Hopefully you are up to maximum fall film festival fitness by now, because this week brings two events to compete for your viewing attention: The SF Latino and Green fests. Both offer a range of international shorts, features, narratives and documentaries, many of which are unlikely to surface on any other Bay Area screen.
First up is Cine+Mas’ San Francisco Latino Film Festival (Thu/23-November 4), whose official opening night selection at the Roxie is Travis Gutierrez Senger’s ASCO: Without Permission. It’s a look at the East LA art collective that was fired up by the activist movements of the era to spend approximately 15 years (starting in 1972) promoting Chicano power and visibility via street theater, guerrilla film shoots, mail art, protests against Hollywood ethnic stereotyping, et al.
With Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal onboard as executive producers, this flashback is striking—and eerily relevant today—for limning the blatant bigotry in mainstream media coverage of peaceful protests violently broken up by police as “riots” by “hoodlums.” I could have done without quite so much time given over to latterday young artists creating vignettes “in the spirit” of ASCO, if only because the archival materials are so compelling. Still, Without Permission provides vivid evidence that many of today’s hot-button culture war issues were already being contested over half a century ago.
Casting even further back is Raymond Telles’ American Agitators, which focuses on SF-born community organizer Fred Ross Sr., whose witnessing reality in Great Depression farm labor and WW2 Japanese internment camps fueled a lengthy career fighting often racially-angled injustices. He ultimately proved a huge mentoring influence on Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, amongst other leading activists in the second half of the 20th century.
Another compelling documentary feature is Jayson McNamara and Andrea Tortonese’s Norita. It mixes interviews, historical clips, and animation to limn the life story of Nora Morales de Cortinas. A bourgeoise housewife in Buenos Aires, she’d had no political involvement whatsoever until her eldest son was “disappeared” by the military junta in 1976. She and other women like her founded Madres de Plaza de Mayo to act as an enduring thorn in the side of a regime that stonewalled in their desperate pleas. Her own activism eventually encompassed myriad other human rights issues as well, not just at home but around the globe.
There are also docs about refugees from El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s (The Most Beautiful Deaths in the World), Latino men in the gay leather scene (Encuerados), Mapuche peoples driven from traditional lands by the colonizers of Chile and Argentina (Relentless Memory), and transgender cargo-ship workers on the Peruvian Amazon (Lovers in the Sky).
Narrative features include Matias Ferreyra’s Argentine A House With Two Dogs, an offbeat, somewhat mysterious drama in which economic hardship forces a young family to move into close quarters with relatives. Full of unspoken tensions and conflicts, it’s an intriguing directorial debut. Jose Angel Parades Rios’ Entre Actores is about Diana and Rodrigo, platonic best friends who are both professional actors. It’s only when she moves from Tijuana to Mexico City for her career that they realize perhaps they should’ve taken their relationship to a different level. There are also full-length fictions from Ecuador (The Dog, My Father And Us), Bolivia (Own Hand), Venezuela (The Leap of Angels), and another from Mexico (Violent Butterflies), plus a revival screening of Roberto Rodriguez’s antic 2001 family adventure classic Spy Kids.
Shorts programs, online content, parties and more fill out this 17th edition of SF Latino Fest, whose in-person programs run Tue/21 through Nov. 4 at various locations around the city. For full info, go here.
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A relative newcomer to the local scene is the Green Film Festival of San Francisco (Fri/24-October 30), which launched just a few years ago in the wake of some similar-minded events going under due to budgetary woes, COVID shutdown, etc. Unlike them, this event’s attention to “the blue marble we all live on and the challenges we face in maintaining a livable planet” doesn’t limit itself exclusively or even primarily to documentaries about the environment.
There’s also room for narrative works that simply dramatize the human individual existing in nature, like Ime Nyong Etuk’s Outdoor School, about an African-American woman (Cycerli Ash) who flees an abusive marriage in Portland, OR. Having nowhere else to go, despite being gainfully employed, she winds up camping out in a public park—an “adventure” her two young children go along with, but one that needless to say has its discomforts as well as dangers.
Pia Marais’ French-German-Brazilian coproduction Transamazonia, which opens Green Fest on Fri/24, offers a more ambitiously metaphorical fiction. The sole survivor in childhood of a jungle plane crash, Rebecca (Helena Zengel) grows up to be the star attraction in her father’s (Jeremy Xido) evangelical church, as that “miracle” is thought to have granted her healing powers. But their moneyed benefactors include powerful interests behind the clear-cutting of nearby rainforest, and Rebecca becomes increasingly pulled towards the cause of indigenous peoples losing their traditional lands—plus sometimes their lives—for that commerce. It’s an unusual, atmospheric if slow-moving tale.
Ending the festival on Thurs/30 is Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, an adaptation of the late Denis Johnson’s superb novella. Joel Edgerton plays a laborer whose largely solitary life charts the development of the American West in the early decades of the 20th century. Both lead performance and film have won some high praise at festivals, suggesting likely Oscar nominations ahead.
Documentary features this year include real-life tales of man and beast: Cody Sheehy’s The Last Dive ponders the strange “friendship” between US military veteran Terry Kennedy and a 22-foot manta ray living off Baja Mexico whom he dubbed “Willy.” Their shared dives over many years’ course turned him into an oceanic conservationist. Less congenial is the relationship between the human inhabitants of the French Pyrenees and their hairy new neighbors in Max Keegan’s The Shepherd & the Bear. When brown bears are re-introduced into the area by ecologists to maintain biodiversity, they wreak havoc on livestock, outraging longtime rural communities. This gorgeously shot, leisurely film provides an even-handed treatment of a controversy in which both sides have legitimate arguments.
Three more nonfiction features are all wet: Maggie Burnette Stogner’s Upstream, Downriver: Uniting for Water Justice, Betsey Biggs’ climate change meditation MELT: The Memory of Ice, and Colleen Thurston’s Drowned Land, about a river continually hijacked by hydropower interests. Likewise Adam Marshall Present’s American Dendrite, a lyrical travelogue of sorts that travels alongside “the Mighty Mississippi” and its tributaries, interviewing people en route from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. They come from all walks of life, but their proximity to the river seems to equate with above-average knowledge about environmental concerns—and a sense that in many ways, we are running out of time.
Many of these features (as well as the festival’s shorts) have local makers and/or camera subjects who will be present at the in-person screenings. all of which will be at SF’s 4-Star Theater. Green Fest will also have at-home streaming options during the same period, Fri/24-October 30. For full program, schedule and ticket information, go here.
