Opening 4/20: San Francisco International Film Festival
The San Francisco International Film Festival is a great showcase ofinternational films which are highly relevant to our understanding of
the contemporary world. Every year I have a great experience. The
following films are from the IndieAsia segment of the Festival, and
provide a glimpse into modern life in Asia.
Tickets for all of these films are $11 General Public/ $10 Students
and Seniors/$9 Members. Visit http://fest06.sffs.org for more details
or call the box office at 925-866-9559 from 9:00AM-4:00PM, Monday
through Friday.
GUBRA
Early in Gubra, amorous horseplay between young Orked and her husband
Arif is interrupted by a frantic phone call from her mother: "We are
losing your father!" Orked and Arif rush to her parents' house and,
amidst much wailing and scolding, load him into a car and drive him to
the hospital. It is a comic reminder of the hysteria that can
accompany any family crisis and the catalyst for an important
encounter at the hospital with the brother of Orked's lost love,
Jason. The story of Orked's interracial love affair with Jason was told in writer/director Yasmi Ahmad's previous film, Sepet (SFIFF
2005), but Gubra is more than just a sequel. This meditation on
forgiveness portrays the variations of familial love and malice
through the stories of four families: the happy marriage of a muezzin
and his wife, the two prostitutes they befriend, Orked's boisterously
affectionate Malaysian family and Jason's working class Chinese
family. Sharifah Amani reprises her role as the tiny, shrewd Orked,
and Harith Iskander and Ida Nerina return as her parents. Nam Ron
gives a solid performance as Pak Bilal Li, the muezzin whose religious
outlook is solidly rooted in compassion, and Abidah Noor is wonderful
as a hefty, no-nonsense servant so beloved by Orked's family that they
would never dream of referring to her as the maid. Ahmad successfully
combines the comic and the tragic as her characters face betrayals
that range from petty cruelty to outright brutality and confront the
question of what is and is not forgivable.
April 23, 2:30PM, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
April 29, 4:00PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
May 3, 9:30PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
CLOUDS OF YESTERDAY
In a silent cinema in the 1930s, a benshi (a performer who provides
live narration for silent Japanese films) narrates the tale unfolding
on screen for the film Utsukushiki Tennen, in which flower-seller
Okiku (Kikuyo Takahashi) is prevented from pursuing her true love,
violinist Tadanosuke (Shojiro Kataoka), by a dance-hall proprietor
(Shinichiro Uchida). But this is just the beginning of a story that
straddles two eras. In the 1930s, the boy delivering the film to the
theater is also a big fan of Okiku. Upset by the film's tragic ending,
he buries the last reel of the film. In the present, that delivery boy
is now an old man (Hitoshi Takagi) who comes to stay with his
flower-painting daughter and his troubled granddaughter Nami (also
played by Takahashi). Grandfather is dogged by the memory of the
missing film reel, and his search for it helps Nami to resolve her own
problems. Director Tsubokawa's first film, Clouds of Yesterday took
ten years to complete, struggling against budget problems and an aging
cast (Takagi died just one month after the shooting was completed).
But the effort has paid off in this tender and loving homage to silent
film and its music (Tsubokawa himself leads and plays in a musical
ensemble that accompanies screenings of silent film). However, the
film is not all rosy nostalgia, and Tsubokawa understands that whether
in the past or the present, within movies or outside them, the path to
true love and loving relationships is never straightforward.
May 1, 9:15PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
May 2, 7:00PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
LOOKING FOR MADONNA
Indonesian film master Garin Nugroho has earned a reputation for
making cinema that is engaged with social issues and for having
idiosyncratic insight that is neither preachy nor didactic. This
approach underlies his production of director John de Rantau's feature
film debut. One of the more unusual AIDS films ever made, Looking for
Madonna follows the fate of Joseph, a Papuan teen who, together with
his girlfriend Yolanda, contracts AIDS. When Yolanda is burned alive
by her father for embarrassing the family, Joseph and his friend Minus
(who also acts as the film's commentator) travel to their home village
where they are attracted to the local prostitute, Madonna. In this
depressed economy, the local lumberjacks exchange top-grade gaharu
(aloe tree wood) for sex and, although Madonna has been rejecting
their wood (and the sex), she chooses Joseph one night, and they
discover their common infection. At the close, Madonna lights candle
tributes to Joseph, while Minus watches him on a posthumous video.
While the film's focus is AIDS awareness and the plight of Joseph and
Yolanda, de Rantau adds further dimension to the narrative through the
figure of Minus. In the tradition of Nugroho's "boy-men" (see
Octavianus in Bird Man Tale, 2002), Minus is a teenage schoolboy with
some very adult attributes—he tells salacious stories to the camera,
has sex with twins and seems of strikingly muscular heft for a boy his
age. And it is Minus who concludes this moral tale, emphasizing the
social ignorance and poverty that have contributed to the spread of
AIDS.
April 25, 7:15PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
April 29, 12:45PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
A SHORT FILM ABOUT THE INDIO NACIONAL (OR THE PROLONGED SORROW OF
FILIPINOS)
Nothing from the Philippines—except perhaps the early work of Cannes
winner Raymond Red—prepares you for this stunning debut feature from
22-year-old Raya Martin. Its title may be misleading at first (it is a
feature, not a short), but it makes you realize that film is but a
fleeting moment in the long tragic history of the ordinary man. A man
tells a sleepless woman a story about the cause of disharmony in the
world. What follows is a black-and-white silent film set in the 1890s
during the brewing Filipino revolution against Spanish colonialism. A
series of tragic and comic sequences tells the Three Ages of an Indio
("common man") as he progresses from boy bell ringer in a village
church to teenage revolutionary to adult theater actor rehearsing a
popular Spanish play. But as everyone flees from the encroaching war,
the Indio contemplates a more significant dilemma: escaping his
troubled soul. Mapping the tragedy of the Filipino psyche and spirit
under successive colonizations has been the sustaining theme for the
country's great artists, from Jose Rizal to Lino Brocka to the epic
films of Lav Diaz. Martin brings a profound poetry to this legacy,
creating a world that is at once mysterious and recognizable, and a
film that uses the silent form and modernist piano score to struggle
against the repressions of politics, religion and art. In marrying the
history of a nation with a historical film form through his unique
vision, Martin has created one of the truly original works of
contemporary Filipino cinema.
April 29, 6:30PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
May 1, 6:00PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
TAKING FATHER HOME
Against his mother's wishes, teenager Xu Yun sets off from their
village for the big city to look for the father who abandoned them
years ago and who is rumored to have made a fortune and a new life.
Traveling with no money and only two ducks to his name, Xu Yun
encounters the harsh reality of urban life in China today—petty
thieves, youth gangs, swindlers and indifferent policemen. Despite
these setbacks and his naiveté, Xu Yun moves towards the final
confrontation with a father who turns out to be not quite as legend
would have it. Director Ying Liang's talent lies in his understanding
of the larger frame of society distilled into his intimate, detailed
portrayal of the common man. As in his short films, Ying's first
feature focuses on the issues and way of life in his home province of
Sichuan—summer floods, the vanishing way of life and the deepening
division between country and city as China's economic development
rushes headlong into a future marked by corruption, fragmented family
life and a brutally predatory business style. Ying's skill is evident
in packaging all of this into an indie production that is both social
drama and pungent dark comedy. Xu Yun has an innocence, honesty and
humor—a truth that enables him to survive in a jungle of lies and
greed. Ying identifies with Xu Yun's point of view, "I think the story
is about growing up, seeking, missing, faith, development, calamity
and revival." As Ying Liang shows us, it's also a good approach to
filmmaking.
April 22, 1:30, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
April 30, 3:30PM, Kabuki 8 Theatres, San Francisco
--
joyce guan
little black jacket
"targeted strategic marketing"
510.206.3455
