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September 29, 2006
All eyes on screen BY MAL KARMAN Only a year after the Mill Valley Film Festival heaved a sigh of relief at returning to its roots in its hometown, the staff has folded its tent, abandoned the downtown parking lot and moved its big top from the square to, uh, Tuscany. Or more precisely, to an Italianized version of Strawberry Village Shopping Center, where creeping figs and citrus trees will try to fool Opening Night partygoers into thinking they are ciao-ing down on the Via Frigola. “It was a great coincidence that they are opening [after remodeling] the same time as we are,” festival director Mark Fishkin says. “There’s a piazza there now, three or four large spaces, enough for a main tent, a rock band, several restaurants. This was a once-in-a-decade opportunity for us.” For 11 days, Mill Valley (which can hold its own with Tuscany or any other sleepy romantic niche on the planet) will transform itself into a major cinema city with 231 films from 43 countries. The 29th edition of the festival will reel out the red carpet for actresses Helen Mirren, whom Fishkin describes as “acting royalty,” Robin Wright-Penn, Karen Black, Virginia Madsen, actor/director Tim Robbins, actor/producer Sydney Pollock and actor/writer Billy Bob Thornton. But right alongside them, on the same carpet, will be a bunch of up-and-comers film lovers wouldn’t know from a Tuscan sunburn, including dozens of independent Bay Area filmmakers who this year landed a record-breaking 19 features and 30 shorts, and account for more than 20 percent of what may dazzle us onscreen. The Opening Night hoopla Oct. 5 fires up a pair of big-budget entries with big-top names. In Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, a London architect (Jude Law) tracks a young immigrant who burgled his office and becomes enmeshed with the boy’s mother (Juliette Binoche) despite the emotional baggage of a longtime girlfriend (Wright-Penn). In Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker carves out a monster portrait of the tyrannical Ugandan leader Idi Amin in a fictionalized account of his terrifying reign and his relationship with a young doctor. Festival tributes are always crowd-pleasers because film buffs get to stroll through the ever-evolving career highlights of honorees and engage them onstage with questions. Mirren’s tribute (Oct. 7, 6:30pm) will also include a screening of The Queen, in which she plays Queen Elizabeth II, a performance that won her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by Stephen Frears, who sent Mrs. Henderson Presents here a year ago, The Queen moves in on the British public’s growing animosity over the royal family’s reaction—or lack thereof—to the untimely death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997. Fellow tribute recipient Robbins will chat with audiences Oct. 11 at 6:30pm, following acting and directing clips of his work. As always, a dinnerfest follows the tributes as well as the closing night film, The Astronaut Farmer (Oct. 15, 5:30 and 6pm) with Thornton and Madsen. Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu may not be a marquee name yet, but when he becomes one—and he will rather soon—they’d better start making those marquees a lot wider. The festival honors him with what it calls a spotlight, which is a tribute to someone who isn’t old enough to have a tribute. Iñárritu, whose career is just out of the gate (but who has a can’t-miss résumé following Amores Perros and 21 Grams), will be on hand Oct. 8 at 4pm, to answer questions and screen his latest film, Babel, featuring Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt and Gael García Bernal. Babel, for which he won this year’s best-director award at Cannes, weaves three stories of desperation and how a single violent incident on one side of the world crashes through the boundaries of hemispheres and disparate cultures. • • • • CONSIDERING THE BUCKET of esoteric languages I’m discovering by poring over the program notes, the festival organizers could have subtitled this year the Babelfest. We’re not just talking Spanish, Japanese or even Arabic. Those that made me believe I will never be truly bilingual are Kaado and Bambera (in Taafe Fanga from Mali); Ganalbingu (in Ten Canoes from Australia); Khmer and Vietnamese (in Holly from the U.S.); Bahasa Indonesia (in Love for Share from Indonesia); Amharic and Oromifa (in Black Gold from the United Kingdom); and Xhosa and Afrikaans (in 3 Needles from Canada). Berlitz anyone?? While all festivals past have had entries by local talent, the huge crop this year is conclusive proof the Bay Area leads the nation in dream weavers. Packing more than a bellyful of guts inside their camcorders, our hometown heroes rode off into the sunset to the testiest parts of Afghanistan, smuggled cameras into a blue jeans sweatshop in China and took a prolonged dip in one of America’s ugliest waters. To make The Observer, San Francisco directors John Karr and Ben Leslie trekked through Kabul and Kandahar and other groovy spots in Afghanistan to tell the story of foreign election observers, especially a 20-year-old Malaysian man whose job was to monitor the ballot process. “He struggles to understand the complex world of Afghan local politics,” says Karr. “[But] I believe he represents the best of what it means to be an observer and that, despite the circumstances, smart people with a strong sense of purpose can stand for something bigger than themselves. I think viewers will begin to appreciate what it’s like on the ground in that country.” What it was like on the ground for Karr and Leslie while they were filming was not exactly the Disney back lot. “I could feel something on the street that I hadn’t felt before,” says Karr, who worked in Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban. “In Kandahar, the security situation is starting to deteriorate, significantly in the last few months. Uncertainty is increasing. It was not relaxed. I noticed a lot of people praying, more than usual. It felt like a lonely outpost and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. “The people perceive the violence as coming from outsiders. It’s a dangerous place to be and the way to approach it is to try to be rational about it. I didn’t want to be around military convoys. I didn’t want to be near security people. You don’t want to be in polling stations on Election Day, but that’s exactly where we were. “There were times we weren’t sure we’d be able to get back. We almost didn’t make it out of Herat. It’s like a rugby match to get on a plane and there’s a guy at the top of the stairs with a gun. The most aggressive people get on the flight, no women or children first.” While a complete film, The Observer is still undergoing tweaking. You can let the creative team know what you think and quiz two of the observers Oct. 8, 12:45pm, Oct. 11, 7pm and Oct. 12, 9pm. No less harrowing an undertaking was San Francisco director Micha X. Peled’s China Blue (Oct. 7, 3:15pm and Oct. 8, 5pm), a riveting documentary that follows the lives of three teenage girls trying to survive by working, practically 24/7, in a Chinese blue jeans factory. Because all filming in China requires a permit, Peled and his crew smuggled a disassembled camera into the country in shopping bags, shot clandestinely, endured police interrogations and arrests, and lost weeks of work to confiscated tapes. This is a heart-wrenching story of the exploitation of young optimism and energy by the faceless state and the desire for profit. See it before you head off to the mall for that clothing sale. Interested in taking a dip in raw sewage? Hmm, didn’t think so. But Christopher Swain did exactly that to draw attention to the beastly condition of the Hudson River. Berkeley filmmaker Tom Weidlinger tracked Swain in Swim for the River (Oct. 7, 7pm and Oct. 15, 4:15pm) over the entire 315-mile course from the Adirondack Mountains to New York City to raise awareness about the dying waterway. En route, he also braved Class 4 rapids, hydroelectric dams, factory outfalls and PCB contamination. “I’ve watched a lot of films about the environment,” Weidlinger says. “Mostly they are preaching to the choir. As Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth, too often ‘people move from denial to despair without stopping in the middle in a place where action seems possible.’ I wanted to make a film that was both engaging and, hopefully, inspired. Chris Swain’s swim is inspiring...and it seemed like a good place to start.” • • • • ANY IDEA WHERE the mountain bike craze began 30 years ago? You’re probably squatting within a couple of miles of it right now. In his film Klunkerz (Oct. 8, 6:30pm and Oct. 9, 9pm), former Marinite Billy Savage chronicles the birth of the “fat tire bikes” and the band of riders who charged hell-bent down the fire roads of Mount Tam to see who could lay claim to being the fastest. Several heaps of broken bones and twisted metal later, they had an answer. There are no bones about who the greatest guitar sideman of all time is. According to Novato producer/cinematographer Pete Crowley’s 50 Watt Fuse, it’s G.E. Smith. “Here’s a guy who has worked with Jagger, with Bowie, with Dylan for five years, with Neil Young, with George Harrison, with Tom Petty, and is unrecognized and unappreciated by people outside the business,” Crowley says. “He played with Hall & Oates and wrote their songs. He’s on stage with Aerosmith. He was the music director for the Emmys and the leader of Saturday Night Live’s in-house band. There isn’t much he hasn’t done.” 50 Watt Fuse burns on Oct. 6, 8pm and Oct. 11, 9:15pm. And if you dig those licks, Smith performs live at the festival Oct. 7, 9pm, with some noteworthy musical friends. Sausalito documentarian Will Parrinello puts a face on another talent of some anonymity in Emile Norman: By His Own Design (Oct. 14, 1pm and Oct. 15, 4pm). This is a very visual exploration of the self-taught 88-year-old Big Sur artist whom the director says produced “a staggering output of work and is still working with the same passion for life, art, nature and freedom that inspired him through seven decades of a changing art scene and of turbulent times for a gay man in America.” Meanwhile, Berkeley filmmakers Laurie Coyle and Rick Tejada-Flores celebrate the life of south-of-the-border master painter Jose Clement Orozco, a contemporary and rival of the flamboyant Diego Rivera. “Orozco believed in art as a way to bear witness to the injustice and tragedy of our times,” says Coyle. “He was a genius really, and yet he faced tremendous obstacles in his long journey of becoming an artist. I don’t think many of us can relate to a one-armed artist painting 100 feet above the ground, but we can relate to his very human struggle to become who he really needed to be.” Orozco: Man of Fire screens Oct. 7, 12:30pm and Oct. 11, 6:30pm. When it comes to fire, nobody can deny that South Bay Film Studios really lit up the place. In the course of filming Drifting Elegant (Oct. 7, 8pm and Oct. 11, 9pm), half of its building burned down. The company, part of a plan at San Jose State University to mingle film pros with film students, was “five days into shooting when half the studio went up in flames,” producer Barnaby Dallas says. “We were filming at a diner across the street when a can of Sterno caught onto a curtain. It was almost obscene how much smoke was coming out of there.” Obviously, the drama, about an Arab-American convicted of rape in the aftermath of 9/11, was rescued. Drifting Elegant was directed by SJSU professor Amy Glazer, who has a track record at the Marin Theatre Company and the Magic Theater. Where there is smoke, there is fire; where there is fire, there are politics; and where there are politics, there is Maalox. But you picked the Mill Valley Film Festival, and you can’t get around it without becoming more consciously aware of the social ills of this young century and last. In Catch a Fire (Oct. 10, 7pm and Oct. 14, 6:45 pm), director Phillip Noyce interprets the true story of Patrick Chamusso, an apolitical family man during the apartheid era, that is, until South Africa’s oppressive police wrongly accuse him of being a terrorist—and why does that sound like something we’ve just read in the newspapers? Tim Robbins turns in a nifty performance as an overzealous investigator, Derek Luke will be an Oscar contender for best actor and Bonnie Henna is wonderful as Chamusso’s wife. How the grass-roots anti-apartheid movement grew in this country until it climaxed in a face-off with the Reagan administration is detailed in Berkeley filmmaker Connie Field’s Have You Heard from Johannesburg? (Oct. 14, 5pm and Oct. 15, 6:30pm). The 89-minute documentary demonstrates that, every so often, the good guys can come out on top. “This is only one small episode of the story,” says Field, who is planning five more features with collaborator Greg Scharpen on the global anti-apartheid movement from 1946-1990. “Everyone thought South Africa would become a bloodbath. That’s why I feel so strongly about it. It is so important the world needs to know you can find solutions without violence.” Some women in Israel and the Palestinian territories apparently feel the same way. In Lilly Rivlin’s documentary Can You Hear Me? (Oct. 7, 12:30pm and Oct. 8, 2:30pm), an Israeli mother who lost a son and a Palestinian woman who lost a sister launch an activist movement to end violence in the Middle East. Writer/director Udi Aloni delivers a psychological thriller with the same message in Forgiveness (Oct. 7, 7:30pm), in which an Israeli actor and a Palestinian actress play opposite one another as love interests. Now that’s forgiveness. Berkeley filmmakers Valerie Mih and Don Richards coax candid and presumably nonpartisan interviews from military personnel and from a mother who lost her son in the war in Voices of Patriots: Why Are We in Iraq?, which is on the same bill as Can You Hear Me? If there was any doubt in your mind about how the invasion of Iraq has destabilized the region and destroyed personal lives, you must see the Swiss-German documentary feature, The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez (Oct. 14, 4:30pm and Oct. 15, 12pm), about a boy who was abandoned by his mother, overcame a childhood of drugs on the streets of Guatemala City and realized his dream of becoming a U.S. Marine—only to become the first soldier killed in Iraq. • • • • THE FESTIVAL BRAIN trust continues to jack up the prominence of films from Iran, a country that sits nervously between Afghanistan and Iraq, and the place President Bush probably dreams of whacking next. If only that pesky U.N. Security Council would see things his way. This time there are four features from the country that the White House views as Number One with a Bullet on the hit list of “evildoers.” They include Café Setareh, a tale of three women whose culture impacts their choices about love, family obligation and personal freedom (Oct. 7, 12:30pm and Oct.9, 9:15pm); The Liar Shepherd, about two orphans whose compassion for a sick animal teaches a small village a valuable lesson (Oct. 10, 9:30pm and Oct.12, 6:30pm); Men at Work, a comic parable of man’s need to flex his muscles rather than his brain as four middle-aged friends act out their compulsive need to shove an odd-looking monolith off a cliff (Oct. 6, 7:15pm and Oct.8, 4:45pm); and, finally, The Nightly Song of the Travellers (Oct. 8, 1:30pm and Oct. 10, 4:30pm). Based on a novel by the director, Chapour Haghighat, this co-production with Turkey and France follows the quest of an ex-con and a youth to find the man’s home village, which inexplicably seems to have been wiped off the map. If you could use a good laugh—and who can’t in this age of global migraines—check out Venus (Oct. 10, 7:15pm and Oct. 12, 6:45pm), in which Peter O’Toole gives his best performance since Lawrence of Arabia. He plays a dirty old man on his last legs with a taste for a pretty young woman who’s just finding hers. It’s irreverent, quirky and even a bit touching. Mill Valley-based director Rob Nilsson, who must hold the record for most films screened at MVFF, shuttles over the bridge with another pair (Pan and Opening) and appears in a third, Cine Manifest (Oct. 8, 6pm and Oct. 14, 9:15pm), Judy Irola’s comic look at a radical film collective that grew out of ’60s idealism before it evaporated in the aftermath of the Me Generation. Pan (Oct. 8, 8pm), the seventh installment in Nilsson’s 9@Night series (though program director Zoe Elton points out much of it takes place in daylight), is about a complex bonding between a homeless man and a middle-class 9-year-old and how that friendship changes the dynamic of both their lives. In Opening (Oct. 6, 9:15pm), a diverse group of invitees to a Kansas City art opening are trapped in the gallery when a tornado hits, unleashing a torrent of misdeeds, from infidelity to greed to artistic prostitution. If that sounds a bit claustrophobic, try sampling Read You Like a Book (Oct. 13, 9pm and Oct. 15, 1:45pm), Robert Zagone’s feature that takes place entirely within the confines of the Black Oak bookstore in North Berkeley. “What if you were given a second chance to undo the biggest mistake of your life?” Zagone proposes. “That’s where our 24-hour story begins when a book with mysterious powers changes everyone who comes in contact with it.” Tony Amendola, Karen Black and Mill Valley’s Barbara Crampton head the cast. In this filmic Oktoberfest there is an unusually high density of estrogen (always a good thing) permeating the festival. Among the dozens of entries by and about women are Xiao-Yen Wang’s I’m Seducible, Catherine Ryan’s Three Women and a Chateau, Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa, and a seminar “On Acting” (Oct. 14, 1:30pm) with Olympia Dukakis, Bernadette Lafont, Michele Shay, Sandra Oh, Karen Black and Anne Brebner. Richmond director Wang, who recalls her journey in 1985 from Beijing to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art “with $38 in my pocket,” classifies her film as autobiographical. “That’s why the title is in the first person,” she says. “I wanted to tell the story of what immigrants went through. I kept a diary and I had weird dreams and I realized I was trying to figure myself out. My own process and experiences struggling with the subtleties of domination and power is universal, and I think it relates to all women of all cultures.” I’m Seducible screens Oct. 6, 6:45pm and Oct. 8, 1:30pm. Ryan, who co-directed Chateau with husband Gary Weimberg, explored the history, near-death and resurrection of the Carolands, a 100-room mansion in Hillsborough, a place I personally have not seen but where I am certain I would have trouble finding my socks. “It’s an architectural masterpiece,” Ryan says, and it took three women—an heiress, a countess and a doctor—to create it, save it and restore it. Chateau can be seen Oct. 7, 2:30pm and Oct. 15, 6:30pm. Finally, Llosa’s Madeinusa (Oct. 6, 9:15pm and Oct. 9, 4:15pm) is a spiritual tale of a young girl who is asked to perform surrealistic holy day celebrations in her remote mountain village while secretly longing for a life elsewhere. I kept reading the name of the film as “Made in USA,” but I’ve been assured Madeinusa was made in Peru. So here’s your shot at being an opinion-maker. The MVFF is continuing its Audience Awards and your voice will mean a lot to these filmmakers, who wouldn’t at all mind following in the footsteps of one of the festival’s early discoveries—Ang Lee. It’s the big time in a small town. “Twenty-nine years ago we were called the little festival that could,” says Fishkin. “Now,” adds Elton, “we’re perhaps the little festival that does.” |
 That’s the ticket The film festival runs October 5-15. Tickets can be purchased in the following ways: in person — Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce, 85 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley or Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael by phone — 925/866-9559 by fax — 925/866-9597 online — www.mvff.com
Mark’s picks: Zoe’s picks: —Jason Walsh
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