SFist interviews Jeff Ross, founder of Indie Fest...

Unholy Women, a Japanese horror movie played at the unholy hour of 11:45pm on Saturday night. We brushed our teeth, put cold cream on our face, bundled up in our jammies and trundled over to the Roxie for the last Indie Fest showing of the U.S. premiere of this movie. Unholy Women is comprised of three shorts featuring some scary-ass women. Two of the vignettes employed the usual horror movie tropes; knife wielding ghosts, dead children, mothers who have gone bonkers and the always scary, looking-in-the-mirror-and seeing-something-frightening (besides your own bad hair-do) looking back at you bit--that makes us jump in our seat every damn time. ...

The two SF Indie Fest films we watched on Friday night at the Victoria Theatre made for a very thought-provoking juxtaposition. The short film Mischief at 16th and Florida captured the rich history of an industrial area (and the river beneath it) located just a mere five blocks from the film screening. The feature film The Ballad of Greenwich Village was related to us through the countless anecdotes of the many amazing artists, performers......

We've been doing far too much reading about relevance and contemporary classical music as of late, so we're looking forward to the opportunity to hear it in a nice room with other people. The SF Tape Music Festival going on all weekend at ODC Theater (3153 17th St at Shotwell) features three distinct programs of audio art over a pristine 16-speaker surround sound system. We like the mix of legends (Brian Eno, with a world......

This week's giveaway comes from The Finches, a local duo who play endearing folk pop. The songs are refreshingly gentle and Carolyn's voice rings with a true sincerity. See them Saturday afternoon at 2pm when they play a free in-store at Amoeba, or celebrate their CD release at Cafe Du Nord on Wednesday night with The Moore Brothers, Colossal Yes and The Mantles. We're giving away a copy of their brand new CD Human......

How DARE you suggest that independent movies are pretentious, self-satisfied, masturbatory, and heavy-handed? What an outrrrrrrageous accusation. Just glance at the SF Indie Fest's puke-green website, which just struggled to life a few days ago; here's a few of our favorite excerpts from the films' descriptions. ... a gritty cinema-verite-style drama that journeys headlong into San Francisco's dark underbelly. ... This verité documentary shows a day in the life ... ... a broad stylistic......

SFist interviews JL Aronson, director of Danielson: A Family Movie...

We can't count the number of times we've left a movie announcing "That sucked! This is what they should have done..." And then we'd go on in great detail to our long suffering better half, who had to sit through both the flawed work AND our backseat screenwriting and direction. If we were the kind of person who took proactive steps toward bettering her relationship (oh, we're so not, trust us), we'd shut our damn......

We snickered to ourselves when we learned that the Initial D movie was selected to be screened at the SF Indie Fest this year. The anime/manga/arcade game phenomenon from Japan featuring import car racing down Japanese mountain roads using drifting techniques (steering though corners while maintaining the highest speed possible) was the be scourge of our existence a couple of summers ago. With other pre-pubescent import car enthusiasts, we obsessed over the finer points......

SFist reviews the world premiere of "Pirates of the Great Salt Lake" at the Roxie in San Francisco...

A review of Twitch, a short playing at the SF Indie Fest....

As we find ourselves gearing up for this year's SF Indie Fest (of which we're a sponsor! whoo yay us!) we find ourselves wondering ... is it enough? All these festivals that SF has -- the Indie Fest, Frameline, the Int'l Fest, Hole in the Head, the recently-concluded Noir Fest -- sure, they're all swell, but is that all there is? No, apparantly, according to the SF Film Society. As a part of their recently-launched......

Okay, indie filmmakers. Today's lesson: ECONOMY. In these difficult, troubled times, you absolutely must not allow a single frame of your piece to go to waste. Economize, consolidate, and slash your movie until you're eliminated every single extraneous moment. And if that leaves you with a movie that's only two minutes long, fine -- they'll be two minutes the world will love, instead of thirty that we'll all hate. And in case you need......

First off, SFist would like to say that while we've been seriously grooving on Indie Fest, we would like to recommend that the people who do the Indie Fest Web site tweak the shopping cart a bit so one can confirm their tickets before finalizing the purchase. While SFist has no problems going to some super divey café in Oakland, that wasn't really what we had planned. Of course, we could have paid more attention......

The newly single, and recently more vocal, Gavin Newsom can have his pick of the staff to bring as a date to someone's first anniversary party. Congratulations to all the happy couples who got hitched last year in San Francisco -- especially friends of SFist Ed and Norm up in Silverton, Washington. You guys are such a cute couple. Sorry about the damn state Supreme Court. Such a busy week. Of course we've been......

A funny little thing happened to the movie Blackball: before it premiered at SF Indie Fest, it became National Lampoon’s Blackball. Turns out that somewhere between the movie being indie enough to appear at an indie fest and its showing at said indie fest, it got swooped up by the National Lampoon people, the very same people behind Van Wilder. Of course, this movie shows just how wide the definition of "indie" is in......