From the "On The Scene" Archives:

by Carl Russo

(indieWIRE/ 05.09.02) -- Doubt has filled the minds of San Francisco filmgoers ever since Peter Scarlet left town for a choice gig in Paris last year. The departure of the San Francisco International Film Festival's venerable programmer of 19 years created a void that seemed impossible to fill. How would the new tag team of outside programmers -- including L.A.'s Roxanne Messina Captor and Seattle's Carl Spence -- pull off the 45th edition of this world-class event? The answer: with flying colors.

Despite the Bay Area's current economic slump, the new SFIFF crew boosted attendance and expanded its Asian and Latin American offerings, and even scored the pre-Cannes world premiere of Woody Allen's "Hollywood Ending" for its May 2 closing. Fifteen days,180 films, and 87,000 tickets later, the new question from the locals is, how can the festival top itself next year?

Splashy tributes for Warren Beatty and Kevin Spacey notwithstanding, the meat of the festival is its global survey of capital-A art films, which always attracts a marvelously multiculti audience. Indeed, the babble of tongues filling the glass-and-steel lobby of the Kabuki Theater gives the impression of a bustling, Pei-designed train station at a crucial foreign crossroad.

Zhang Yimou met fans of his charming new comedy "Happy Times," while white-haired poststructuralist guru Jacques Derrida discussed the Kirby Dick documentary that bears his name. The world premiere of "The Green Cold/The Mirror of the Soul," Nasser Saffarian's lyrical tribute to Iranian poetess Forough Farrokhzad, played to a packed house of Persian descendents. And director Luis R. Vera fielded comments in Spanish, Swedish and Romanian following "Bastards in Paradise," his unfortunate sub-Dogme entry into immigrant hell in Stockholm.

The subject of immigrants has become a clichÈd staple of the social problem film, but the topic was particularly relevant during the weeks leading up to the French elections. Alain Gomis's "L'Afrance" shows that Senegalese people are alive and well and living in Paris, except for one student busted like a common criminal for missing his permit renewal by a week. Djolof Mbengue depicts the evolution of an alien with astonishing range, sliding from an idealist with plans to return home as a teacher to a self-loathing, drunken laborer.

Equally rich is the performance of Fejria Deliba in "Inch' Allah Sunday," bringing dignity to her illiterate housewife walled in by a brutal husband, a despotic mother-in-law, and racist neighbors in northern France. Her suffering silence surrenders to rage in Yamina Benguigui's seriocomic reaction to the French-Algerian "family reunion" policy of 1974. In "Delbaran," the adaptation of a young Afghan refugee orphaned by the Taliban is surprisingly natural when he goes to work in an Iranian town ruled by a suspicious sheriff. Writer/director Abolfazl Jalili invokes the films of Kiarostami as he lingers on the mesmerizing beauty of quotidian acts on the parched landscape.

Other polyglottic crossroads (not counting the Texan Holy Rollers of George Ratliff's "Hell House"): German filmmaker Stefan Tolz captured four fragile communities nearing obsolescence in his documentary "On the Edge of Time: Male Domains in the Caucasus," which portrays a snowbound Christian village of eight families and no doctor, a faded beach resort that houses blind widowers, a philosophical woman who maintains a decrepit oil rig. These are the forgotten survivors of communism and urban flight who hold their own against history.

In Song Hye-Sung's boisterous melodrama "Failan," a Chinese waif enters into a marriage of convenience with her opposite, a mid-level Korean gangster of the piss-in-the-sink variety that she never meets. Ultra-violent but with a sympathetic streak, he finds love to be the bridge between their cultural differences, even if his wife lives only through the letters she wrote before an untimely death.

If the narratives weren't real enough, political junkies could take in two sober and meticulous documentaries, both American premieres: Patricio Guzman's gripping "The Pinochet Case" and Anand Patwardhan's "War and Peace," the latter an epic examination of the Indo-Pakistani wars in the Nuclear Age.

At times the line between real and depicted life seemed to dissolve at this year's fest. Veronica Chen, Argentinean director of the audience award-winning "Smokers Only," found her country's banks shuttered and could not attend the screening of her own film, about sex at the automated teller. So, too, was Ra'anan Alexandrowicz stranded in Bethlehem during the violent standoff at the Church of the Nativity, underlining the deep divide felt by the Palestinian refugees taking an unsettling field trip to their former homelands in "The Inner Tour."

Meanwhile Czech director Bohdan Slama, upon his arrival in New York, jumped into a rental car and drove across the continent to collect the $10,000 Skyy prize for best first feature. His cynical comedy "The Wild Bees" is peopled with contemptuous lowlifes who want to bust out of their humdrum burg but never get past the city limits.

Lest one think of SFIFF as so much medicine, the current events were balanced with dreamy flashbacks, including a visitation by the bearded godfather of the New Latin American Cinema, Fernando Birri. The Argentinean pioneer claimed the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award and treated the sold-out house to his 1961 neo-realist classic, "Los Inundados."

The spirit of Pasolini hovered with the presence of the maestro's writing collaborator Sergio Citti, who accompanied screenings of "Teorema" and Laura Betti's "Piero Paolo Pasolini." This sublime doc seemingly invades the mind of the cocksure intellectual via his obsessions, and reminds us that PPP's most transgressive output was tempered by his award-winning poetry.

The newly restored Castro Theatre was an ideal venue to view Teinosuke Kinugasa's experimental 1926 landmark "A Page of Madness." The phantasmagoric nightmares of a woman locked up in an asylum broke new ground in celluloid expressionism and still amazes. Chapel Hill, NC-based indie rockers Superchunk provided live accompaniment (similar collaborations with Nexus and Teho Teardo were exhibited in 2001), but the plodding drum machine and raucous guitar soundscapes tended to steamroller the film's finer nuances.

Tipping in the direction of SF's footloose sister to the south, the San Jose Cinequest, programmer Carl Spence instituted a small sidebar of cult/pulp flicks. Blood-and-guts connoisseurs thrilled to midnight shows including Shinskuke Sato's "Princess Blade" and Lucky McKee's "May" while sucking down free pints of Guinness.

At the festival's end, an ecstatic executive director Roxanne Captor told indieWIRE, "I've had audience members come to us and say this is the best festival they've seen in 15 or 30 years!" Good, better or best, this longtime reviewer found SFIFF's latest incarnation to be consistent with the supreme quality of years past, which is all one could hope for.