Writing this just after our POTUS has bombed a distant country without Congressional approval… well, what can be said? Only that it’s certainly a prime moment for the launch of ATA’s Anti-Fascist Film Series at Artists Television Access in the Mission. The free summertime programming (donations are encouraged) kicks off this Fri/27 with Pulp Fiction star Maria de Medeiros’ 2000 feature directorial bow April Captains, a large-scale fictionalized depiction of the 1974 “Carnation Revolution” in her native Portugal. Launched partly to end the regime’s brutal colonialist wars in Africa, it was that rare thing: a military coup that was not only near-bloodless, but also that restored (rather than stole) democracy after decades of authoritarian rule.
Most movies about fascism focus on its ample horrors, but the ATA lineup emphasizes successful resistance against its forces. After pointedly skipping July 4, it recommences July 11, then plays every Friday night through August 1. The remaining films in the series are Pablo Larrain’s 2012 No, with Gael Garcia Bernal as an advertising executive whose ideas helped end Pinochet’s dictatorship at the ballot box in 1988; Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 The Great Dictator, in which the Little Tramp experiences a Prince and the Pauper-like identity mixup with a bellicose caricature of Hitler; David Bradbury’s 1986 Australian broadcast documentary Coup d’Etat: The Philippines Revolt, about the Marcos government’s overthrow earlier that year; and Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985, the Oscar-nominated 2022 dramatization of the criminal trials that ensued following the collapse of that nation’s brutal military junta.
Meanwhile, back in the present-day world of imperiled democracies, San Francisco Cinematheque is presenting Then <.> Now, a program of experimental film and video art from Taiwan. The six works presented date from as far back as 1989 and are as recent as 2018, each using different strategies to probe the island nation’s complex cultural, ethnic, political and colonial identities. It plays The Lab in SF this Thu/26.
On Sun/29 at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland there’s another Cinematheque offering, this one the latest in an ongoing Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues series. With pushback against hard-won LGBTQ+ rights getting ever more shrill, it’s a particularly good time to revisit newly-restored In the Best Interests of the Children, a groundbreaking 1977 documentary about the legal and institutional hurdles then faced by lesbians trying to retain custody of their kids. It’s being shown with the new Lesbian Custody, which examines the earlier film’s legacy. Frances Reid (who co-directed Best with Elizabeth Stevens and Cathy Zheutlin) and Samuael Topiary (co-director with Molly Skonieczny of Custody) will be present at the screening.
Plentiful new movies of interest opening this week as well:
Senior housing issues: ‘Familiar Touch,’ ‘The G’
Two new dramas find elderly women facing very different closing chapters to their lives. In Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, we meet Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant) in her comfortable SoCal home, meticulously preparing lunch for a guest she can’t quite place. He is in fact her son (H. Jon Benjamin), though her memory is now so far gone she thinks she never had children. She also has no recall that the upscale Pasadena elder-care home he soon deposits her in is a place she’d already chosen for herself in more cogent prior days.
A retired professional cook with evident nouvelle cuisine expertise, octogenarian Ruth remains an elegantly composed, exacting, officious personality—which generates some problems in this new setting, where she does not set the rules. Nonetheless, she does adjust her in fashion, forging relationships with select staff (Carolyn Michelle, Andy McQueen), albeit while continuing to mentally decline. Touch is a quiet, impressionistic slice of life, at times a bit surreal and/or comedic; there are a few moments that seem over-indulgent of actor improvisation. But it is always grounded by Chalfant, a San Francisco native whose career took flight in middle-age with Angels in America (she was in several productions, including the first one at the Eureka). This assured debut feature opens Fri/27 at the Roxie and Rafael Film Center; she will appear in person for a Q&A session at the former on Tue/1 and the latter Wed/2.
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A considerably rougher landing is dealt 72-year-old Ann Hunter (Dale Dickey) in Canadian writer-director Karl R. Hearne’s The G. The veteran of obvious hard living already, she is one sour apple, disliked by seemingly everyone aside from her invalid partner (Greg Ellwand) and granddaughter (Romane Denis). Only the latter shows concern when the couple disappear, forcibly shuffled off to a bleak housing project—they’ve become the latest victims of a criminal enterprise that scams seniors, using corrupt officials to declare them “unfit” and seize their assets.
Things get much worse before they get any better. But Ann isn’t the helpless-if-vinegary old lady she is assumed to be. She has a distant past she’s buried, which may harbor its own hidden cache of illicit cash, criminal connections, and ability to wreak violent havoc on those who cross a line. Once truly riled, her resources prove formidable. The G (which is bypassing Bay Area theaters, but hits On Demand platforms Fri/27) could be punchier as a thriller—there’s little effort expended on building tension. Nonetheless, Dickey makes it worthwhile, her flinty performance lending rich resonance to acid lines like “I’m not a nice person… but I do have other qualities.”
Survivor nonfictions: Marlee Matlin, Harley Flanagan
Another pair of new features cast a documentary spotlight on entertainers who managed to conquer considerable adversity. Shoshannah Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore profiles the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar, in 1986 for the film version of stage play Children of a Lesser God. A 19-year-old unknown when she shot it, Matlin wasn’t prepared for the pressures of fame. Nor for an offscreen relationship with co-star William Hurt that turned abusive, or the expectations of an activist Deaf community for which she was suddenly a high-profile spokesperson. (The only non-hearing person in her family, she’d had scant prior exposure to that community.) Plus there was the need to convince the film and television industries that performers like herself could be much more than a seldom-employed novelty. Her original breakthrough would be echoed by another Oscar-winning film she was in four years ago, CODA. This is a conventional inspirational celebrity portrait, but the larger issues regarding deaf culture make it compelling. It opens Fri/27 at SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas.
Playing just Sun/29 at the Roxie is Rex Miller’s Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos, about the founder of hardcore legends the Cro-Mags. Born in SF during the Summer of Love, he did not enjoy a surplus of that emotion: His hippie parents split up immediately, his mother moved him to NYC at its combat-zone nadir to pursue her own amorphous dreams. Molestation, drugs, beatdowns, living in squats, etc. ensued—with the saving grace that at age 11 he’d already discovered the punk scene, hanging out at CBGB’s and drumming for notable band The Stimulators.
Nonetheless, his anger issues were such that one observer here calls him “a human pitbull.” Sometimes you get the feeling this biopic sweeps under the rug his own involvement in the more violent aspects of the hardcore world where Cro-Mags were a star attraction. (There is also a suggestion that as a teen he regularly made sport of fag-bashing patrons outside a gay disco, something the movie skims past at warp speed.) Now a jiu-jitsu instructor with his own young family, in addition to a musician, Flanagan says, “my life is in the best place it’s ever been”—but thank god he’s got an outlet, or rather several, for all that accumulated rage. While its main attraction is the wealth of archival footage, other interviewees in the film include Henry Rollins, Ian Mackaye, Flea, Ice T, and Glenn Danzig.
It’s still Gay Pride month, dammit: Queen of My Dreams, Pink Narcissus
Frameline may be coming to its annual end this Saturday, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still more queer cinema attractions on tap in Pride Month’s remainder. Opening at the Roxie this Fri/27 is Fawzia Mirza’s The Queen of My Dreams, a splashy debut feature about generational and cultural clash. When her easygoing father Hassan (Hamza Haq) passes away, grad student Azra (Amrit Kaur) must fly to Karachi and face her mother—largely the reason she’d fled to Toronto in the first place. Mom Mariam (Nimra Bucha) is an imperious wellspring of disapproval towards her only daughter, who refuses to meet potential husbands or otherwise behave like a proper young Muslim lady. (Little does she know Azra is already in a committed lesbian relationship with her “roommate.”) But ’twas not always thus: As flashbacks illustrate, the parents themselves were once Westernized progressives who fled Pakistan for greater social freedom in the U.K.
Mariam’s evolution into a conservative nag isn’t the best-defined element of what’s otherwise a lively, stylish dash back and forth through about half a century of family experience. It comes complete with Bollywood-style musical fantasy sequences, and Tupperware home sales pitches to big-haired suburban ladies. Like the late Jean-Marc Vallee’s (Dallas Buyers Club) coming-of-age saga C.R.A.Z.Y. 20 years ago, this fellow Canadian breakout feature announces a talent almost too eager to prove itself—the energy level can be a little exhausting, sometimes at the cost of depth. But it’s still a winning movie that, for the most part, juggles its many ideas and gambits with aplomb.
A contrastingly very old-school gay objet d’art is also playing the Roxie this Wed/25 as part of Frameline, then at the Alamo Drafthouse on Mon/30. That would be the infamous Pink Narcissus, an underground wonder that photographer, designer, and sometimes-drag-performer James Bidgood spent seven years filming in his minuscule Manhattan apartment, using his boyfriend and/or flatmate as the near-sole actor. It’s a camp erotic phantasmagoria that’s like a queer version of Eraserhead set in Barbie’s Dream House, albeit more redolent of the Kuchars, Kenneth Anger, and Maria Montez than Gothic surrealism. The amorphous “plot” consists of the mental wanderings of a rent boy (pillow-lipped Bobby Kendall), who when not hustling Times Square in a sequence anticipatory of Querelle imagines himself in various sexy roleplays: as a matador, a peasant, in a Roman orgy, a harem, etc.
Shot in lurid 8mm color, making use of stop-motion animation, sequined psychedelia, and thrift-shop costumed splendor, the 65-minute film has never looked better than in Strand Releasing’s current 4K restoration. For years, it was only available in bootleg copies so murky you’d have thought Narcissus was stored (or even made) underwater. But despite its cult status, the feature remained a mystery. Disputes with financiers who took it out of his hands caused Bidgood to disown the project, insisting it be credited only to “Anonymous” once those agents excluded him from final editorial and soundtrack decisions. He finally claimed authorship much later, by which point the film had proved hugely influential on figures from Pierre et Gilles to Guy Maddin. He never attempted anything so ambitious again, dying in impoverished obscurity from COVID complications just three years ago. Much imitated, Narcissus is still not quite like anything else: A kitsch jewel-box dream, at once smutty and innocent.
