Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

We don't know about where you are, but it seems like spring can't decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren't sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it's not. Anyways, onto the -ists....

Faithful readers, you've probably noticed that this SFist watches the same types of movies over and over again: Is it a documentary about something weird and/or in San Francisco? Gosh, who could SFist possibly get to watch that? So we figured we'd mix it up a little bit and go watch something a little less provincial for a change -- which is how we ended up at the 9:00 p.m. screening of the Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela at the SFIFF. First of all, the audience for a historical and personal documentary about South Africans in exile from 1960-1990 as apartheid was being dismantled is very different from the usual scruffians we see at our wacky movies about, say, the history of the Mission hipster told through burritos used as puppets -- there were a lot of earnest expressions on faces, internationalist people carrying Global Exchange backpacks, and in the audience, we ran into a friend from New York who's devoted her life to public interest law. Boy, we're usually pretty shallow in our movie picks, aren't we? Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris told the audience that the documentary itself is a eulogy to his stepfather, who fled South Africa with a group of 11 friends and helped found the African National Congress, and an attempt to tell his story and to resolve posthumously the sometimes-strained nature of their relationship. His stepfather's story is pretty amazing (he fled, mostly by foot, from South Africa to Tanzania, and then emigrated to the Bronx). We started out dubious about the premise, and even more dubious about the dramatic "reenactments," but as the movie progressed, it all of a sudden didn't really matter. It's a great story. We wish there'd been a little more information about modern African history (the movie presumes a fair amount of knowledge) and we also got the sense that Harris was pulling some punches about the conflicts between him and his stepfather, but that's all pretty minor stuff. 12 Disciples plays again tonight at 6:30 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and it'll also be airing on PBS in September. ...