San Fran fest pic profiles
by Danielle Beverly
In its 51st year and the longest running festival in the Americas, The San Francisco International Film Festival is only getting better, particularly under the helm of fairly new, but ever-charming executive director Graham Leggat. This year saw nearly 200 films, including several favorites about Place and Identity:
"Medicine for Melancholy"
Winner of an Audience Award, "Medicine for Melancholy" is a quiet, introspective narrative about love, race, and "indie" twenty-something life in San Francisco. The film is loping and a bit sleepy - just like the hangover the two characters are nursing from their hookup the night before. Director Barry Jenkins reveals the silent magic of getting to know a new lover - when Micah slips his hand into the small of Jo's back, the audience feels the tingles. Biking through changing neighborhoods rarely seen, the city is entirely theirs, as if they are truly alone inside it.
And they might be, because Micah (Wyatt Cenac) tells Jo (Tracey Higgins) that gentrified San Francisco is only 7% black and dwindling. He defines himself as a "black man", but knows the world sees him simply as "black". Jo, however, views her blackness as just one element of herself, and this distinction is how they come to teach one another, and the audience.
"Children of the Sun"
Comprised exclusively of archival footage (an extraordinary feat), "Children of the Sun" is a documentary about daily life on a kibbutz. Director Ran Tal was born on one founded by his grandparents, and it's his child's view now seen through the lens of adulthood that is both loving and jaundiced. From infancy, children were raised en masse by caregivers, sleeping each night in dorms and showering communally. It proved a grand but heartbreaking social experiment, where children never experienced solitude, and never truly knew their own parents.
"Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans"
(Winner, Best Bay Area Documentary Feature) details a forgotten 1800's civil rights movement in New Orleans, as well as the destruction of the same neighborhood by Hurricane Katrina. The film employs standard PBS-style construction - historians, archival footage, recreations, narration, and first person book-ending by a writer who lives in the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood. But as the narrative unfolds, it reveals an incredible era of freedom and empowerment during Reconstruction, that later died out.
Thinking they'd completed their historical documentary, the filmmakers were about to go into their online edit when Katrina struck. It was only then that they truly began the documentary they were destined to make - a film about how one neighborhood was twice "forgotten and refused by the American government".
In its 51st year and the longest running festival in the Americas, The San Francisco International Film Festival is only getting better, particularly under the helm of fairly new, but ever-charming executive director Graham Leggat. This year saw nearly 200 films, including several favorites about Place and Identity:
"Medicine for Melancholy"
Winner of an Audience Award, "Medicine for Melancholy" is a quiet, introspective narrative about love, race, and "indie" twenty-something life in San Francisco. The film is loping and a bit sleepy - just like the hangover the two characters are nursing from their hookup the night before. Director Barry Jenkins reveals the silent magic of getting to know a new lover - when Micah slips his hand into the small of Jo's back, the audience feels the tingles. Biking through changing neighborhoods rarely seen, the city is entirely theirs, as if they are truly alone inside it.
And they might be, because Micah (Wyatt Cenac) tells Jo (Tracey Higgins) that gentrified San Francisco is only 7% black and dwindling. He defines himself as a "black man", but knows the world sees him simply as "black". Jo, however, views her blackness as just one element of herself, and this distinction is how they come to teach one another, and the audience.
"Children of the Sun"
Comprised exclusively of archival footage (an extraordinary feat), "Children of the Sun" is a documentary about daily life on a kibbutz. Director Ran Tal was born on one founded by his grandparents, and it's his child's view now seen through the lens of adulthood that is both loving and jaundiced. From infancy, children were raised en masse by caregivers, sleeping each night in dorms and showering communally. It proved a grand but heartbreaking social experiment, where children never experienced solitude, and never truly knew their own parents.
"Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans"
(Winner, Best Bay Area Documentary Feature) details a forgotten 1800's civil rights movement in New Orleans, as well as the destruction of the same neighborhood by Hurricane Katrina. The film employs standard PBS-style construction - historians, archival footage, recreations, narration, and first person book-ending by a writer who lives in the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood. But as the narrative unfolds, it reveals an incredible era of freedom and empowerment during Reconstruction, that later died out.
Thinking they'd completed their historical documentary, the filmmakers were about to go into their online edit when Katrina struck. It was only then that they truly began the documentary they were destined to make - a film about how one neighborhood was twice "forgotten and refused by the American government".
Michael Jones is the film festival editor at Variety.com. 
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