 |
||
2010 San Francisco International Film Festival
Joan Rivers launched her career as a standup comic in the early '60s, a time when female comedians were few and far between, and after several years of working nightclubs to unresponsive audiences, she was booked on THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JOHNNY CARSON in 1965 and soon became one of the most successful comedy acts in the nation. Since&hellip…
2009 San Francisco International Film Festival
International Critics Prize
Already bent by the demands of his home life – fatherhood, a faltering marriage, and a submerged mortgage – a tradesman struggles to balance his own appetites and expectations with those of a friend in need. Everything Strange And New is an intimate portrait of ordinary people and their longing&hellip…
2008 San Francisco International Film Festival
Winner - Golden Gate Award(Best Documentary Short)
When Vali and Mimi closed their couture shop on Lexington Avenue they kepy a dozen of their best clients, moved the business into the spare bedroom, and moved Mimi to the pull-out couch. Still sewing forty hours a week, the 87 and 93 year old sisters reflect on the dying of a&hellip…
Golden Gate Award Winner
FAUBOURG TREME: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK NEW ORLEANS - A lament for a drowned culture brought to you direct from our partner California Newsreel. FAUBOURG TREME was largely shot before the Katrina tragedy but edited afterward, giving the film both a celebratory and elegiac tone. Our guide through the&hellip…
2007 San Francisco International Film Festival
Laura Dunn's feature-length directorial debut is a profoundly stirring, visually stunning, and emotionally overpowering work of epic beauty. Sharing a kinship with the film's executive producer, Terrence Malick, Dunn's lyrical nonfiction poem reaches levels of transcendence not often encountered in cinema. Malick and Robert Redford teamed&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
Known mainly for playing quirkily comic characters, Parker Posey shows she can tackle a serious role just as skillfully in Zoe Cassevetes's moving film. BROKEN ENGLISH stars Posey as Nora Wilder, a thirtysomething whose disastrous dating experiences in the Big Apple have put her on the verge of giving up all hope when it comes to love&hellip…
2006 San Francisco International Film Festival
Winner of numerous international awards and garnering universal acclaim worldwide, Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers (Les Amants rguliers) is a rapturous paean to France's near-revolution of May '68 and its aftermath.&hellip&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
A freelance photographer Lili (Romane Bohringer) has been hired to document new infastructures in her town's sister community in Sengal. Once there, she forms an intuitive bond with Aminata, an unmarried and childless woman like her, whose quiet independence mirrors Lili's own. By the time Lili returns to France, something has shifted&hellip…
2005 San Francisco International Film Festival
Former president of Peru Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan in 2000 after turning his presidency into a dictatorship and alienating most of his fellow countrymen. This documentary by Ellen Perry allows Fujimori to speak from his exiled home, although he was arrested and imprisoned in Chile shortly after filming wrapped&hellip&hellip…
Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature
CZECH DREAM is a funny and provocative look at the effects of rampant consumerism on a post-communist society. CZECH DREAM has also caused some controversy, provoking extreme reactions in the Czech people and media and even being discussed in Czech Parliament. With the recent entry&hellip…
Audience Award(Best Narrative Feature)
SKYY Prize
Christine Jesperson is a lonely artist and "Eldercab" driver who uses her fantastical artistic visions to draw her aspirations and objects of desire closer to her. Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a newly single shoe salesman and father of two boys, is prepared for amazing things&hellip…
2004 San Francisco International Film Festival
Jim Jarmusch has consistently wowed audiences with his truly distinctive cinematic vision. Shot over the course of a 17-year-period, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES proves once again that Jarmusch is a true original. This time around, the director tries his hand at the short film genre, delivering 11 shorts that are all based around the seemingly&hellip&hellip…
SKYY Prize
This Polish film from director Andrzej Jakimowski takes a look at the unique friendship between a younger girl and an older man. Mala runs away from home, fleeing the idyllic surroundings of her parent's farm, and instead shacks up with her former school teacher, Jaciek. With her parents and Jaciek both attempting to&hellip…
A genre-bending update of the Hansel and Gretel story, GRIMM is a Dutch film directed by Alex van Warmerdam. Young adults Jacob and Marie are abandoned in the woods by their father, with only a note in Jacob's pocket to guide them: advice from their mother to travel to Spain and see their wealthy uncle. When they reach the warm and sunny&hellip&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
FIPRESCI Prize
Effortlessly blending drama, nature documentary, and ethnographic film, THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL weaves a magical tale about a nomadic Mongolian family who reunite a rejected baby camel with its mother. When a mother camel refuses to sustain her child, the keepers of the camels often reunite them in a ritual&hellip…
2003 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Gate Award, Best Bay Area Documentary
LOST BOYS OF SUDAN, directed by San Francisco-based documentary filmmakers Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk, observes the experiences and impressions of two boys from Sudan who were brought to the United States as part of a resettlement program that took place in 2001. Thousands of people&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
In THE SAME RIVER TWICE, director/writer/producer Robb Moss tells a true story that takes place across two separate decades: the 1970s, when Moss and a group of long-haired, free-spirited friends spent a summer rafting and camping along the Colorado River; and the 2000s, when he revisits the friends who have come through the other side&hellip&hellip…
Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer (THE QUIET ROOM) turns his lens onto a matter that continues to trouble his fellow countrymen in this evocative drama. When an Aborigine is accused of murdering a white woman, three white men must treck through some perilous terrain to find him. Aided by an Aborigine tracker, the men undergo a tortuous&hellip&hellip…
THE EYE, directed by twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is a Chinese/Thai horror film that focuses on Mun (Sin-je Lee), a cornea-transplant recipient who has been blind most of her life. As Mun adjusts to her newfound sight, she begins to see haunting visions of dead people. As these terrifying visions become more frequent, Mun turns&hellip&hellip…
2002 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Gate Award
George Ratliff's stirring documentary sheds some light on one of America's most confounding creations at the turn of the 20th century: the Hell House. Providing a bizarre twist on the traditional haunted house formula, Hell Houses are elaborately staged productions that substitute fictitious monsters for the&hellip…
Golden Gate Certificate of Merit
In a society constantly looking for permanence in all things, examining the deterioration of an object or life often produces a sense of horror or dread. But sometimes such an examination reveals that beauty and purpose exist even in a state of decay. In his ethereal experimental film, Bill Morrison&hellip…
Golden Gate Award, Biography
Directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman present this documentary portrait of the intellectual and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Beginning with his theory of deconstruction--the notion of getting to the basics behind our thought processes and the way in which we view the world--Derrida is portrayed&hellip…
Certificate of Merit
Mirra Bank directs this documentary about the making of "A Selection," a 2001 dance performance by the Pilobolus Dance Theater. A collaboration between the Pilobolus artistic directors, Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy, and Jonathan Wolken; and the artistic directors of The Night Kitchen, Arthur Yorinks and famous&hellip…
Golden Gate Award-Film and Video
In RIVERS AND TIDES, German documentarian Thomas Riedelshiemer attempts to capture the essence of Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, who uses natural materials to create site-specific pieces which he then leaves to be carried away--or destroyed altogether--by the elements. Goldsworthy is seen at&hellip…
SKYY Prize - Honorable Mention
Senegalese director Joseph Gai Ramaka re-imagines Georges Bizet's oft-filmed opera CARMEN--from Preminger's CARMEN JONES to MTV's CARMEN: A HIP-HOPERA--in a joyously sensual, colorful musical set in modern-day Dakar. Karmen Gei (Ramaka's wife, Djeinaba Diop Gai), a stately beauty in tribal robes&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
2001 San Francisco International Film Festival
SOUND & FURY is a documentary that examines the issues surrounding the controversial cochlear implant, the medical technology that allows deaf people to hear. The film follows the Artinian family: adult brothers Chris (hearing) and Peter (deaf), their wives and their children. Over a two-year period, the camera bears witness to the pain&hellip&hellip…
Golden Gate Award, Short Narrative
A collection of three films from cult director Guy Maddin. In TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS (1997), Shelly Duvall (POPEYE) and Frank Gorshin (BATMAN: THE MOVIE) star in a tale of passion and fantasy set in a far away land where the sun always shines. ARCHANGEL (1990) is a story of obsessive love&hellip…
Golden Gate Award, Best Documentary Feature
For her film SOUTHERN COMFORT, veteran documentarian Kate Davis found a rare subject in Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female-to-male transsexual living in Tuccoa, Georgia. Eads, a charming, laconic cowboy apparently "male" enough to once be propositioned to join the Ku Klux Klan, began&hellip…
Wayne Wang, although known for his personal drama about Chinese-American life, EAT A BOWL OF TEA, and the Hollywood equivalent, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, has always harbored a fascination with the depiction of sex in the movies. The director remarked, "In college I loved movies like LAST TANGO IN PARIS." Here, in his first digital video feature&hellip&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
One of the first feature films to come out of the civil war-torn country of Chad, this complex, nuanced drama particularizes the misery of war through the story of two childhood friends. Koni and Djimi live in the fictional Daresalam, which is ruled by an oppressive, thoroughly corrupt government. The extortion practiced on their rural&hellip&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
2000 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Spire
SOUND & FURY is a documentary that examines the issues surrounding the controversial cochlear implant, the medical technology that allows deaf people to hear. The film follows the Artinian family: adult brothers Chris (hearing) and Peter (deaf), their wives and their children. Over a two-year period, the camera bears&hellip…
Certificate of Merit
Ramblin' Jack Elliott ambled through the folk movement as a true free spirit and the ultimate follower of his dreams. He was also the unheralded but unmistakable link between folk legends Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. He had dreams of trains, boats, the road, rodeos, and he wrote songs about all of these&hellip&hellip…
1999 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Spire - Television History
An extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary man, Werner Herzog's LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY details the life of Dieter Dengler, a survivor of both WWII and Vietnam. Dengler grew up in Germany, and, dreaming of one day flying a plane, left for the US when he was 18, unable to speak English&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
1998 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Gate Award
THE SALTMEN OF TIBET is a film documenting the traditions and rituals of a small Tibetan group of nomads in one of the most remote locations in the world. The holy salt lakes of the Chantang region in Tibet is the destination of a three-month pilgrimage surrounded by beauty, untainted landscapes, and the dedicated&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
Based on a true story that occurred in 1994, EDGE CITY examines a violent conflict between some Philadelphia teens and some would-be "gangstas" from suburban New Jersey. When a harmless prank is played on some girls in a supermarket parking lot, it is blown out of proportion as it is told from person-to-person--leading to a fatal act&hellip…
A stunningly original take on the traditional serial killer film, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's CURE follows the determined and tortured trail of detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) as he races against time and logic to solve a baffling string of gruesome, unexplained murders. As the corpses accumulate, the only connection between the crimes is the&hellip&hellip…
This film is currently on backorder, please allow 3-5 weeks for delivery.
1997 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Spire
Set in the precarious surrounding of South Central, Los Angeles, COLORS STRAIGHT UP is a documentary that explores the lives of children who have managed to escape slipping into a life of crime via their commitments to various artistic endeavors. An organization called Colors United helps foster these burgeoning talents&hellip…
Certificate of Merit - Film & Video, Sociology/US
Three documentaries from acclaimed gay filmmaker Arthur Dong are contained here.
COMING OUT UNDER FIRE: Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, this documentary uses first-person accounts to chronicle the development of the military's "don't ask, don't&hellip…
1991 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Gate Award, Best Bay Area Documentary
When it premiered, Peter Adair's now critically-acclaimed documentary ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE became the first film to humanize the face of AIDS. HIV-positive himself, Adair chose eleven individuals from a cast of 125. The subjects range in age from 17 to 60, coming from a wide variety&hellip…
1962 San Francisco International Film Festival
Golden Gate Award - Best Actor – Keir Dullea
Golden Gate Award - Best Actress – Janet Margolin
Now available in a brand-new digital transfer, this touching '60s classic about two emotionally disturbed teenagers drawn to each other in a mental institution&hellip…