| Main Feature Story - Friday, September 28, 2007
Happy 30th MVFF!
Ang Lee, John Korty, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Laura Linney, Terry George, Denys Arcand, Doris Dorrie, Rob Nilsson, Julien Temple invited for cake and ice cream...
by Mal Karman
When a film festival turns 30—which happens about as often as Saturn completes a full-blown revolution around that lucky ol' sun—it means the star gazers who put these flickering light shows together each season know a thing or two about crowd-pleasing cinema. In the 30 years that have shot past our blinking eyes as rapidly as 30 fleeting frames on the big screen, the Mill Valley Film Festival has grown from an incubator baby to one of the most prestigious film and video gatherings in the galaxy.
If you were around way back then—whoa!—it might not seem feasible that so much time has passed. But in 1978, when Mark Fishkin kick-started his brain child with a first-ever opening night offering of Francis Ford Coppola's decade-old The Rain People and feted Marin director John Korty in the inaugural tribute, the average price of a new house was $49,000 (sigh), Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, "Hotel California" was the song of the year, Sony put out something called the Walkman, gas cost 65 cents a gallon, Iran was a longtime ally, no one knew Brad Pitt from a peach pit, and my housemate Melissa wasn't even born.
"It's a benchmark, a milestone I guess," says Fishkin. "What signifies turning 30 more than Rob Nilsson films? Films like Terry George's Reservation Road. Having Ang Lee here, whom we consider one of our greatest discoveries." It was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1992 that Fishkin zeroed in on Lee's Pushing Hands and had the foresight to bring both film and filmmaker home. "Did he need us?" he asks. "Probably not. Are we thrilled and honored to have this legacy with a great director who considers us special? Of course."
Lee revisits the festival on Opening Night (Oct. 4, 6:30pm) with his erotic World War II espionage thriller Lust, Caution and, again, the following evening on stage in a clips-and-conversation tribute (Oct. 5, 7pm) with scenes from The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In Lust, Caution, the Oscar-winning director pits a sensual young woman (Tang Wei) in Shanghai against a Japanese collaborator (Tony Leung) with whom she becomes embroiled in a web of World War II intrigue.
From one Lee to another, Jennifer Jason Leigh, arguably the world's most underrated actress, will be on hand Oct. 13, 6:30pm to interact with festival goers and to introduce her latest work Margot at the Wedding. She stars with Nicole Kidman as estranged sisters whose volatile past is no less fiery than their present. It all comes to a volcanic head when one of them plans to marry.
The girls have no monopoly on sibling tension, however. Quietly slipping into town without so much as a press release is Cassandra's Dream (Oct. 8, 9pm), about a pair of compulsive blue-collar brothers (Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), who get involved in a scheme to turn their lives around only to find they've accelerated their downward spiral. It's a Woody Allen drama shot in London and a bit reminiscent of his earlier Match Point in its sinister plot turns.
More brotherly fireworks explode in My Brother Is An Only Child (Oct. 13, 9:45pm). Conceived by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, who wrote the truly luminous The Best of Youth, Only Child begins in the '60s in Latina, a town in Italy created by Mussolini out of the Pontine Marshes, when one brother becomes infatuated with fascism while the other becomes active in the communist party. Big trouble when the older brother's girlfriend enters the scene.
So you see gang, observing extremely neurotic siblings in this season's lineup can be therapeutic, making our own feel, by comparison, not quite so hysterical. Even more cinematic psychiatric help is on the way in Opening Night's sister film The Savages in which a brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and sister (Laura Linney), shouldering a long history of antagonism and envy, are thrust into caring for an aging, demented father who never cared for them.
Another drama with smoldering intensity is director Terry George's Reservation Road (Oct. 10, 7pm) in which a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a child sets off a combustible chain of events and staggering moral dilemmas with no easy answers. Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo head the cast.
"It's the intersection of these two fathers, one who lost a kid, the other the hit-and-run driver who is also a lawyer, that presents difficult questions of conscience," says festival Program Director Zoe Elton. "The guy could walk scot-free, but you see him confronting what he did. The problem is will he take the hardest road possible?" Audiences can get the answer to that and pepper George with other tough questions during his on-stage interrogation following the screening.
Says Fishkin, "Looking at 20 or more of these films, I had to wonder, is it just me or are all of them dealing with personal moral issues affecting people's lives in profound ways? This year it's very obvious we're really dealing with themes of morality and courage."
The morality of our government's methods of interrogation and its anti-terror policy giving agents the authority to spirit away suspects to places where torture laws do not apply are excoriated in Rendition (Oct. 6, 6pm and Oct. 7, 8:45pm), which meets one of today's red hot-button issues head-on. Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) directs a powerhouse cast of Meryl Streep, Peter Saarsgard, Alan Arkin, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal.
In Michael Clayton (Oct. 10, 7pm), a top law firm's damage control expert (George Clooney) struggles with the deterioration of his moral fiber as he sweeps the crimes and misdemeanors of clients under convenient rugs.
First-time director Ben Affleck takes a shot at morals and mayhem with Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and Michelle Monaghan in Gone Baby Gone (Oct. 9, 7pm) in which cops with their own personal agendas lead an investigation into a child abduction. Based on a novel by Mystic River author Dennis Lehane.
"These films are not without risk," Elton says, meaning the choices the characters have to make and the courage they are forced to tap into to make those choices are no longer slam-dunks. This isn't John-Wayne-at-the-Alamo anymore. "The truth is, with independent filmmakers, they stick their necks out all the time. But to see this in a number of the larger films, which are basically about doing the right thing, well, I think it's an incredible reaction to the [Bush] administration that has not been doing the right thing. Hey, you don't have to tell lies! Gavin Hood is really sticking his neck out politically. People today realize that how to live the truth is the story—and one of the most powerful ways to get that message across is through cinema."
If there's been a festival that celebrated the long necks of local cinema more than our own, they've sure been keeping it a secret. This year, the MVFF—champion of the indiedog—unspools 14 features and 29 shorts from Bay Area filmmakers with subjects as diverse as the history of women's vibrators, to the double life of professional wrestlers in Tijuana, to a novice base-jumper's leap from a Swiss Alp, to the moral dilemma soldiers face when ordered to kill, to the event that spawned the Summer of Love, to the price paid by women in Tibet who defied the Chinese occupation of their country.
In Passion & Power: The Technology of the Orgasm, Mill Valley's Wendy Slick and San Francisco's Emiko Omori put together a humorous chronicle of "the vibrator and its impact on sexual politics from the time it was invented by doctors to cure 'hysteria'."
"The treatment for this," says Slick, "was to bring women to a 'hysterical paroxysm' [read: 'orgasm'] by masterbating them (in the office) under the guise of a medical treatment." And doctors got paid for that?
When they disappeared from the Sears Roebuck catalog and the Hamilton Beach warehouse in the '20s, vibrators didn't start buzzing again until the rise of feminism in the '70s. But get this—just a few years ago in Texas, a housewife was arrested, Slick says, "for selling vibrators to two undercover cops posing as a dysfunctional couple. Apparently, you can't own more than five vibrators, but you can own any number of guns."
"The Technology of the Orgasm screens Oct. 6, 2pm and Oct. 13, 2:15pm—conveniently on two Saturday afternoons—so bring the kids.
Gustavo Vasquez's Que Viva la Lucha (Wrestling in Tijuana) (Oct. 13, 2:30pm and Oct. 14, 4pm) takes us on a South of the Border fling to the ring where working class men forge "mythological identities" and are revered as superheroes.
"I have a fascination with the double lives of the wrestlers," says the San Francisco-based filmmaker who teaches digital media at UC Santa Cruz. "They're everyday, working class people but, on weekends, they transform themselves into bigger-than-life characters [with names such as "Extreme Tiger" and "Horny Frank"], this social ritual that I call 'the therapy of the poor'."
On the same program, Lincoln Else crafted Learning to Fly, 15 minutes of amazing footage of novice base jumper Chris McNamara, who grew up in Mill Valley and (whose father Steve was longtime editor and publisher of the Pacific Sun). "Rather than put together another heavy metal extreme sport video," Else says, "I wanted to show why someone might be interested in what at first appears to be crazy, but after a closer look, might just start to think it oddly appealing." McNamara, who leapt from the Eiger in the Alps after only a year of base jumping, admits he's had several close calls, including one where his chute opened just 50 feet above ground. (Um, thanks, but I'll take the stairs.)
Close calls come in bunches for the military men in Berkeley filmmakers Gary Weimberg's and Catherine Ryan's documentary Soldiers of Conscience. "We wanted to make a film that would ... create less war—and the only way to do that is to honor people for their beliefs, whether they are fighters or conscientious objectors. This film honors both. Audiences approved of it at both West Point and at Quaker churches," Weimberg says. "In World War II, 75 percent of the soldiers in combat, under fire, did not try to kill the enemy. That's how deep the inhibition against killing is ingrained. The most important thing I learned is that every soldier has a conscience, every soldier suffers for killing another human being. Some are willing, others can't. But they all suffer for what they believe."
Convictions exacted a high price from an unarmed cadre of women who took to the streets to defy the violent Chinese takeover of Lhasa in 1959. In Women of Tibet: A Quiet Revolution, East Bay documentary filmmaker Rosemary Rawcliffe presents the second in her trilogy of remarkable profiles in courage of women who were arrested and tortured by Chinese invaders.
Says Rawcliffe, "The panel discussion after the [world premiere] screening this year will be electrifying because I am bringing three of the extraordinary women in A Quiet Revolution from Dharmasala, India, including Ama Adhe Tapontsang, who was imprisoned for 28 years (much of that in solitary confinement)."
In a year that the festival is celebrating its 30thanniversary, the Summer of Love marks its 40th. If you go back that far, congratulations, and even if you don't, you'll learn what hatched that unbelievable era in our national timeline. Mill Valley filmmaker Eric Christensen's The Trips Festival (Oct. 10, 9:30pm) documents the extraordinary event in San Francisco that led to Ken Kesey's public acid tripping and Bill Graham getting started as a rock concert promoter. Witness painted naked bodies, light shows and free love, and the Nixon White House's efforts to smother antiwar fervor. "This isn't a valentine to the '60s," says Christensen, "but out of it came some very forward thinking people. It was a time for exploring the world and a time when 10,000 hippies, all these freaks, got out to look at each other, all of them stoned. The Trips Festival was a launch pad for a feeling of community and for all that came after."
Just two years after, however, it all came crashing down amid increasingly violent encounters between police and protesters. Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo and Roy Scheider head the cast of Chicago 10 (Oct. 7, 1pm and Oct. 8, 6:30pm), the band of antiwar "misfits" arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and tried in Judge Julius Hoffman's kangaroo court. Archival footage is melded with digital animation and a searing soundtrack giving this movie a strikingly unusual look and feel.
The top defense lawyer in the country at the time was San Francisco's Charles R. Garry, who had defied the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunt in the '50s and developed a reputation for defending the Black Panthers and the Oakland 7 in the '60s. The People's Advocate: The Life & Times of Charles R. Garry (Oct. 6, 4:45pm and Oct. 8, 9:30pm) paints a riveting portrait of a self-made man whose idealism drove him to the top of his game and, ultimately, destroyed him.
If the aforementioned triptych isn't enough to sate your melancholic obsessions for the '60s, we do know a good shrink in San Rafael. Or you can opt for John Korty's Crazy Quilt, shot in Marin and the city, screening Oct. 6, 2:15pm, 41 years after it was made. Or catch Yella, inspired by the '60s cult classic Carnival of Souls. The metaphysical thriller from Germany screens Oct. 11, 8:30pm and Oct. 13, 12:45pm.
If we've seemed a little light on the international reels thus far, remember there are 114 features from 49 countries, over 100 shorts and eight parties in this little cinema city's film orgy—we're pedaling as fast as we can.
From Down Under comes Kenny (Oct. 5, 6:30pm and Oct. 10, 9:45pm), a documentary about a working class hero who empties portable toilets at festivals (not this one), concerts, parades, carnivals and drag races. The kicker here is that, as real as it seems, it ain't. A put-on and a chuckle in every scene.
Christian Wagner brings Warchild (Oct. 6, 3pm and Oct. 7, 9:15pm) from Slovenia, based on the true story of a mother tracing her daughter who went missing 10 years earlier in the chaos of the war in the Balkans.
Another drama based on true events, The Paper Will Be Blue, emanates from Romania along with two other features, California Dreamin' and The Way I Spent the End of the World. In Blue, it's 1989 and the villainous Ceausescu government has been hauled up by its britches. But during a night of confusion and insanity, more than 1,000 people are killed in accidents, personal vendettas and mistaken identity. As grim as the drama might sound, director Radu Muntean mixes dry humor with that Eastern European reluctance to smile. If you're not sure whether to laugh, let it out. We won't hold it against you.
Things were even bleaker when Ceausescu still had a stranglehold on the country. But The Way I Spent the End of the World (Oct. 9, 4:30pm and Oct. 14, 11:30 am) proves that life is never as dark as it appears, and director Catalin Mitulescu finds a way to milk laughter out of suffering. Doreteea Petre, who plays the teenager battling the rules, won a best actress award at Cannes in 2006.
You wouldn't expect a Romanian film about the war in Kosovo to be called California Dreamin' but you can't judge a film by its title unless it's called Casablanca or Citizen Kane. Cristian Nemescu, the writer-director, who was tragically killed in a car accident when the film was in post-production, based his script on a true incident involving an American lieutenant (Armand Assante) who locks horns with a Romanian station agent determined to prevent a train on a classified NATO mission to continue. The film received the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes festival this year. Screening Oct. 9, 9pm and Oct. 14, 4:15pm.
Israel and France serve up Jellyfish (Oct. 6, 7:15pm and Oct. 13, 8pm), winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes for best first feature, a sometimes lighthearted-sometimes poignant ensemble piece about the search for love and the courage to express it.
Scotland's Kevin Mcdonald, who opened the fest last year with The Last King of Scotland, is back with something even more compelling. My Enemy's Enemy (Oct. 8, 4:30pm and Oct. 12, 4:45 pm) is supposed to be a documentary about Nazi Klaus Barbie ("The Butcher of Lyon"), but is actually a scathing indictment of America, France and the CIA in the aftermath of World War II. The epitome of hypocrisy is guaranteed to make the hair on the back of your neck feel like barbed wire.
Writer-director Denys Arcand, who brought the remarkable Barbarian Invasions here in 2003, returns with Days of Darkness (Oct. 5, 9:30pm), a satire on the dehumanizing behavior of government bureaucrats, a long overdue target for most human beings.
There is more darkness in the multi-plotted Swedish thriller When Darkness Falls (Oct. 10, 9:30pm) about two sisters (dammit, will you kids stop it already!!) whose lives descend into a deadly nightmare when they violate a family code of honor. Meanwhile, a TV journalist becomes a pariah to her peers after she has her abusive husband arrested, and a restaurant owner is threatened with death for agreeing to testify against a gunman who shot his employee. The great Swedish actress Bibi Anderson appears in director Anders Nilsson's answer to Crash.
In what has become an annual tradition, another Nilsson, Berkeley-based Rob Nilsson will be here with his festival within a festival. The prolific director of the 9@Night series, who often plunges into the Tenderloin and plucks his actors off the city's seamy streets, checks in with three new entries, two of 'em on the same night, and each the bi-product of his own improvisational style called Direct Action cinema. In Used (Oct. 13, 7:15pm), the second chapter in the series, a down-and-outer recovering from a nervous breakdown named Malafide develops a Lawrence of Arabia complex and embarks on a spiritual quest to the desert in search of a mystic. In Go Together (Oct. 13, 9:15pm), the final installment of the 9@Nighters, Malafide divorces himself from his Self, then discovers his life unfolding on a big screen in a movie house owned and operated by an idealistic couple.
Nilsson's Presque Isle (Oct. 7, 12:15pm and Oct. 11, 9:15pm) will remind cinephiles of Ingmar Bergman's early work. In a struggle to be free of regret, weighed down by loneliness and angst, the director's alter ego revisits his family's bleak island retreat and his childhood haunts only to be haunted by his childhood.
In a variation on Nilsson's approach of casting non-actors in their daily routines, John Balquist of Oakland, whose nom de sprocket is yahn soon, assembles a fictionalized documentary of an insomniac cartoonist, who creates a cauldron of controversy after envisioning an International House of Pancakes run by Afghan refugees on the site of the World Trade Center. Compound Eye screens Oct. 7, 5:30pm and Oct. 13, 2:45pm.
While music has always been a major gear in the festival gearbox, the program this year offers up something completely new—a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin (Oct. 7, 7:30pm and Oct. 9, 7:30pm), accompanied by a live performance from the Marin Symphony. Writer-director Todd Haynes' pseudo-biography of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There (Oct. 7, 5:45pm and Oct. 9, 8pm), features Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Winshaw and Marcus Carl Franklin, each one embodying a different facet of Dylan's personality. If you prefer your sharps and flats live, guest artists on the soundtrack (and others) will jam at a high-voltage performance following the screening (separate admission, Oct. 7, 9pm). Look for Dan Hicks, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and others.
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (Oct. 12, 6:30pm and Oct. 14, 7:30pm) documents the rise of the British politico punk-rocker and his band the Clash. Interviews with Jim Jarmusch, Johnny Depp, Bono, John Cusack and Pearl Harbour. The latter toured with the Clash and cobbled together a band for a live gig following the film (separate admission, Oct. 12, 9pm). San Francisco DJs Ship and Shindog from New Wave City will spin Strummer/Clash hits, along with Joy Division's recordings, to tie in with UK director Anton Corbijn's Control (Oct. 5, 9:15pm and Oct. 12, 9:30pm), a poignant biopic of British punk rocker Ian Curtis who killed himself at 23. Samantha Morton and Sam Riley head the cast.
Did you know that hundreds of millions of honeybees get trucked around the country every year to put food on your plate? As if global warming wasn't enough to worry about, Singeli Agnew and Joshua Fisher follow a family of migratory beekeepers—the last of the American cowboys, as they call themselves—and reveal in their fascinating 24-minute Pollen Nation (Oct. 6, 2:45pm and Oct. 14, 8pm) the extent of the crisis of the dying bee population. We'll be out of a lot more than honey if that keeps up. In a clear commitment to their art, the East Bay filmmakers sustained bee stings of "monstrous proportions," eschewing bee netting because it interfered with camerawork.
What we like so much about the festival, aside from the buzz of energy we get from just being there, are the treasure hunts for cinematic gems and the worldwide reflections on who we are as a people and where we've come from. There are always films from remote corners of the planet (Liberia, Guinea, Kurdistan, Nigeria, Uruguay), always films from hotbeds of volatility (Iraq, Iran, Israel), always films ripped from today's headlines (Grace Is Gone, Crossing the Dust, the aforementioned Rendition, each of which demonstrates the impact terrorism and the quagmire in Iraq has on us).
In Grace Is Gone (Oct. 9, 7:15pm), John Cusack is a father who struggles to find a way to tell his young daughters their soldier-mom has been killed outside of Baghdad. Two Kurdish militants in the same war-torn region encounter a young Iraqi boy desperately trying to find his parents in the French-Kurdish co-production Crossing the Dust (Oct. 6, 4:30pm and Oct. 9, 9:30pm). Seventeen-year-old Max Strebel of San Francisco created a sophisticated short story, The Homecoming, after reflecting upon those who have lost loved ones in the war. Soldiers interviewed in Peter Jordan and John Kane's Left in Baghdad (Oct. 6, 2:45pm and Oct. 14, 8pm) let us know what it's like to be constantly under fire.
On Closing Night, the festival screens The Kite Runner (Oct. 14, 5pm and 5:15pm), an adaptation of Bay Area writer Khaled Hosseini's novel about an Afghan boy who flees with his family to the U.S. after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and returns as an adult following the takeover by the Taliban to search for a friend he had wronged.
Heavy stuff, but wait! There is plenty more that is lighthearted and local. For the 13th time, there is a Children's Filmfest opening with The Ugly Duckling and Me (Oct. 6, 11am) followed by a reception with "the fabulous Bubble Lady." Two-day workshops on film production for 11-to-19-year- olds will keep those hyperactive minds occupied for a change. In the kidfest, Oakland's Sarah Klein employs a unique style of animation in Meany (Oct. 7, 10:30am and Oct. 14, 2:15pm) to de-fang a bunch of bullies we all knew as children. On the same program, Cynthia Pepper of San Rafael, who has been creating dance films in Marin for 20 years and does work for Sesame Street, mail-ordered a flock of butterflies to accompany the kids and the choreography in Flutterby, a five-minute romp shot with an all-male Marin crew that boasts five Grammys, two Oscars and six Emmys.
San Francisco filmmaker Michelle Meeker, an animator for PDI, Weta and Pixar, got 11 talented friends in the field to contribute 30-second pieces to the delightful When I Grow Up (Oct. 5, 9:30pm and Oct. 6, 10pm in the grown-ups' program Tooned to Murder). "I interviewed young people about what they would like to be, and elders about what they dreamt of being and where life took them," she says. The result is a dazzlingly colorful, often humorous mix of stories, voices and animation styles.
Another red carpet event with its genesis in the nabe is Leslie Iwerks' The Pixar Story (Oct. 6, 7pm and Oct. 7, 6:30pm), an inside look at the Emeryville studio that brought animation into the 21st century. "The biggest challenge was how to make it a celebration of animation as an art form and not a cheap promotional," says the Oscar nominated director whose father and grandfather both worked for Disney and won Academy Awards. Good animation genes.
Finally, in How to Cook Your Life (Oct. 7, 3pm and Oct. 9, 5:30pm), Zen priest and gourmet chef Edward Espe Brown, an occasional presence at Green Gulch in Marin, tells us that we can attain Dharma by chopping onions. Well, maybe not with the onions I get, but the Buddhist author of The Tassajara Bread Book and Tomato Blessings & Radish Teachings demonstrates how, with the proper mindfulness, we can combine enlightenment with chicken pot pie.
Now there's enough cinema to hold you for, well, maybe another 30 years. Go for it! And don't forget the eye drops.
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