This week brings three medium-scaled festivals to the Bay Area. The longest-running, having started nearly 30 years ago, is the Arab Film Festival—the nation’s oldest such event. The entire western hemisphere’s oldest film festival, SFFilm fka the San Francisco International Film Festival, brings its more recently-launched (in 2014) annual Doc Stories back, also this Thursday night. Unfortunately, neither Arab Fest or Doc Stories responded to press inquiries with advance materials this year, so we’ll just leave you to probe their programs for yourself.
Doc Stories, which gathers together many of the year’s more acclaimed nonfiction features and shorts over four days at the Vogue, Thu/6-Sun/9, provides more info here. Arab Fest, running Thu/6-November 15 at various Bay Area venues (plus an online component), offers a multinational mix of narrative and documentary works, starting with the historical drama Palestine 36—an international coproduction featuring the likes of Jeremy Irons and Hiam Abbass. Details are here. (Festival organizers might want to note for the future: If you want local press coverage, please communicate with local press personnel.)
A third event, Ode to Joy: European CineFest, is something that has apparently been held in other US cities for some time, but is a newcomer to San Francisco. It’s a showcase for some of the best-liked recent features from EU nations over the last year, including a few that have already played here theatrically or soon will. The selection this inaugural local annum encompasses works from Italy (Diamanti), Sweden (Becoming Astrid), France (Les Choristes), Lithuania (The Southern Chronicles), Latvia (last year’s Oscar-winning ‘toon Flow), Finland (Tove), Ireland (Listen to the Land Speak), Germany (Two to One) and Czech Republic (I’m Not Everything I Want To Be). Taking place at various SF venues this weekend, Fri/7 through Sun/9, it’s entirely free of charge, though online ticket reservation is required. More info here.
Even beyond guests at those festivals, the next couple weeks will be unusually full of visiting filmmakers presenting their work. San Francisco Cinematheque is presenting “The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim And His Films” (more info here) this Wed/5-Fri/7, each of the three nightly programs at a different co-hosting venue (“Early Works” at the Roxie, “Mnemosyne + Tree of Knowledge” at Gray Area, “Knots & Entanglements” at Oakland’s Shapeshifters). They encompass nearly six decades of avant-garde “observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement,” the titles included spanning from 1970 to last year. Gottheim will be in-person for all shows.
The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley pays tribute to two highly regarded expatriate directors, one alive and well, the other recently deceased. “Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Pahn” highlights thirty years of imaginative documentation by the Paris-based refugee from the atrocities of the Khymer Rouge. Pahn—who will not, alas, be present for this retrospective as originally planned—has deployed elements of autobiography, reportage, animation and dramatization in his inquiries towards that native land’s tumultuous recent past, most famously in 2013’s The Missing Picture (which plays Fri/7). The concentrated seven-program career overview runs Thurs/6-Sun/9, full info here.
Serving as a memorial to another singular talent is “Gunvor Nelson: A Life in Film,” playing the PFA next November 12-21. Its three programs cover over half a century of screen work by the Swedish experimentalist. She passed away at age 93 early this year in her native land, but spent many of her most productive and influential years in the Bay Area. Blending the personal, political and poetical, hers is an ouevre that laid path for many others to come—not least Schmeerguntz, the starting feminist critique of an objectifying mainstream culture she made with frequent collaborator Dorothy Wiley in 1965. Guest speakers will also discuss Nelson’s life and career at each screening. Full info is here.
One among many indirect inheritors of that legacy is Portuguese director Marta Mateus, who will visit the PFA November 13-16 to present her 25-minute 2017 period drama Barbs, Wastelands; her 2024 feature debut Fire of Wind,in which an angry bull drives fruit pickers up into the trees overnight; and several works by fellow countrymen and women. Among the latter are two intriguing archival works by the team of Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, the 1978 Tras-os-Montes and 1982’s Ana. More info here.
Meanwhile the Roxie is hosting a three-part retrospective titled “Seduction: 3 Cruel, Yet Fair Films by Monika Treut” (more info here). She’s a still-active German filmmaker who was once ubiquitous on the LGBTQ+ festival scene for her explorations of kink in both narrative and nonfiction form. The series starts Tue/4 with 1985’s phantasmagorical Seduction: The Cruel Woman, whose S&M scenarios encompass participation from cult cinema king Udo Kier. November 11 brings 1988’s SF-set, B&W Virgin Machine, a more warmly playful exploration of similar themes that utilizes Susie Bright aka Sexpert as a cast members. November 18 has the 1999 Gendernauts, which provides a platform for numerous other Bay Area personalities (Annie Sprinkle, Joan Jett Black, Sister Roma etc.) in its exploration of expanding gender definitions. Author Susan Stryker will appear live as well as onscreen at that last film’s showing.
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New commercial releases arriving this Friday:
Train Dreams
This fall happened to bring screen adaptations of two among the best novellas I’ve ever read. The recently released English-language version of Finnish author Tove Jansson’s 1972 The Summer Book, with Glenn Close, was a nice-enough little drama… but a very pale shadow of its source material. Much more successful in translating a deceptively simple literary work’s profundity to a different medium is this second directorial feature from Clint Bentley, again co-written with Greg Kwedar, with whom he collaborated on last year’s fine Sing Sing. It’s the late Denis Johnson’s fiction (first published in 2002, though not in book form until 2011) about a 19th-century man somewhat bewildered by the changes of the 20th century.
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is an orphan who becomes a logger, then a railroad builder, then a logger again, all with a span of the middle West—he never quite gets to the Pacific, or gets any further east than Montana. Solitary less by inclination than chance and social inexperience, he finally finds a place for himself in society upon marrying Gladys (Felicity Jones) and fathering a child. But that happiness is all too short-lived, and the world continues to turn faster than Robert can keep up. Will Patton’s narration here informs us at the close that when our protagonist finally dies in his eighties in 1968, he has still never actually spoken on a telephone.
Book and movie alike are poetical reveries about a small, somewhat hapless life that never stops its search for meaning—and which somehow becomes very moving for the contrast between that humble individuality and the existential big picture it exists within. I could have done without the normally tongue-tied Robert’s one long speech, and really could have done without Nick Cave’s closing-credits song—two things that unnecessarily spell out ideas the film otherwise conveys with poignant subtlety. But otherwise, Train Dreams is a soulful, lyrical dramatization of a tome that might easily have eluded screen depiction, inspired in look (Adolpho Veloso is the cinematographer), sound (Bryce Dessner contributes a chamber-stings score) and casting. It opens in theaters Fri/7, then premieres on Netflix Nov. 21.
Nuremberg
In contrast to Dreams’ managing to locate a kind of cosmic import in one seemingly unimportant life, veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s own second directorial feature dramatizes events of enormous significance—some might argue they were the key ones of the whole 20th century—yet feels disappointingly pedestrian and reductive. When Hermann Goring (Russell Crowe) is put on unprecedented international trial for war crimes alongside other Nazi high command after WW2, an American psychiatrist (Rami Malek) is assigned to monitor and evaluate their mental health.
As portrayed in this adaptation of a non-fiction book by Jack El-Hai, however, the shrink becomes somewhat over-involved with his subjects, leaving himself open to manipulation by the cunning Goring. This complicates the eventual trials, at which associate US Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) is a principal prosecutor. Those proceedings provided a general public its first detailed revelation of the extent of Nazi atrocities, in concentration camps and elsewhere.
Needless to say, at our own perilous moment it’s good to remember the world once came together to expose and punish crimes against humanity. But despite its inevitably attention-grabbing subject matter and some strong acting (esp. Richard E. Grant as a British deputy counsel), Nuremberg is routinely crafted. Its comingled self-importance and impersonality are reminiscent of those very square, multinationally produced 1960s WW2 dramas in which a distracting all-star cast ponderously went through the motions of reenacting simplified versions of the historical record.
Sentimental in the wrong places, sometimes hokey and formulaic, Nuremberg also has a by-now-familiar central problem: Malek, an actor whose one instance of inspired casting (Bohemian Rhapsody) raised him to an ill-fitting star status in which he’s seemed almost invariably miscast ever since. The performance rings increasingly false, making even his real-life character feel like a contrived narrative device. As with Vanderbilt’s prior feature Truth a decade ago, this is a theoretically admirable attempt to wrestle with very big issues that ultimately falls well short of its own goals. It releases to theaters nationwide on Nov. 7.
