SFIFF, fests, events.

There were actually two Iranian New Waves, and we know very little about the first, as Jonathan Rosenbaum explains in the Chicago Reader. The Gene Siskel Film Center will be screening two features and four shorts by Ebrahim Golestan as well as staging a symposium on Sunday with the all but forgotten director in attendance. Rosenbaum:

An important literary figure in Iran, Golestan is celebrated both for his short stories and for his Persian translations of American literature, including Huckleberry Finn and works by Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O'Neill. In 1956 he set up his own film-production business to make 'industrials' for oil companies and gradually branched out, releasing increasingly ambitious films through the mid-60s (including Forough Farrokhzad's The House is Black, for me the greatest of all Iranian films, and the only one from the first wave available on DVD). Judging from the five shorts I've seen from this period, his remarkable development is comparable in some ways to Alain Resnais in France during the previous decade.

The Reader previews, too, the Sci-Fi Spectacular, tomorrow from noon to 2 am, and, also at the Music Box Theatre, Altman-esque: Films by Robert Altman, through June 10.

The Bay Area's Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival will be hosting an act somewhat notorious in film circles as well, Vincent Gallo. The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston has recently spent some quality time with Gallo, and you grab the gist quickly by clicking his name - or turn to Pixel Vision for the complete "illustrated chat that moves through some of Gallo's fave screen idols and non-auteur films to explore his ideas about making music and movies, and also includes my story about a lifesize wax candle of Richard Nixon's head."

Notes from the San Francisco International Film Festival, running through May 10:

• Spike Lee has "joined the ranks of Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, Abbas Kiarostami, Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa - one of Lee's own personal favorites - in accepting the SF Fest's Film Society Directing Award." At SF360, Dennis Harvey looks back on an evening - and a career.

• Jeffrey M Anderson has capsule reviews of 18 films in the second part of his journal.

• Michael Guillén got a midnight kick out of Black Sheep.

Starring Berlin is a series running at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles; Doug Cummings has thoughts on three of the 40 films being screened throughout 2007.

In the Independent, Kaleem Aftab looks back on the 60-year history of the Cannes Film Festival, while in the London Times, Stephen Dalton looks ahead to two of the few British films heading to Cannes, Anton Corbijn's Control and Julien Temple's The Future is Unwritten.

Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2007 4:00 PM