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Feature: Thirty seconds over Marin
The 32nd Mill Valley Film Fest soars in on its latest mission of incendiary cinema

by Mal Karman

What do Uma Thurman, Wavy Gravy, Woody Harrelson, Daniel Ellsberg and Clive Owen have in common? You may not have heard this yet, but they'll all be barbecuing in your backyard next week, ready or not, as the Mill Valley Film Festival fires up its projectors for the 32nd straight year.

Well, OK, maybe they won't actually be in your yard, but they will be in your ballpark, up-close and personal, as they attend screenings of their latest films and Thurman, Harrelson and Owen get the red-carpet treatment at festival tributes.

And while every year has its stars, its local underground, its glamour, its quirky documentaries, its fiercely independent cinema, festival program director Zoe Elton calls this one pure "vintage."

"These are really striking films," she says. "Across the board, beautiful work at every level, compelling issues, heartfelt, really smart films. Several rose to the surface early and set the bar very high in terms of quality. As we were finalizing the program, we still had a bunch we were intrigued by but, unfortunately, we just didn't have room for."

For those who cannot envision being drawn to an Opening Night entry about an illiterate teenager impregnated for the second time by her father, Elton categorizes Precious (Oct. 8, 7pm) as "a mind-altering work."

"If you tell people what it's about, they won't get very excited," Elton admits. "But if they see it, they'll find it breathtakingly good." At least a couple of audiences have already sprung out of their seats and bounced off the ceiling. The film last week won the top award at the Toronto International Film Festival after, earlier in the year, receiving both the jury and audience awards at Sundance. Also on the marquee at kickoff is Scott Hicks' The Boys Are Back, with Clive Owen starring as a sportswriter suddenly thrust into the twin whammies of tragically losing his wife and having to raise two kids. The actor, whose own father abandoned the family when he was 3, is back the following night (Oct. 9, 7pm) for a Spotlight Tribute, an onstage Q&A and a reprise of Croupier, his breakthrough role—again as a writer who takes a casino job to make ends meet and then meets a woman who infuses that job with, shall we say, complexities.

Thurman's tribute (Oct. 10, 6pm) follows on the heels of Owen's and includes a program of clips, onstage conversation and a screening of the bittersweet comedy Motherhood, in which she, too, is a frustrated writer (are there any other kind?) schlepping two kids around while becoming increasingly aware of her rapidly eroding potential. Harrelson's art in The Messenger, thankfully, has nothing to do with writers, pens, notepads or MacBooks. Instead, he embodies a haunted military captain delivering death reports and souvenir flags to war widows. When his colleague (Ben Foster) tries to bend the rules to comfort one (Samantha Morton), the friction produces more than mere sparks. The Messenger won a Silver Bear for its script at Berlin and will be screened following an onstage conversation with Harrelson at the Oct. 15, 7pm tribute. Foster and writer/director Oren Moverman will also chime in. That should set the klieg lights humming—which begs the question—who gets chosen for tributes, and how?

"We have a running list with all our favorite people," festival executive director Mark Fishkin explains. "The problem is how do you get them here? Sometimes we'll get really nice letters back, and they'll tell us they can't do it now, but hope we'll invite them again. Then they have a break, they're on sabbatical, they're slowing down, they have a new film coming out. Everyone named Woody has been on our list for 25 years. We were finally able to get one of them. A lot of it is timing, persistence." Memo to festival execs: Woody Woodpecker has down time, anxiously awaits your call. No joke.

• • • •

THERE ARE ALWAYS plenty of political junkies in the reel world and you can sate the hunger this time around by meeting The Most Dangerous Man in America, waxing nostalgic over Troupers, communing with Saint Misbehavin', hearing the Soundtrack for a Revolution, Awakening from Sorrow, getting Tapped, Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops and knowing Stalin Thought of You. I don't know about you, but if Stalin thought of me, even though he's dead, it would still make me nervous. And apparently it had the same effect on Russian cartoonist Boris Efimov, whose brother was executed by the Soviet tyrant. Spared imprisonment and exile because the dictator admired his talent, Efimov nonetheless had to choose between working for Pravda or risking death. How does one come to grips with devastating loss, hatred and survival? Screens Oct. 10, 1:15pm and Oct. 16, 6pm.

In the evocative, nail-biter documentary Most Dangerous Man from Judith Ehrlich and Mill Valley's Rick Goldsmith, ex-Marine and Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg's extraordinarily daring leak to the New York Times in 1971 of the government's classified history of the Vietnam War is contrasted with the press's disturbingly comatose behavior following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Upon publication of the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon went ballistic and Henry Kissinger railed that whistleblower Ellsberg was "the most dangerous man in America." (Why Kissinger ever merited an ounce of respect after that is beyond me.) See a film about a real-life hero on Oct. 17 at 6:45pm and Oct. 18 at 3:15pm who, in his prime, risked everything to try to put an end to an unwinnable war. He is certain to be remembered by history.

Celebrate the history of the venerable, ever evolving, antiwar, anti-capitalist, free theater in-the-park San Francisco Mime Troupe in this, their 50th year, with a screening of the 1985 doc Troupers (Oct. 16, 7:30pm) featuring classic performance pieces from the '60s and input from Bill Graham and Peter Coyote. Then extend the foray into that most bizarre era in American history with Saint Misbehavin' (Oct. 9, 6:45pm and Oct. 13, 7pm), a bump and glide ride as commandeered by longtime Berkeley hippie Hugh (Wavy Gravy) Romney, the dude Paul Krassner once called "the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa." From his early days as a beat poet, to informal emcee of the Woodstock music fest, through the war we all hated (come to think of it, I can't find one I liked), to the founder in 1978 of a charity to combat blindness in Third World countries, to co-director of Camp Winnarainbow (a summer performing arts program he started for children), Mr. Gravy (as the New York Times refers to him) has "matured that '60s idealism and made it his life today." Palo Alto writer/producer/director Bill Guttentag (a two-time Oscar winner for previous work) and co-director Dan Sturman sweep us out of our seats and back into the history of the civil rights movement in Soundtrack for a Revolution (Oct. 10, 7pm and Oct. 18, 2:45pm) with unsettling archival footage and music that was a cornerstone for the courage to stand up for equality. "You can cage the singer," Harry Belafonte once said, "but not the song."

El Cerrito filmmakers John Knoop and Karina Epperlein's Awakening chronicles a burgeoning activist movement by the now-grown children of Argentine dissidents who were disappeared, tortured, drugged and shoved out of naval airplanes over the Atlantic. In one clever turnabout, activist radio in Buenos Aires announced on the air the name of an officer responsible for these things—along with his address and phone number. Find out what happens on Oct. 10 at 4:30pm or Oct. 17 at 4:45pm. Before you grab that next plastic bottle of water, check out Stephanie Soechtig's Tapped (Oct. 11, 6pm and Oct. 14, 9pm), and find out what the self-regulated, multi-billion dollar, bottled water industry is passing on to us. If we labeled a bottle of pristine spring water as "sewage," would you drink it? What about a bottle of treated sewage labeled as "pure"? And what about the bottles themselves? Oy, not sure I want to know—just get me a milkshake in a glass, please. There may not be any milkshakes in the Amazon, but Berkeley director Denise Zmekhol's Trading Bows and Arrows demonstrates how technology used intelligently can actually preserve the traditional in this short about Google Earth training the Surui tribe to monitor its land and confront illegal loggers. On the same program (Oct. 16, 7pm and Oct. 17, noon), Sausalito filmmaker Will Parrinello treks to a forbidden Himalayan kingdom in Mustang - Journey of Transformation and San Rafael producer Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee and director Stephen Marshall descend into Ethiopia's Rift Valley in A Thousand Suns, as Western influences threaten to destroy its natural beauty.

• • • •

I DON'T KNOW if this is true elsewhere, but this festival seems to afford a certain loyalty, not only to independent filmmakers but to local filmmakers and to films shot in and around town.

"Our first few years we were really about Northern California films, so how can we not give them a particular place in our hearts?" Elton asks. "We want to show them in the context of the world." But Fishkin is quick to add, "They're not given priority. They have to meet our criteria. But keep in mind what we have in the Bay Area is a strong center, a focal point, for independent filmmaking. It's not surprising a lot of films come from here."

The Old Guard is well represented by Marin's John Korty and the East Bay's Rob Nilsson, who went to Tam High, by the way. They'll probably hammer me for putting this in print, but together they have pretty close to 100 years of filmmaking experience. Their two entries ought to be required viewing before any aspiring filmmaker is allowed to breathe near a camera: One takes a subject that sounds like an alternative to Valium and transforms it into something completely captivating; the other simply mesmerizes with a cast of two in a single room. Best known for Crazy Quilt, Farewell to Manzanar and his Oscar-winning Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?, Korty exercised a long hiatus from general audience filmmaking before bringing in his latest, Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn (Oct. 10, 3pm and Oct. 17, 2:30pm), which he says "on the surface is about restoring grand pianos but really is about people who work extremely well together...and truly care about the quality of what they do." Asked what hopes he has for such an esoteric subject, Korty quips, "Oh, just the usual—that people will leave the screening in a beatific state and their lives will be changed forever." Meanwhile, Berkeley director Nilsson—the first American to win both the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the Grand Prize at Sundance and whose latest films are as much an annual certainty as the festival itself—presents the world premiere of Imbued (Oct. 10, 9pm and Oct. 11, 9pm) with Stacy Keach as a gambler holed up for a night in a friend's half-finished high-rise condo. When a call girl rings the wrong doorbell, no elevator can rescue one from the other. Clever, articulate and scholarly, Nilsson will also be in his element in a free-wheeling conversation on stage with character actor Seymour Cassel (Oct. 14, 8pm). Both bleed the grand vizier of independent film, the late John Cassavetes. Cassel's first role was in Cassavetes' Shadows, the film that Nilsson credits as his wake-up call to cinema. You can toss questions at 'em from your seat.

Korty and Nilsson are just kids compared to Poland's Andrzej Wajda, who is still making movies at 83. With last year's riveting Katyn, it's safe to say he is aging like fine wine. In this turn, his Sweet Rush (Oct. 16, 4pm) centers on a lonely wife who begins a relationship with a young laborer while trying to overcome the loss of two sons. Actress Krystyna Janda drew on her own grief over the recent loss of someone she loved for a highly emotional performance. Not only does Oakland writer/director Niall McKay's emotion-charged and deeply personal documentary The Bass Player (Oct. 9, 9pm and Oct. 11, 7:30pm) center on his jazz musician father raising two sons alone in Dublin, it begins with his mother's suicide. "My mother would have been a natural protagonist," McKay says. "But sometimes it's the film that seems to make the filmmaker. Time and time again I would have quit this if I felt I had a choice. After my mother's death I left California for Switzerland to rescue my Dad and bring him back to Ireland. However, life intervened, as it often does, and it was I that was rescued. From the outset, I had no intention of including myself in the film but, as time went on, I had no choice. After all, what's a father-and-son story without a son?"

Now this may not exactly catch you by surprise, but fractured families are in like never before. In addition to The Bass Player, single parents are the heroes, heroines, protagonists, antagonists and/or driving force behind nearly a dozen entries, including both Opening Night films, one Closing Night film (Looking for Eric), plus Fish Tank, The Eclipse, Hellsinki, The Swimsuit Issue, Original, Ricky and Jermal. British director Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (Oct. 10, 8:30pm and Oct. 13, 9pm) offers a fresh and abrasive in-your-face dissection of working class Britain, of a teenage wannabe in a dysfunctional home with her young single mom that sinks deeper into competitive sexuality, betrayal and revenge when mom brings home a new guy. Arnold won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2006 with her first film Red Road. Won it again this year with this, her second film. Whoa! Has anyone ever done that before? On Closing Night, director Ken Loach will give you an up-close-and-personal shot of a single parent's life that couldn't be more of a mess if you put a match to it. Steve Evets plays a pathetic s.o.b. as well as anyone ever has in Looking for Eric (Oct. 18, 5:15pm). His slovenly stepkids sleep, eat, watch TV, don't work, walk all over him, and hang—naively—with the underworld. He still pines away for a love lost decades ago. There's a cement mixer in his front yard. And only imaginary conversations with international soccer hero Eric Cantona keep him from diving into an empty pool.

• • • •

IN CONOR MCPHERSON'S The Eclipse (Oct. 11, 8:15pm an Oct. 14, 9:15pm), a single dad and frustrated writer with two kids (have you heard this one before?) meets a published author of books about ghosts and confesses to her that his late wife is—literally—haunting him. Sophisticated, slightly bizarre, sometimes unsettling—a ghost story set in Ireland for people with brains. Moving on to Finland and Hellsinki (Oct. 14, 9pm and Oct. 17, 2pm), a bunch of smalltime thugs who grew up with absentee fathers realize their dreams and become big-time hoods, but the throne at the top is a lonely place—and their own kids left behind, abandoned by their ambitious and morally empty pursuits, present ever-growing obstacles to something they thought they had lost long ago—their consciences. Yet another single parent tale (What ever happened to Ozzie & Harriet?) leaks out of the cupboard in Scandinavia with Sweden's The Swimsuit Issue (Oct. 14, 4:15pm an Oct. 17, 6:45pm), in which a hard-nosed jock is forced to care for his teenage daughter. A stupid joke leads Dad to urge his macho buddies into bathing suits and, with his kid's help, transforms them into the nation's first synchronized male swim team. Oh, this one is a lot less predictable than you think—and more fun than you're allowed to have underwater. There must be a Scandinavian Oscar for single parent movies because Denmark's got one, too. In Original, a young man's dad dies in a moose-hunting accident and his mom decides she's had enough of reality. (I always thought it was overrated, too.) He has ambition, however, and more than his share of rotten luck. In fact, in some ways, Original (Oct. 9, 8:45pm and Oct. 10, 6:15pm) is a bit reminiscent of North by Northwest with mistaken identity and abductions but with an IKEA store tossed in for, um, originality.

French director Francois Ozon's Ricky (Oct. 9, 9:15pm and Oct. 11, 3:30pm) stirs up a blend of fantasy and reality for a single mom and her 7-year-old, as a love child complicates family life in decidedly bizarre ways. Not to be left adrift by the Western world in this crazy one-parent thing, Indonesia offers Jermal (Oct. 12, 7:15pm and Oct. 16, 8:15pm), in which a 12-year-old boy loses his mother and sets out to find his father at a deep-sea fishing depot. Dad, of course, wants nothing to do with a kid and a life he jettisoned years ago, but a grim secret has him trapped by his own past.

• • • •

IF IT'S THE perfect past you long for, this county hosts farm families who date back to the Gold Rush era, and the pristine isn't very far from anywhere, if you can tear yourself away from Macy's. Go west, young person, and you'll find what's in the Hidden Bounty of Marin (Oct. 11, 1pm and Oct. 13, 6:45pm), an exquisitely shot doc about small farmers and their struggles to survive. Narrated by the aforementioned Peter Coyote, who also narrated Mustang, and almost every other documentary ever made. Ever try growing organic veggies in cement? (And why not, may we ask?) If a Los Angeles family can churn out 6,000 pounds of produce a year from a postage stamp patch of Pasadena potting soil, surely we can match that in Marin. Check this out in Homegrown on the same program as Hidden Bounty. Miraculously, they do it with biofuel and solar power. And what's that label on your cantaloupe say? "Grown in L.A. near the Pasadena Freeway?" Hmm, I'll skip the melon today.

While the Pasadena produce drinks in the rays in SoCal, Mill Valley filmmaker Peter Sorcher's sincere and thoroughly engrossing documentary Eat the Sun (Oct. 9, 8:30pm and Oct. 17, noon) probes the ultimate nonfat diet of a young man who is trying to put an end to his grocery shopping by gazing at that lucky ol' sun for up to 44 minutes a day, a practice he believes will provide all the nourishment he needs. "Most of us go through life believing that there are many firm and unshakeable universal truths—like you have to eat or you will die. Or, if you stare at the sun you'll go blind," the director says. "I found through the experience of making this film that there are other ways of thinking that don't necessarily co-exist with science, or what one might call 'rational.' The power of belief can lead to extraordinary things and there are other ways to exist—both psychologically and physically—than what we currently and collectively believe is 'reality.'"

So San Francisco's Mason Dwinell adopted this belief in cosmic cuisine and set off to meet other sungazers, apparently inspired, according to the program notes, by No. 1 sungazer Hira Ratan Manek, who has not eaten solid food for 411 days. According to my notes, they're out of their friggin' minds. And, ol' skeptic that I am, it's tough to resist posing questions such as: When it rains are they just fasting? When they're sungazing on the Champs-Elysees, is that like eating French food? On the other hand, if I haven't tried it, how can I knock it? So this morning for 104 seconds I gazed up at the sun from the plaza in Mill Valley, then went home with a splitting headache. The upside to that is if some days give you a headache, you might have grist for a screenplay.

San Francisco writer Ned Miller used his 11 years in the city's rough-and-tumble district to create the script for Tenderloin (Oct. 16, 6:45pm and Oct. 17, 9pm), from which San Anselmo director Michael Anderson fashioned the story of a physically and psychically wounded Iraq war vet who moves into the neighborhood to lose himself, but instead, finds what he least expected.

What Melinda Darlington-Bach least expected was losing the location she thought she had nailed down for her children's film Faeries of Farthingale (Oct. 10, 1pm and Oct. 18, 12:30pm). So she spent days driving around the county searching for a large house with a circular driveway and an electric gate, and when she finally found one, the owners wouldn't let her in. "They thought I was a Jehovah's Witness," she says. "I had to convince them through a peephole in the door." To raise $25K for her 11-minute film, Darlington-Bach says she "sold my clothes, my jewelry, my handbags and gold from my teeth!" Now that takes some film chops.

No woman has had more dance chops than Marin's Anna Halprin. Move your bod with the queen of physical expression in Breath Made Visible (Oct. 10, 2pm and Oct. 12, 6:45pm), a rendering of the avant-garde dance pioneer. If she can remember how to boogie at 89, so can you.

Remember the days when some guy would show up on TV playing tunes on a washboard and rubber bands? Kid stuff. For adults who get their music licks from something trippin', check in with Trimpin: The Sound of Invention (Oct. 14, 6:30pm and Oct. 16, 9pm). Drawn to "explore the life and work of someone who would not trade in their creative gifts in order to become rich or famous," San Francisco filmmaker Peter Esmonde x-rays the artist/inventor/engineer/composer as he constructs a 60-foot tower of 700-plus electric guitars, tangles with the Kronos Quartet and converts earthquake data into music. The Village Voice calls Trimpin "a genius...(who) manufactures orchestras that play themselves," while the director hopes audiences might simply "open their ears and their minds...and hear their world a little bit differently."

• • • •

JUST AS A quick aside, I should mention there are about a million words in the English language but, somehow, every year filmmakers run out of them when it comes to movie titles. This season we have Ricky and Ricky Rapper, Victoria and Young Victoria, Barking Water and Strength of Water, Red Cliff and Red Machine, Eat the Sun and A Thousand Suns. The folks at the box office should have a picnic with that. Next time around, free thesauruses for all.

Now before you rush off to yoga, we just want to remind you that there may be hundreds, if not thousands, of film festivals around the globe but only one of them can solve life's every problem. That one is the MVFF. No kidding. Have nagging questions about God? About happiness? Success? Relationships? For the price of a ticket, the festival will put all your worries to rest. Project Happiness (Oct. 17, 3pm and Oct. 18, 5pm) shows how to put a smile on your face with help from the Dalai Lama; Race to Nowhere (Oct. 10, 3:30pm and Oct. 18, 5:45pm) promises to put your career treadmill in perspective; Oh My God (Oct. 17, 3pm and Oct. 18, 2:30pm) will make you a believer (in something), no matter what you don't believe now; and the sometimes wandering, sometimes funny Sorry, Thanks (Oct. 11, 9pm and Oct. 12, 9:30pm) will convince you the swelling will eventually go down on those romantic whacks you've been taking. Co-writer and director Dia Sokol admits "a very sad breakup was the impetus" for her quirky hike through the emotional trails of adolescent confusion and young adult know-it-allness—filmed entirely in the Mission District, where problems abound. (Feel better now?)

So there you have it. Or, more accurately, there you have a little bit of it, without even mentioning Up in the Air with George Clooney, or Happy Tears with Demi Moore, Parker Posey, Ellen Barkin and Rip Torn, or The Private Lives of Pippa Lee with Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Julianne Moore and Keanu Reeves. I'm convinced you'll find those on your own. The others are tougher sells.

"You find great films and it's just out of passion you want people to see them," says exec director Fishkin. "So over time, you build an audience, build trust, to get to those who want to see something different. You network, you go through the festival, you're exhausted, but you're meeting people, the films are meshing together and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts."

That "whole" arrives next week as the 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival, which program director Elton confesses she initially heard as the "30-second Mill Valley Film Festival."

"Oh, the job would be so much easier," she says wistfully.

But then we wouldn't have nearly as much to discover.

Curtain going up.

View the complete schedule and all the details at 2009.mvff.com