival’s web site visitors to make mash-ups with images from the festival’s own movies.

Not to abandon the festival’s place as the first festival in North America, the festival features a spotlight on the past in “From the 20th Century,” with an Alloy Orchestra-composed-and-performed score for Clarence Brown‘s “The Eagle,” and a Deerhoof original score and performance for Harry Smith’s 1962 experiment, “Heaven and Earth Magic,” among other films.

Additional new features this year include a Talk Cinema series presented by film critic Harlan Jacobson, as well as SF360 Panels on the Bay Area and its new media innovations. 826 Valencia co-presents a seminar on literary adaptation with Bent Hamer and Jim Stark of “Factotum.”

Festival activities kick off early, on April 17, with “San Francisco Movie Night,” a co-presentation by the SF Film Society and Ironweed Film Club, in which house parties across the city will be discussing Marshall Curry‘s dramatic documentary on a Newark, NJ, election, “Street Fight.”

[EDITORS NOTE: This article was originally published in SF360.org, a joint publication of the San Francisco Film Society and indieWIRE.]