SFIFF, 5/2.

Brian Darr's been meeting up with fellow bloggers at the San Francisco International Film Festival and: "[T]he films I feel I can most usefully talk about at this bleary-eyed stage of festival madness, are the ones I attended in my capacity as a silent film devotee."

Shahn's experiences have been heavy on the silents as well and is a little put off by "a disturbing trend to have any old musician play at the same time as a film is shown, as if silents aren't important enough to merit a talented, serious soundtrack composer." Cinematical's James Rocchi, though, enjoyed the pairing of Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage and Jonathan Richman.

Updated.

Jon Else's Wonders Are Many "not only broaches pressing questions about art's role in a time of threat and crisis; its very appearance here helps highlight the place of film festivals themselves as forums for political debate and discourse," writes Robert Avila at SF360, where he also considers Bamako, Zolykha's Secret, The Yacoubian Building, Strange Culture, Everything's Cool and Peter Sellars's "State of Cinema" address in which he "came repeatedly back to the rise of fascism in Europe to underscore the challenges facing art and humanity today."

Also, Michael Fox: "Even a casual follower of the San Francisco International Film Festival has to recognize how new Exec Director Graham Leggat has rewired the Festival to embrace new media."

Eduardo Coutinho's The End and the Beginning "will linger with me for quite a while," writes Darren Hughes, "partly due to the charm of his subjects, but also because, in acknowledging its position as a work of documentary... The End and the Beginning also serves as a kind of test case, giving a media(ted) voice to people who have never had one before but never pretending that such mediation is without moral and political consequence."

Kevin Lee takes the Vertigo tour and reviews Chand rooz ba'd (A Few Days Later, "tense, quiet") and Fu zi (After This Our Exile, "a grueling film to watch").

The SF Weekly rounds up highlights of the second week.

Update: Johnny Ray Huston posts the San Francisco Bay Guardian's second week highlights at Pixel Vision.

Posted by dwhudson at May 2, 2007 12:22 PM