COVID shutdown and its aftermath were very hard on local film festivals, as well as movie theaters in general—there are a reduced number of both now compared to where we were five years ago. But two of the hardier surviving annual events are returning this week for overlapping runs, each commencing the evening of Thurs/6. They would be SF IndieFest, with its 27th edition taking place at the Roxie Theater (and online) through Feb. 18, and the 17th Mostly British Film Festival, which plays through Feb. 13 at the Vogue. But you’ll find more about the latter in a separate preview here this week.
As ever, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival—a complete, formal name I’ve never heard anyone call it by—celebrates the offbeat, DIY and fun amongst feature-length, short, narrative and non-fiction cinema. It’s easier to pinpoint what you likely won’t get than what you will: This is not an event likely to invite (or attract) Hollywood stars, mount tributes to venerable directors, or show posterior-challenging obscurantist arthouse epics. Instead, there’s a spirit to IndieFest that’s not unlike days of yore when you picked the most outlandish-looking box off the video store shelf for a night’s home viewing with friends—the goal is surprise and adventure, not prestige.
Those days might well be recalled by the opening night selection of Pavements by Alex Ross Perry, who duly worked at a famous Manhattan video store before he began writing, directing, producing and sometimes acting in his own movies (including The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip and Her Smell). This is his first documentary feature, though unsurprisingly it is not a very straightforward example of that genre. It does offer a more-or-less chronological history of Pavement, the Stockton-born band who defined a certain snarky yet lovable strain of 1990s indie rock, pretty much coming and going with that decade. That backstory is intercut with preparations for a (second) reunion tour.
But also mixed in are elements that might recall the prankish nature of Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, in which “real” new and archival footage mingled with poker-faced deceptions (like Sharon Stone claiming she’d been a 1970s tour groupie). Here, that leg-pulling impulse takes the form of Perry rehearsing a Pavement stage “jukebox musical”—an inherently ridiculous idea that sure looks it in reality, with bright young theater majors leaping about singing ironical slacker lyrics in a sort of low-rent Rent. (Slanted! Enchanted! duly played three off-Broadway “workshop” performances, to understandably baffled response.)
He also casts and at least partially films a supposed Pavement biopic, “Range Life: A Pavement Story,” with more earnest young actors turning the band’s story into a Lifetime-worthy parade of dramatic cliches. One suspects the performers involved weren’t in on the joke, which is somewhat at their expense. The resulting very meta whatsit may delight and/or puzzle Pavement longtime fans; it is extremely unlikely to create new ones. But it is an entertaining, original statement about an endearingly original band.
This year’s “Centerpiece” film playing on Fri/7 is Anthony Lucero’s (East Side Sushi) new drama The Paper Bag Plan. Set in the writer-director’s native East Oakland, it’s a gentle drama about an aging, alcoholic father (Lance Kinsey) trying to map out an independent future for his son (Cole Mass, who like the character has cerebral palsy) after realizing he won’t be able to care for him much longer. As with many films here, some cast and crew members can be expected to attend the screening.
Other features of particular local interest include veteran San Francisco indie maker JP Allen’s new Memorizing Alison; San Jose-based Anthony Hand’s day-glo-hued Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-Shero, which is like an animated Vegas In Space; self-explanatory documentary KCSM 91.1 The Bay Area’s Jazz Station To The World; and mid-length Encrypted from Vallejo’s Miyoni Nelson, which provides a fictive exploration of mental health, its treatment and neglect within the Black community.
Closing night at the Roxie on Thurs/13 brings The Agbajowo Collective’s The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos, an impressively well-crafted spin on “true events” from a few years ago. Jawu (Temiloluwa Ami-Williams) is street vendor living with her young son in a leaky shack in the waterfront slum of Nigeria’s largest city. While she hopes to move somewhere better some day, it’s nonetheless home—until this becomes one more neighborhood summarily razed by the government to make room for high-rise development, its residents criminalized on phony charges.
Pretty much as depicted, some 30,000 citizens got “evicted” from the area in real life eight years ago. But a long text crawl at the end indicates they were just a small percentage of Nigerians displaced by various means over recent decades, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Despite the injustice and poverty on display, Legend is a strikingly handsome widescreen production with flights of visual lyricism.
Other international features of note include Emanuele Gaetano Forte’s Italian seriocomedy The 4 of Us; Doug Rao’s UK Dirty Boy, about a young man trapped by the cult he was raised in; Kenta Ikeda’s creepy Japanese near-horror Strangers; and Florian Frerichs’ German Traumnovelle, a new update of the same Arthur Schnitzler material that Kubrick turned into Eyes Wide Shut.
There are also several phantasmagorical takes on women in extremis: Nida Chowdhry’s Anxious. has her as a perpetually mortified Orange County Indian-American whose latest panic attack opens a vortex of delusional fantasy. Aurelia Mengin’s French Scarlet Blue plunges into a schizophrenic’s unstable, sometimes hallucinogenic reality. Nupur Chitalia and Pascale Potvin’s Canadian Baby Fever finds its own heroine pregnant in a Stepford-like environment of frighteningly perfect mommies. In Irene von Albertini’s German The Protected Men, by contrast, an epidemic exclusively infecting the male of the species leaves governance fully in charge of women at last—but they soon discover that absolute power can absolutely corrupt them, too.
No laughing matter are the plights faced by female protagonists in Issac Hirotsu Woofter’s Bound, in which a teen flees an abusive home for life on the streets of NYC, or Brady Bryson’s B&W Sideways for Attention, where a slightly older figure in the same locale likewise copes with past and present traumas. The blows are more purely physical in nature in Queen of the Ring, a biopic of early women’s wrestling star Mildred Burke—directed by Ash Avildsen, whose father John did the original Rocky and Karate Kid films. Fighting a different fight is the hero in Toni Comas’ Silent Notes, whose quest to fund surgery to prevent his going deaf becomes both a crime thriller and a gay love story.
It wouldn’t be IndieFest without at least a few goofier concepts. Anna Brenner’s The Karamazovs distills Dostoevsky to 86 minutes of darkly comedic family dysfunction set in modern-day Martha’s Vineyard. Sci-fi looks backward in Vito Trabucco’s Britney Lost Her Phone, wherein a wagon train of 19th-century westward pioneers incongruously stumble upon a very 21st-century device; to a celluloid past in Michael Stasko’s retro B-movie spoof Vampire Zombies…From Space!; and forward in Josephine Rose’s Touchdown, about a near-future multinational crisis of alien invasion.
Miguel Llanso of prior indescribable IndieFest highlight Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is back with another singularly surreal narrative, Infinite Summer. That Estonian-Spanish coproduction involves three vacationing young women of privilege in a VR “extreme dating” game, psychedelic raptures, Interpol investigators, shady biochemical experiments, and other random weirdness.
But then real life looks just as bizarre in Javier Horcajada Fontecha’s From My Cold Dead Hands, an hour-long compilation that is subtitled “A YouTube Mash-Up About Gun-Loving Americans.” From amateur musical talent displays to 2nd Amendment-adjacent product endorsements to people who really believe in an imminent “zombie apocalypse,” it is an ode to red-white-and-blue ammosexuality that will have your jaw drifting floorward till it dislocates.
This IndieFest edition also has a second, separate “closing night” at the Vogue on Tues/18, in tandem with the Mostly British Festival. First up that evening (and co-presented by the Jewish Film Institute) is Yoav Potash’s Among Neighbors, a sort of documentary companion piece to A Real Pain—in that it is also about Jewish Americans traveling to Poland to find what traces they can of their ancestors, whose communities and cultures largely disappeared with the Holocaust.
The past is largely illustrated via graceful animation, while the present is bitter, with more acknowledgement of how rigorously that nation has erased evidence (or, now, even public acknowledgement) of its role in the 20th century’s most infamous genocide. Spanning eras in a different, more antic way is English writer-director-star Alice Lowe’s new Timestalker, in which she plays a woman reincarnated to pursue an unrequited love across the centuries—though in life after life, her objet d’amour says “no thanks.”
IndieFest also boasts numerous shorts programs, a screenwriter panel, musical events and parties on its schedule, which runs Thurs/6 through Tues/18 for both in-person and Virtual Festival access. Full info can be found here.
