Several countries the US at least used to be friends with are well-represented in the latest edition of 3rd i’s San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival (Fri/10-Sun/12, Roxie, SF). Subtitled “Beyond Bollywood,” it’s a celebration of independent cinema from around the world, including the immigrant diaspora.
Thus opening night’s Little Jaffna is actually a French movie, albeit one set amidst the Sri Lankan emigre community of Paris. That demographic consists largely of refugees from the long-running civil war back home, but they haven’t necessarily escaped the bitter ethnic, political and religious divisions that fueled it. Here, Michael (director/cowriter Lawrence Valin) insinuates his way into one of the rival gangs participating in turf wars, smuggling, protection rackets, and so forth—though unbeknownst to his new pals, he’s also a trainee undercover cop. It’s an electric first feature that combines the furious organized-crime violence of Scarface with the more nuanced likes of Donnie Brasco, while providing a window into a diverse, conflicted subculture. Valin will be present for a post-screening Q&A this Fri/10 at the Roxie.
Other highlights in 3rd i’s 23rd annual festival include Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Cactus Pears, a Sundance prize winner that portrays a closeted gay son’s awkward homecoming to his native Indian village, where improbably he just might find love. Uttera Singh’s Pinch offers a more seriocomic take on the generational/cultural divide, centering on differences of values and priorities between a westernized young woman and her more traditional daughter in an Indian town, exacerbated by a sexual assault.
Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop finds another fictive parent coping with new technologies and old social norms in rural Jharkhand, while Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong is a coming-of-age tale for a boy in problematic family circumstances in the northeastern state of Manipur. Nishtha Jain’s documentary feature Farming the Revolution offers a sweeping view of unprecedented protests by Indian farmers against potentially disastrous new government agricultural policies. Rajee Samarginhel’s Your Touch Makes Others Invisible mixes staged and nonfiction elements for a poetical meditation on the legacy of Sri Lanka’s civil war. There’s also a program of five shorts, from the biographical to the comedic. 3rd i’s SF International South Asian Film Festival runs Fri/10-Sun/12 at SF’s Roxie Theater, for full schedule and ticket info go here.
Simultaneously, the Roxie is mining celluloid gold from another part of the world in observation of October as everybody’s favorite month for watching scary movies. The series “Noche Oscura: Mexican Gothic Terror Tales” commences five “dark nights” this Thu/9 with Carlos Enrique Taboada’s 1968 Hasta el viento tiene miedo (Even the Wind Is Afraid), in which some very mature-looking girls’ boarding-school residents are terrorized by the vengeful ghost of a fellow student. Though very mild now—even when one lass scandalizes everyone by performing a striptease—this color supernatural potboiler was credited with reviving the horror genre in Mexico.
Two earlier B&W thrillers strike a campier note: Chano Urueta’s 1962 El Baron del terror aka The Brainiac has a 17th-century warlock returning in the form of a fork-tongued vampiric space alien to kill off his erstwhile persecutors’ ancestors, while Rene Cardona’s 1967 The Panther Women pits modern-day witches against luchadora wrestlers.
The amount of sex and violence permitted onscreen had really ratched up by the time of Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda a decade later—this tale of demonic possession in a convent school is one gushing fountain of nudity, blood, and general nonstop hysteria. Such guilty-pleasure genre exploitation pieces helped shape the mindset of Guillermo del Toro, whose inventive 1992 debut feature Cronos completes the series. Its stylish mix of horror, sci-fi and pathos provided a blueprint for the future Oscar winner’s career, which brings a new Frankenstein next week. The full “Noche Oscura” schedule, running through Oct. 27, is here; all films are shown in Spanish with English subtitles.
Closer to home in theme, two local festival favorites are returning, each dealing rather specifically with the subject of “home.” After premiering at Sundance and Frameline in early 2023, Andrew Durham’s Sofia Coppola-produced debut feature Fairyland is finally opening in theaters. It’s an adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s memoir of growing up in the Haight-Ashbury with her widowed father Steve, immersed in the gay hippie subcultures of the 1970s—and then in the AIDS epidemic which claimed his life.
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Steve Abbott, a personal friend and mentor, was a prolific author of poetry, essays and fiction, as well as an editor and general booster to SF’s experimental literary scene. He was a singular personality that actor Scoot McNairy sometimes comes eerily close to recapturing. Others in this fond, nostalgic, bittersweet coming-of-age tale include Geena Davis, Adam Lambert, Maria Bakalova and Emilia Jones; Michael Penn contributes an original score. Fairyland opens this Fri/10 at SF’s Balboa and the Aquarius in Palo Alto, joined by SF’s Roxie on Fri/17.
Though we duly have buffalo here in Golden Gate Park, more for decorative purposes than anything else, that once-mighty species’ natural habitat is the Great Plains. For centuries they sustained myriad Native American tribes, but when the US and Canadian governments sought to seize tribal lands, they expedited that process by reducing the buffalo population from some 30 million to (at a nadir) less than a thousand.
A long-running struggle to return herds to traditional Blackfoot terrain is chronicled in Bring Them Home, narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone. This documentary by Daniel Glick, Ivan & Ivy MacDonald features stunning photography of Glacier National Park and other epic landscapes that the buffalo had—until recently—long disappeared from. It plays the Roxie this Mon/13 and Sat/18 (more info here), plus Berkeley’s Elmwood on Tues/13 and Sebastopol’s Rialto on Wed/14, all with Glick in person.
Other openings of note this week:
Apocalypses, Now: ‘A House of Dynamite,’ ‘Orwell 2 + 2 = 5’
Two veteran filmmakers have weighed our immediate future, and the outlook is not good. A House of Dynamite, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature in eight years, is a Fail Safe-like portrait of US government officials reacting to a grave emergency in what’s rapidly become a new Cold War. When a nuclear missile of unknown origin is detected heading from the Pacific to the American heartland, authorities have only twenty minutes to figure out a diplomatic or military solution.
That timespan is repeatedly traced as we live through the crisis from the viewpoints of personnel in myriad different roles and departments, all the way up to the POTUS (Idris Elba). They’re played by a large cast including Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts and Anthony Ramos. There’s a strong atmosphere of white-knuckle suspense, and the script by NBC News president Noah Oppenheim has a firm, fascinating grip on how our government might operate in such worst-case-scenario circumstances. (Though inevitably you might worry the competency demonstrated by these characters is freefalling in real life every day.) But Dynamite has a major flaw: After so much tense buildup, the non-ending sends you out with a whimper rather than a bang. It opens in theaters Fri/10, then begins streaming on Netflix Oct. 24.
By contrast there is a punishing completeness to Haitian documentarian Raoul Peck’s new Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, a sort of biopic-slash-essay in which the ideas and work of the titular late, great British author get applied to over a century of fascist movements and totalitarian states. Archival footage of related wars, propaganda, oppression and state-sanctioned violence from around the globe, as well as clips from myriad film versions of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.
With Edward Snowden and Bernie Sanders among the latterday experts interviewed, and actor Damien Lewis reading from the writer’s texts, this is a brilliant assembly that might enlighten those still resistant to the notion that we’re careening towards an end to democracy. For those of us who’ve already grasped that truth, it may just feel like a first-rate dose of the castor oil you’ve already overdosing on. It opens Fri/10 at SF’s Roxie and Oct. 17 at the Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol.
Phantasmagorias: ‘The Ice Tower,’ ‘She Loved Blossoms More’
Those eager to escape so much grim reality might find diversion in two dark fantasies from distinctive European auteurs. The Ice Tower is the latest from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, who’s married to another French screen provocateur, Gaspar Noe. Like all her features, this is a sort of queasily adult, semi-modern fairy tale, with Clara Pacini as a teenage runaway from a Dickensian foster home in the mountains who adopts a random stranger’s identity.
She then stumbles upon a film shoot with Marion Cotillard (who also starred in this director’s first and still-best movie, 2004’s Innocence) as an imperious star playing a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen. As our heroine is pulled into the orbit of both this “bloody diva” and her project, naturally the lines between reality and fiction blur. As ever, Hadzihalilovic conjures an unsettled, dreamlike mood with considerable style. But this time her script (co-written with Geoff Cox) is so vague that after a point we scarcely care where it goes, if anywhere. Tower opens Fri/10 at SF’s Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.
There’s also an intriguing perversity and unique aesthetic to Yannis Veslemes’ She Loved Blossoms More. This baroque gothic fantasy has stirred comparisons to fellow Greek countryman Yorgos Lanthimos, but is really more reminiscent of early Guillermo del Toro. Three young brothers (Julio Katsis, Panos Papadopulos, and Aris Balis), left to their own stalled-adolescent devices in a cluttered manse by their neglectful father, are permanently obsessed with somehow bringing their late mother back to life.
Hopes are pinned on a supposed time machine in a large wardrobe that has unpredictable, grotesque effects on any creature trapped in it. Needless to say, when an actual woman (Sandra Abuelghanam Sarafanova) wanders into this odd environ, she soon becomes the next “experiment.” Druggy, icky, macabre, yet crafted with surprising elegance, Blossoms is a bizarre debut feature, but undeniably an original one. Dark Sky Films released it to US vod and digital platforms last week.
Recycled Trash for Connoisseurs: ‘Deathstalker,’ ‘Beast of War’
Love of yesteryear’s exploitation cinema keeps taking ever-more elaborate forms among younger directors, as demonstrated by two new, very tongue-in-cheek action movies. The original Roger Corman-produced 1983 Deathstalker was perhaps the most enjoyable among myriad cheesy sword-and-sandal epics that followed in the wake of Conan the Barbarian. It had erstwhile Hugh Hefner consort and Hee-Haw honey Barbi Benton as the biggest “name” in a landscape of bodybuilders in loincloths, ogres, harem babes, witches, and such.
This very loose remake from Canada’s Steven Kostanski (Psycho Goreman) prioritizes brawn over breast. It compensates for excising the first film’s very 1980s cable-ready T&A by adding much over-the-top gore, plus variably ridiculous monsters realized via claymation, puppetry, creature suits, etc. Daniel Bernhardt plays the titular post-apocalyptic “scavenger,” while Patton Oswalt voices comedic wizard sidekick Doodad (Laurie Field dons the physical costume), while WWE wrestler Paul Lazenby is a villain. This episodic quest flick, produced by no less than Guns ’n’ Roses’ Slash, goes on too long to sustain such deliberate silliness. But it is lively, funny, and imaginative—like all Kostanski’s movies, an elevated in-joke for fanboys. At presstime, it was opening just at the Alamo Drafthouses in Mountain View and Santa Clara on Fri/10.
The biggest laugh in Beast of War might be the opening text informing us that it is “inspired by actual events.” What ensues is a whopping pile of vintage fictive cliches, from the strenuously matey boot-camp prologue to the watery mayhem—all evidently shot in a studio tank—ensuing when a boatload of Australian soldiers in 1942 get their vessel sunk by Japanese forces. The few survivors (primary ones played by Mark Coles Smith, Joel Nankervis and Sam Delich) assemble makeshift rafts from debris. But their numbers still keep dwindling, thanks to a pesky, hungry Great White that’s realized dinner is floating just above the Timor Sea’s surface.
Writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner is another energetic genre lover whose none-too-serious, openly derivative efforts can be crass good fun (the Wyrmwood zom-coms, Sting) or just exhausting (video-game-like Nektronic). This falls in the middle, not quite going as far as Sharknado levels of absurdity, but close, while simultaneously and unwisely still asking us to “care” about characters whose past tragedies that still haunt them in flashback. It’s all too much—though still entertaining, at least to a point. Beasts appears to be bypassing Bay Area theaters, but it also launches on digital platforms Fri/10.
