A preview of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.
With nationalism on the rise there is a palpable hunger for art than connects nations and peoples. No art form bridges cultural divides like film. The programmers at the San Francisco International Film Festival (rechristened “SFFILM”) have always taken on this mission with enthusiasm and a keen eye for quality. SFFILM celebrates its 60th birthday this year and is the longest running film festival in the Americas. It is precisely this year’s slate of foreign films that poignantly illustrate the capacity of cinema to speak universally.
A perfect example is the extraordinary The Cinema Travelers — Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s indescribable real-life ride-along with the travelling tent theaters of India, alive but struggling in the most remote of remote corners of that huge country for more than 70 years.
In focusing on two tent cinema operators and their milieu, on their struggle to assemble audiences in the tiniest, dustiest and poorest places imaginable while performing CPR on their ancient, almost unbelievably rickety and still arc-lit projection equipment, Abraham and Madheshiya capture not only a nail-biting story of survival in a changing world, but also an affectionate homage to the beautiful and timeless details of the dying old-school art of exhibition.
The Cinema Travelers grants its viewers access to a time and place that we would otherwise never see, and connects to a larger context — the universal sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief that is core to cinema, gathering us to “look out of one window” together for a moment as one human race.
Again and again it is this (some would say receding) ideal of human connectedness that characterizes this year’s best. In Sieranevada, the last installment of Cristi Puiu’s Bucharest-based trilogy, the acclaimed director represents the state of Romania’s society based on a single claustrophobically confined location shoot.
The film unfolds in a modest city apartment where an extended clan has gathered for a memorial service honoring patriarch Emil. Focusing on Emil’s oldest son Lary, Puiu uses this protagonist as an entry into the chaos and turmoil of family gatherings. Niece Cami brings a severely drunk friend who throws up in the bathroom. A brother goes on and on with his 9/11 conspiracy theories. Lary’s sister gets in a heated argument with Auntie, who robotically praises the dated values of Communism over the garish irrelevance of monarchy.
Through these and other exchanges, Puiu’s characters reveal the bi-polarity of belonging in multiple worlds; sex, notions of family and filial bonds, nationality and nationalism, religious and political ideologies — and the practical necessity, sometimes willing but mostly forced — of compromising one’s soul in order to “belong” where even light hearted affiliations are treated as absolutes.
Importantly, Sieranevada takes its viewers so close as to feel a part of the clan. The camera is crowded out and has to peer over heads and never gets a clear view. It’s a cinematography elbowing its way into the narrative with uncomfortable proximity.
The astounding and miraculous Ma’ Rosa (its Philippine director Brillante Mendoza is a legend) captures a haunting almost anime panorama of a moral and cultural decay co-inhabiting the closeness of a tight, loving family. It is at once set in a world of delinquency, drugs and corruption while at the same time zooming in tight on a small house and an even smaller store, in a little neighborhood packed with humanity, down a tiny, teaming dead-end of an alley, where Ma’ Rosa rules her few square feet of Manila with a foul-mouthed, comic and steady staccato that any great leader would take notice of.
That momentum smacks into a horrible, slow motion wall of pain after she and her husband are arrested for drug dealing, an enterprise that we suspect became necessary as Rosa’s income from her store fell behind her family’s growing needs — two young sons, a daughter in college, a drug addled husband.
And so when corrupt police demand bribes for the couple’s release, it’s Rosa’s children who must raise the money by whatever means necessary, and the camera follows them. Its an epic and flawlessly acted tale — Mendoza literally pulls us along through the abyss of a brutalized, immoral corner within a corner of the world — but without simplistic moralizing and artificial pathos — at once compassionate, empathetic and ruthless as to the ordinariness of evil in a community on the verge of losing control.
The Future Perfect follows the eighteen-year-old Chinese immigrant Xiaobin’s arrival in Buenos Aires to join the family. There, unbeknownst to her parents (who show no desire to integrate into Argentine society), she takes Spanish lessons and dates an Indian tech worker. Xiaobin’s Spanish emersion classes rely on role-playing of mundane, basic scenarios. Director Wohlatz utilizes this stripped-down formula of the language exercise as a template for the plot, with nearly every exchange being conducted in a formalized manner.
By using structure of language classes to permeate the narrative, a freshly intimate and authentic immigrant experience emerges. The conceptual twist, already indicated by the emphasis on grammar in the title, is that with every new tense Xiaobin learns, a hypothetical future appears as a quartet of drastically different endings. Anything could happen.
The Ornithologist, is João Pedro Rodrigues’ magical-realism depiction of the voyage of young Fernando, who mysteriously transforms into a revered Catholic saint in a poetic, homoerotic, darkly comedic and often blasphemous riff on the life of St. Anthony of Padua.
Initially on an ornithological field trip to research black storks in remote northern Portugal, the handsome Fernando’s encounters begin to echo elements of a Saintly journey — resurrection (from a kayak accident by the assumed good graces of two women) then rituals both demonic and sensual, sacrificial and sage, right up until the surprising climax, when Fernando emerges anew, played now by the director himself, underlining the extent to which a movie is also a personal journey for its director.
Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student tells the story of a young radicalized Christian in Putin’s Russia, offering a different and alarming take on religious awakening. Whereas Rodrigues negotiates questions of personal and spiritual desire, Serebrennikov’s protagonist Venya shows a relationship with dogma that is fundamentalist and literal.
By quoting Biblical passages without context, Venya is able to justify to himself and often others any behavior, and ominously gains attention and power from the authenticity of his mania. As Venya’s spiritual awakening spirals, the school authorities acquiesce to his hectoring, changing school policy, insisting, among other things, that creationism be taught alongside evolution.
Serebrennikov weaves the tricky subtexts of religion and ideology, taking not-so-subtle aim at the State, it’s current chief apparatchik Mr. Putin, anti-Semitism, homophobia and group-think, all in a timely but also expertly acted drama.
Drug strife and corruption in the Philippines, Putin’s Russia, Immigration and integration, journey’s of self-discovery, and even the future of cinema itself — all on display at this year’s superbly programmed SFFILM.
SFFILM ’60 runs April 5–19, 2017. For tickets and information visit http://www.sffilm.org/festival .
San Francisco Presents Cinema as a Catalyst for Bridging Cultures was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.