SFIFF: SFBG

The ever-sharp San Francisco Bay Guardian film critics blurb the second week of offerings at the San Francisco International Film Festival, basically picking up where they left off in the last issue (and those previous blurbs are here).

How that issue managed to go unblogged around here I'm not quite sure, but the leisurely conversation among the SFBG's Johnny Ray Huston and Susan Gerhard and SFIFF guest programmer Roger Garcia (more here), doc filmmaker Jon Else (The Day After Trinity) and the prolific and wise B Ruby Rich about the current state of cinema is no less interesting this week than it would have been last week. Quite a lot of ground is covered and it's covered well, so get comfortable. The stand-out topics are the varying roles of festivals and home video these days in the wake of the decline of the art houses, funding documentaries and spots in the world where cinema seems liveliest at the moment, namely, the Middle East and Latin America.

Also:

• David Fear on Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Milos Forman.
• Johnny Ray Huston on Checkpoint and Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel.
• David Kim on Judy Irving's documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

By the way, the current issue also features Patrick Macias's brief chat with John Woo

Posted by dwhudson at April 21, 2004 9:19 AM