SF INT'L '07 | "The Violin" and "Souvenirs" Among Top Golden Gate Award Winners at SFIFF 50

Mexican director Francisco Vargas Quevedo's "The Violin" (El violin) won the San Francisco International Film Festival's Skyy Prize, while Israeli duo Shahar Cohen and Halil Efrat's "Souvenirs" took best documentary feature (West Coast premiere), capping the Golden Gate Awards ceremony Wednesday evening for the festival's landmark 50th edition. SFIFF's golden year closes Thursday May 10th with Olivier Dahan's Edith Piaf biopic, "La vie en rose." Picturehouse will release the feature beginning June 8.
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DISPATCH FROM SAN FRANCISCO | George Lucas, Robin Williams, and More Honored as SF Int'l Fest Celebrates 50 Years

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the San Francisco International Film Festival welcomed about 600 of the city's well-heeled residents to the Westin St. Francis Hotel in Union Square last night for the annual Film Society Awards night. Hollywood glitterati also made their way in for the big party, including Bay Area natives George Lucas and Robin Williams as well as director Spike Lee, recent Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Morgan, and director Ron Howard. San Francisco Film Society executive director Graham Leggat greeted the crowd, taking the stage in the cavernous ballroom saying gleefully, "This is the longest running festival in the Americas..."
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SF INT'L '07 | Picturing Politics at SFIFF50

A shot in veteran filmmaker Jon Else's documentary "Wonders Are Many" -- a behind the scenes look at composer John Adams and director-librettist Peter Sellars' opera Doctor Atomic -- makes visual reference to Picasso's "Guernica" as apt shorthand for art's awesome charge to speak for the voiceless in the age of total war and total exploitation. For an opera about the Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic age, the Picasso quote is fitting enough. But Else's documentary, which screens this year as part of the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, not only broaches pressing questions about art's role in a time of threat and crisis; its very appearance here helps highlight the place of film festivals themselves as forums for political debate and discourse.
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SF INT'L '07 | San Francisco Fest Brings Out the Films and Big Names for 50th Anniversary

[San Francisco film critic Dennis Harvey gives his take on the 50th Anniversary of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which opens Thursday. The article first appeared in our sister publication, SF360. Visit SF360" for additional coverage from the 50th SFIFF.] A decade might be long enough in dog years, but in film festival terms it takes a bit more time to impress. Berlin goes back to the early '50s, Cannes came about just pre- and post WWII, Venice dates to the early '30s. But in the U.S., where, since that latter era, Hollywood's output has dominated world markets? No film festival at all -- until 1957. At which point a second-generation local theater owner and dedicated cineaste decided somebody had to step up to the plate -- to affirm San Francisco's "place in the international arts world," to underline that film could be a true art form as well as entertainment, and simply to bring foreign movies to the city's ever-hungry intelligentsia. As you might have heard by now, that makes the San Francisco International Film Festival 50 years old this year. And the oldest continually running such event on this half of the globe celebrates its 50th with a whole lotta hoopla and a cherry-picked selection of current worldwide cinema April 26 through May 10.
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SF INT'L '07 | Looking Back at 50 Years of San Francisco International Film Festival History--And Going Forward

[Editor's note: SF360.org, where this article first appeared, is copublished by the SF Film Society and indieWIRE. B. Ruby Rich gave the 2004 State of Cinema address to the SF International Film Festival. Visit SF360 for additional coverage of the 50th SFIFF.] Is there anyone who doesn't know that the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is turning 50 this month? The drumbeat in the Bay Area has been celebratory, from the Pacific Film Archive tribute program of films drawn from its history to the daily bulletins in the San Francisco Chronicle, where Ruthe Stein has been publishing 50 items over 50 days, all drawn from the festival's archive. Instead of focusing on the usual festival squibs, forecasts, and must-sees, then, this writer headed over to the fabled Presidio on an unusually sunny day to talk to the festival staff about the past. And of course, as the past always is a lens for the present, to think about what festivals mean in the current moment -- and, okay, what this one has that's special.
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"Golden Door" Opens a Golden San Francisco International Film Festival

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced a robust lineup for the festival's 50th edition during a press conference Tuesday at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, with 200 films on the roster from 54 countries, and awards in more than 13 categories showing at a variety of locations, but centered at the new Sundance Cinemas Kabuki. As described by San Francisco Film Society executive director Graham Leggat, director of programming Linda Blackaby, and programming associates Sean Uyehara and Rod Armstrong, the festival kicks off April 26th with a screening of Emanuele Crialese's Venice award-winning "Golden Door," followed by a party in San Francisco's City Hall.
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"Workingman's Death" and "Half Nelson" Among San Francisco International Film Festival Winners

The 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, North America's oldest event of its kind, announced its winners Thursday, with Austrian director Michael Glawogger's "Workingman's Death" receiving the fest's Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature, while Chinese director Ying Liang received the Skyy Prize - First Narrative Feature award for "Taking Father Home." Also receiving kudos this year is lauded Sundance '06 competition feature, "Half Nelson," by Ryan Fleck, which won the FIPRESCI Prize. SFIFF's audience award winners will be announced soon. SFIFF is organized by the San Francisco Film Society.
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SF Film Fest: Starstudded Tributes, "Brothers of the Head," "Half Nelson," and "The Bridge"

The second week of the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival was packed with tributes and special events, luring crowds diverse enough to be equally starstruck by Werner Herzog and Ed Harris. (Not as diverse, alas: all of the honorees -- not to mention their on-stage interviewers -- were middle-aged white guys.) Still, all the kudos were well-deserved. April 25, the Persistence of Vision Award, previously given to the likes of Kenneth Anger and Faith Hubley, went to wildly creative Canadian Guy Maddin, who sheepishly accepted his award with an anecdote recalling his first visit to SFIFF back in 1989 (punch line: "You don't get a hangover from Stoli!") In between screenings of several Maddin shorts, including the remarkable "Heart of the World" and the self-explanatory "Sissy Boy Slap Party," the director discussed his fascination with "lost films," his beloved Winnipeg, how to best direct a herd of nervous ostriches, and ideas for future projects ("I'd like to make a horror movie, but with lots of dancing.")
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From here to Iberia, the San Francisco International Film Festival

Heroic firefighters, the eeriest simian costumes since "Planet of the Apes," a "Baywatch" star-as-activist, fierce flamenco dancers, and a rushing tide of watermelon juice: Welcome to the first four days of the 49th annual San Francisco International Film Festival. Opening night (Thurs/20), after introductory remarks by San Francisco Film Society executive director Graham Leggat, SF mayor Gavin Newsom took the Castro Theatre stage to usher in "the longest-running film festival in the world" (uh, sorry, Venice; SFIFF is the longest running film fest in the Americas, however). Newsom also awarded the key to the city to the mayor of Paris, France while the packed house surreptitiously rifled through their swag bags, admiring the Hong Kong Tourism Board tchotchkes (chip clips, baseball caps) and looking for edibles (breadsticks, cookies).
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49th SF Int'l Fest Opening with "Love," Closing With "Prairie"

The San Francisco International Film Festival unveiled its program of 97 features and 130 shorts from 41 countries Tuesday, March 28th at the Westin St. Francis Hotel today. Under new leadership from Executive Director Graham Leggat, the festival is moving toward its 50th anniversary with themes of innovation and democratization. Leggat, along with Director of Programming Linda Blackaby and Programming Associate Sean Uyehara announced a varied lineup for the festival, which opens with Peter Ho-Sun Chan's "Perhaps Love," a musical by the maker of "Comrades, Almost a Love Story," and closes with Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion."
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"Perhaps Love" and "A Prairie Home Companion" to Bookend 49th San Francisco International Film Festival

Peter Chan's "Perhaps Love" will open the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Film Society, organizers of the event, revealed this week. Chan will attend the event at the historic Castro Theatre along with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom and visiting Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe. Seen through a series of flashbacks and "film-within-a-film numbers," "Perhaps Love" is described by the event as a "lavish and heartfelt romantic triangle set in Shanghai and Beijing," starring Jacky Cheung ("July Rhapsody"), Zhou Xun ("Suzhou River"), Takeshi Kaneshiro ("House of Flying Daggers") and Jee Jin-hee ("If You Were Me"). The film was Hong Kong's official entry for best foreign-language consideration for the 78th Academy Awards.
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