SFist Wendy covers both South and North Africa with the SFIFF! Who needs Coachella when there’s Oppikoppi, a rock music festival held in South Africa every year? Really, we would have loved to have been at Coachella this weekend, but if you couldn’t be there, the SF International Film Festival was a great place to be instead. Last night, at Bunny Chow, John Barker’s debut feature film, we roadtripped to Oppikoppi along with a......

At a question and answer session in front of an organization of African-American ministers near downtown Sacramento, Phil Angelides went back-back-back-back-back to say something nasty about the Governator in an attempt to stir things up. After telling the audience that Arnie doesn't care about black people, he said he can prove it because, back in the day, Arnie allegedly was pro-Apartheid. Cue reactions of shock mixed in with whole heaping bits of "wha?" ...

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. ...

Tonight and tomorrow at the Purple Onion, catch fifteen rising stars on the SF comedy scene for only $15! That's only $1 a comedian, or about a nickel a joke! Seriously, catch them know before they get a show on Comedy Central, sign a multi-million dollar deal, and then disappear to South Africa to center themselves spiritually. Shows start at eight. Hoarding your serotonin agonists/antagonists for Burning Man, but have an itch to see......

The scene at the Kabuki for the last night of the Asian-American Film Festival was jam-packed, with three movies all starting at the same time, and people dressed to the nines for the closing party. We were in attendance at the sold-out show for part three of the thirteen-part series Chinese Restaurants, a labor of love for Chinese-Canadian director Cheuk Kwan, who has eaten in Chinese restaurants around the globe -- including Israel, South Africa, Mauritius, Cuba, and Turkey -- and sought to learn the stories of how the proprieters came to live in these unexpected places. Chinese restaurants are a constant source of fascination -- the co-sponsor for the screening was the Chinese Historical Society, which is currently showing an ecstatically-reviewed photography exhibit of Indigo Som's pictures taken in Chinese restaurants in Mississippi. (You may also remember Som's other project, collecting all the Chinese takeout menus from across America.). The movies screened on Thursday -- Three Continents and two shorts, BBC House Special and Selling Louie's Village -- all explored the role of the Chinese restaurant in representing the Chinese diaspora. Egg Foo Young, a Chinese restaurant in Norway, and Chinese people with Liverpudlian accents, after the jump. Images from ...