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Let's All Go To The Movies
SFist Sara S's got the jujubes!
Please don’t mistake us for fans of human suffering but it’s high time a film was made to tell the uninformed public about the genocide in Rwanda. Beyond the Gates, at the Embarcadero, is a smart, engaging, often (rightly) painful view of the conflict from the view of a Catholic training college manned by John Hurt and Hugh Dancy. It’s a tearjerker but it’s really edifying to see how screwed up our international policy was just a generation ago – compared to now when it’s 2-3 times worse. (Watch trailer here.)
Another particularly worthy screening this week is the Jim Fetterley screening of Charged In The Name of Terror at Other Cinema this Friday. Fetterley and a few others (including local great Lynn Hershman-Leeson for example) have been working on films about the case of Steve Kurtz, a conceptual artist who was put in Kafka-esque limbo with the federal courts because he'd created a home-made lab filled with Petri dishes for an exhibit on genetically modified foods The feds launched an investigation because they thought he was engineering biological weapons for terrorist use. And all this happened after the sudden and tragic death of his wife Hope. (Preview of the movie is here.)
The case is fascinating and like the GMOs Kurtz was studying, this story grows exponentially with every day and every retelling. Kurtz’s story implicates the changing landscape of law under this administration, it highlights our anxiety about terrorism, and it comments on the tenuous position these contexts force on people who work in mediums like art and culture; those whose job it is to question all of the above.
Charged In The Name of Terror will probably play the SF Int'l Film Fest next month but since it's unclear if the doc will be picked up for distribution, see anything you can about Kurtz before the windows of opportunity close.
After the jump: some other highlights in your friendly local independent cinema.
Your Local Wisdom:
Artist Television Access (922 Valencia St.) has more CINEMATASTIC featuring work by some great and noteworthy locals this Friday. On Sunday they’re hosing a Folk Rock Special with Jason Anderson and Golden Boots.
The Castro Theater is hosting a week-long showing of Boy Culture, a romantic dramedy about a gay male escort.
On Sunday, the Cinematheque is playing "Bay Area Roots," which will be comprised of a series of short films by local greats Greg Sharits/ Dean Snider. All screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
At the Pacific Film Archive on the 25th and the 29th (respectively), as part of their Antonioni Retrospective, they've got The Lady without Camellias and The Mystery of Oberwald. On Saturday, the Matinee returns with Silly Symphonies, followed by Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, as part of the Tribute to the SF Int'l Film Fest.
The Red Vic is playing Cuaron’s Children of Men through Sunday. If you haven’t already caught it on the big screen it’s an unbelievably brilliant film. Big screen is the way to see it.
The Roxie New College Film Center is showing a NO MISS doc on the nation’s fixation with oil called Crude Impact. The film is totally comprehensive about the ways that the nation uses oil as a resource and really transforms the nature of our use of the product into a conflict of manageable proportions. It’s inspiring and we mean it when we call it a “no miss.”
And at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the SF Jewish Film Festival Forum is presenting a screening of Hanuszka, about documentary about a 12-year-old Jewish girl who was hidden by priests in a monastery and became enthralled by Catholicism. As an adult, the woman is reunited to the priest who harbored her -- and that priest is Pope John Paul II.